Egad! It’s the Times Higher Education Supplement

Jan 10, 2008 Alun Life 1 Comment Academia, Education, Publishing, THE

…or as it’s now named Times Higher Edu­ca­tion. If you’re look­ing for the re-launched THES the you may find it’s moved loc­a­tion in the paper shop. Rather than being stuffed next to the TES and TLS, I found it next to New Sci­ent­ist, BBC His­tory magazine and those strange magazines with head­lines like “Inside the Asian Tiger” which are full of pic­tures of sky­scrapers instead of big cats. It’s re-sized with a shi­nier cover but they’ve kept the ink which sticks to your fin­gers if you hold it. My atti­tude to the shift from paper to magazine is neut­ral — it’s still a good read. The web­site how­ever is much better.

There’s usu­ally some­thing to com­ment on in the THES THE. The prob­lem has been that the web­site has been emphat­ic­ally sub­scrip­tion only which makes link­ing to it a bit point­less. Repro­du­cing the basic story would also be a chore, as well as bad thing to do from a copy­right per­spect­ive. That’s changed.

From the week the news stor­ies and archives of THES/THE are open. This means I can link to cur­rent stor­ies like the ongo­ing prob­lems with the RAE as well as the really good opin­ion pieces which are pub­lished, like Susan Bassnett’s Shrink­ing Volumes. I can also link to the book reviews. Simon Goldhill’s review of James Davidson’s latest book is a must read if you have an interest in Greek sex, which com­ple­ments Tony Keen’s com­ments about the book on his web­log. With the archive being open too there’s the oppor­tun­ity to revisit some older argu­ments. As an example here’s a book review I might be inter­ested in.

At a stroke I think THE has become a lot more use­ful. Free access to its cov­er­age of higher edu­ca­tion will improve its prestige inter­na­tion­ally. I’ll be able to share good bits from Laurie Taylor’s column. It’s good news.

And max­imum joy! I’ve just real­ised I can link to Daniel Lord Smail’s art­icle on Deep His­tory so you can see what he’s writ­ten for yourself.