Marginalia

Words by Charlotte Guest, Publishing Officer at UWA Publishing

For those whose Twitter, Instagram and Facebook streams are usually populated with book-related content, you may have been surprised to see an inordinate amount of cake on your screens today. That would be because today is National Cooking for Copyright day, a campaign run by Freedom of Access to Information and Resources (FAIR).

Words by Charlotte Guest, Publishing Officer at UWA Publishing

Register for UWA Publishing's WINTERarts event, On Reading: How our reading habits might change the way we think.

Socrates bemoaned the advent of writing over oratory for what he saw as its negative impact upon memory: if all knowledge is documented there would be no need to retain it in our minds and our souls. Now, in the twenty-first century, we fear the impact of typing and electronic texts upon memory and learning, majority opinion being that we process information more thoroughly if we hand write notes as opposed to typing them.

Words by Charlotte Guest, Publishing Officer at UWA Publishing

As Sean Kelly wrote in a recent article for The Monthly, our public debate and mainstream media coverage has become increasingly simplistic. We have misplaced the tools for navigating complex topics; there seems to be no time for reflection. This can be said of issues for contemporary Australia as diverse as the refugee crisis to the housing crisis and the terrorism crisis. The point is they’re all ‘crises’; more and more, we are accessing these subjects through the language of extremes; we are witnessing a growing propensity to shy away from deep and sensitive analysis. As, at its core, this is largely a problem with language-use and communication, it is unsurprising that one of its victims is a primary communicative tool: the book.