You may have read a lot recently about tools such as ChatGPT for text or Midjourney for art (there are many others) and realized that artificial intelligence has moved out of the realms of science fiction, and even self-driving cars for that matter, and into the realm of an actually usable technology for individuals. There are lot of reasons you might want to avoid using such tools and yet there are some good academic reasons for wanting to experiment with them.

Writing is powerful therapy available us all.  We tend to think in snatches of ideas intuitively linked and woven together into a maelstrom of thought from which we derive an impression of reason that is often not all that robust.  …

23+ wellbeing things. No. 16 – Write yourself well Read more »

Over the past couple of months, our new Rare Books display case has been put to great use to show to you some of our collection that are not usually on display. In October we had the powerful artwork of …

Divine Images from our Rare Books Collection Read more »

Around Easter time, it is final hand in for a lot of you, from essays to end-of-year reports or dissertations. Now you have done the hard work researching your topic and formulating your arguments, how do you make sure you …

The artful editor – all you need to know at this time of the year Read more »

Are you distracted by the nagging feeling that your grammar might be letting your work down?  As with so many things, there is now an app (or several) for that!  Two popular free apps that check your grammar while you …

Check your grammar while you type with Ginger and Grammerly Read more »

After publishing a case study article in a peer-reviewed journal, one librarian shares the lessons he learned about successful academic writing.  Happily the advice works for everything from undergraduate assignments to academic journal articles, so there is something of potential …

Tips for academic writing Read more »

We recently published a peer-reviewed journal article (a free version is available from the University of Portsmouth Research Portal) about the arrival of Pablo the penguin (who tweets as @uoppenguin).  Some of you might be wondering about the origins of Pablo the penguin …

Putting pen(guin) to paper Read more »

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum, or should that read Blackwells, last week! I didn’t want to venture very far.  My lunch buddy had cancelled, the drizzle had started and I needed to buy a sandwich …

I only went into Blackwells to browse through their world music collection Read more »