Alan G. Gross work is firmly grounded in the humanities, having been trained as a Shakespeare scholar at Princeton under Gerald Eades Bentley. In a long career, he has been an English professor at Wayne State, a Dean at Purdue-Calumet, and professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. In the last quarter-century, he has written and co-written a steady stream of major-press books on academic communication. Joseph E. Harmon works as a science writer, editor, and manager at Argonne National Laboratory. He is the coauthor with Alan Gross of Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present, The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour, The Craft of Scientific Communication, and Science from Sight to Insight: How Scientists Illustrate Meaning.
The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities presents a broadly well-conceived comparison between two traditions of academic enquiry. The book is at its strongest when it lays out the ways in which the major asymmetries between how these two fields differ from one another in their use of the Internet. -- Internet Histories While it is true that readers must turn to the companion websiteto see in action some of the Internet features the authors describe, the fact that readers can follow and appreciate the authors thesis without having recourse to the website shows why the traditional print monograph is a durable, serviceable, and often sufficient vehicle for scholarship, even when that scholarship makes a compelling case for its reinvention. -- Journal of Scholarly Publishing Gross and Harmon s The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and the Humanities is not a time-stamped review of content on the Internet, which would be out of date within a month of publication. Instead, it is a rich assessment of what the Internet has and, more importantly, can achieve in the communication and evaluation of scholarly knowledge. -- Metascience