Now, what I find absolutely horrendous and directly unethical is that all this denigrates the scholarly book, the research monograph. The way I was raised into academia, this was what you meant by research, and now a bunch of foreign bureaucrats with language problems are saying that this does not count? Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Writing a journal article, to me, is mainly an exercise in typing. There are rote formulas to get a journal article done (well known such, looking at the shite that gets published), and it frankly bores me a lot of the time. A book, however, is another matter. A book takes time to craft, and the sheer length thereof forces one to work in an altogether different manner.
Alf Rehn has interesting things to say on how the system evaluates scholarly performance.
Interesting seminar coming up at the Niels Bohr archive, unfortunately it collides with the end of term ceremony at the kids’ school:
Niels Bohr Archive
History of Science Seminar
Friday 21 December 2007, 11.15am
Auditorium A, Niels Bohr Institute
Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen
Steven Shapin
Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science
Harvard University
“Science and the Modern World”
Abstract:
Do we live in a scientific world? At least since Max Weber in 1918 announced the “disenchantment” of the world, social and cultural commentators have insisted, or assumed, that we do. This lecture will assess some very substantial senses in which science is now the defining and most authoritative form of knowledge, and has been since perhaps the late nineteenth century. And it will point to a series of considerations which argue that we do not now, and never have, inhabited a scientific culture. Connections will be pointed out between this problematic state of affairs and the changing identity of the scientist in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Spontaneous generations is a new peer reviewed open access STS/HSTM journal. The first issue has opinion pieces, for example one by fellow STS blogger Sage Ross arguing for us scholars to use wikipedia for outreach; papers, including a substantial special section on scientific expertise; and reviews.
This could be the start of something important.
One critical comment, though. While I find the use of Open Access publishing laudable in general, not the least because it makes scholarship visible beyond the walls of (rather expensive) subscription rates (when did you last see a copy of Isis or Social studies of science in, for example, a school library?), it is arguable that the format chosen by Spontaneous generations is a bit too traditional.
Just a simple addition of trackback technologies could add a whole layer of distributed commenting, linking the journal with the academic blogosphere. I think this would substantially increase visibility of the journal. For an example, take a look at the dynamically updated page of sites that link to papers in the physics OA arXiv.org.
Steven Shapin’s review of David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 is a good read. There’s also a review by Steven Yearley in TLS 25 May and one in Nature.
As an academic, one has to shift between many different tasks; writing drafts for That Next Great Paper, polishing text, going over referee reports, writing grant applications, reading, marking students’ papers, developing lectures, lecture, talk with students about this and that, and so on.
Some of these activities are easily started (and sometimes even easily finished), for other stuff one needs more time to get things going. Enter one or more kids in the civilian side of the equation, and you also have some serious boundary conditions that envelopes these activities.
Mathias Klang has interesting things to say about these issues. How, he asks, should one guard the valuable time? One thing that works for me is to change location, spend an afternoon in the university library reading room with books and Powerbook. Another thing that some colleagues have suggested and that I’ve tried sometimes is to keep a quantized goal: “read at least half an hour every day, even if you’re swamped with teaching”, “write at least one page a day, no matter what”, that kind of thing. Works for me sometimes, but easily breaks down.
Stanley Milgram sent postcards, Scott Eric Kaufman tracks the spread of a meme across the bloggosphere in an experiment that will be presented at the MLA conference. Kaufman wants to evaluate in what way weblogs
affords scholars the opportunity to easily and enthusiastically cross heretofore closely guarded disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, it enables academics within increasingly balkanized disciplines to reconnect without necessitating a return of the generalist.
Interesting, and you can join Kaufman’s experiment by doing this:
- Write a blog post with a link to this post on Kaufman’s blog.
- Ask your readers to do the same. Do it! Now! Think of all the poor graduate students out there, for example Scott Eric Kaufman, and their desperate need of data for their research, think of their excel sheets that need to be filled and their diagrams that badly need datapoints, and realize that you - yes, you! - can make a difference and help them, at the same time advancing research. Halleluja!
- Ping Technorati.
“Flickr already provides all the tools the typical faculty member needs”, Edwired concludes an interesting discussion on the use of Flickr in teaching. I agree, the tools are there and the collection of images is really great and tagged and everything.
I really like this web2.0-meets-education development as an alternative to learning management systems, and have been using blogs and del.icio.us in my teaching for years. Once I understood that the thing was to not only post myself to the course blog but also have the students blogging and del.icio.us-tagging during their paperwriting, interesting things started to happen, I think. Soon, some colleagues and I will host a workshop on blogs and similar technologies in teaching and research.
Only, there’s this slightly uneasy feeling I get about using a tool that is free but not open and that charges you extra for things like making your collection private. Personally, I would like to see alternatives to the Yahoo-owned Flickr, perhaps driven by academics, built on top of archive.org or something similar.
Been reading the new volume of Osiris, now a free bonus with the HSS membership/ISIS subscription; titled Global Power Knowledge: Science and Technology in International Affairs, editors John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth have drawn together papers that address the fact that, as they state in the introduction, science and technology “play a significant role in international affairs”, but historians of S&T have been reluctant “to situate their studies in a broader historical context or to build bridges with opther disciplines (and vice versa).” (3-4).
Be that as it may, the papers I’ve consulted so far open up interesting views, not the least for me, finishing, as I am, papers on Swedish solar physics in an IGY context and the organization of food science (for an anthology on the welfare & warfare theme in Swedish history of S&T).
Anyway, here I sit reading John Krige’s paper on Atoms for peace and I stretch for my Powerbook to check out what’s on archive.org and, of course, there shows up six movies on the subject.
Next time I lecture on the cold war and science, some of these films will end up on the course blog.
Dan Cohen writes on why academics should blog. Especially, I like how he relates an idea from Paul Bushkovitch, who had argued that the key to being a successful scholar is to become completely obsessed with a topic, which, after a while, makes you into what others perceive of as an expert. This, according to Cohen, can take place on a blog.
Echoes, thus, of Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s ideas about why we blog. Transparency and trust. There, Pang also relates to the skill component in blogging; it is a way of training, and he compares it to speed chess.
I like Howard S. Becker’s Writing for social scientists: How to start and finish your thesis, book or article and his idea of lowering the thresholds on writing by writing often (and talking about your research all the time). Becker, at least to judge from his homepage, is definitely from the pre-blog era, but I think some of his ideas about writing are applicable to blogging and blogging’s relation to scholarly work in general.
Bibliometry: Citescape is an interesting piece of software.
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