More on Online Scholarship
To continue with my previous post, there's an interesting article in the NYT magazine on "open source" peer reviewing (Trial and Error). The article focuses on scientific papers - but the idea that instead of anonymous peer reviewing we should have open, blog-style peer review, non-anonymous - rather appeals to me for humanistic disciplines as well. At any rate, at least in some topics the number of people writing is so small that anonymity is a poor veil, and it allows people to write needlesly nasty stuff (though anonymity might still have a place for some purposes). Take a look at the article for the details of how it works in the few journals that have tried it.
What do you think? How would open source peer review, or something similar, work in political theory or the humanities more generally?
posted by Xavier Marquez @ 1:46 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Well, I've gotten some nasty stuff in private (I've even written some of it too, which in public I might not have, and regret it now). I've also witnessed my share of flame wars in blogs - and they can get pretty nasty, as you say. But I think that the worst of these happen in blogs where there is no moderation and anonymous commentary is allowed. The worst offenders tend to post anonymously, though of course non-anonymity is no guarantee of civility (as any number of scholarly fights in published papers attest).
I think you have a good point, though, from the point of view of the graduate student. Criticism is easier to take if the whole world isn't watching. But from the point of view of the discipline, it seems to me that properly moderated, non-anonymous commenting by registered reviewers might increase the quality of work published. It might even be good to have hybrid systems - where, say, the paper is posted anonymously for commenting but the comments are non-anonymous (this way the grad student or untenured professor is better protected, though I can already see some drawbacks to this too).
To be sure, any system of reviewing is going to have some drawbacks - as the article I linked to notes, anonymous peer review has its share, but non-anonymous peer review does too. But if we ask, what should the purpose of a review system be? would we come up with the same double blind peer review system - which takes so damn long, offers plenty of opportunities for laziness, and produces such poor quality of review (not always, but in my experience most anonymous reviews are arbitrary and capricious)? Other disciplines seem to be moving away from it - look at a place like arxiv.org - why not the humanities?
This is what I'd like:
a free interchange of ideas with scholars in a related field. Ideas, bits and pieces, not a whole theory, and not flame wars about Deleuzian concepts. Just some informal "hey this is what I'm reading and it sounds a bit off" kind of comment, but in my specialized field.
So I've also started my experiment: I don't put my present research online, but I put the little bits that my future research migh (or not) be made of, the little notes to the self, little elaborations on concepts or films. My hope is that someone will contribute on the same lines, and maybe give me an idea or two.
It could be like meeting colleagues around a coffee after lunch ("I saw something funny last night on TV") and discussing without knowing whether or not the discussion will lead any research idea, someday.
OK, and here's the plug. This little experiment just started at
http://cinebuds.online.fr
Well hello Fabrice!
The TiddlyWiki looks much bigger than the last time I saw it!
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