Online Scholarship
This post and comment thread at The Valve is a very interesting look at issues of publication in academia (especially for those of us who are starting to feel the pressure to put things out on paper). Though the post is not focused on political theory (The Valve caters to literary scholarship), many of the issues raised in the post and the comments are nevertheless relevant to the humanities more generally. (More after the break).
One interesting question raised in the post concerns how are scholarly books to be used, i.e., what are they really for. The author (Kathleen Fitzpatrick) relays a suggestion she overheard that scholarly books are "not meant to be read but rather consulted" - which suggests that the actual physical book is not the best medium for relaying (and constructing) scholarly knowledge.
How do you use scholarly books? When I look at the reading I do for my research, I find that the "consultation" model describes quite well how I use them: I don't really relish reading them, but use the arguments that directly relate to my work. Of course, there are always exceptions - books that are exceptionally well written, or that relay arguments that are not easily synthesized in one or two chapters, or perhaps books whose entire bulk is relevant to the work I'm doing. This seems natural, yet at the same time seems like a bit of a waste. It's like I'm not quite doing justice to the author. (But can you imagine, with all the good stuff that's out there just itching to be read, to slog through all that German scholarship on Plato in the 19th century just for the sake of completeness and a misguided sense of justice towards their authors?).
Are monographs really the best way of communicating scholarly knowledge in political theory (and thus do they deserve the important place they have been given in promotion decisions)? The answer is of course going to be different in different fields, and perhaps even for different projects: but would it not make sense to have a greater degree of flexibility in the way in which the results of inquiry are created, communicated, and evaluated, including a greater degree of freedom regarding the kinds of publication venues that "count"? (I suppose I have a vested interest in this, as an article I wrote will be appearing in February in the Internet Journal of the Plato Society).
I think my dissertation, for example, which is basically a commentary on Plato's STATESMAN, would be much better served as an online commentary keyed to Perseus or some other place (something like this fantastic commentary on Augustine's confessions. Really, click the link, it's amazing. Much better than my dissertation, that's for sure.) And I think a wide variety of scholarly work would be better served if it were entirely online - and perhaps connected to some kind of threading or commenting mechanism, so that the work and its commentaries would be permanetly linked (kind of like the trackback mechanism, as Fitzpatrick's post mentions).
As the commenters on the post at the Valve point out, there's also a lot to be said for tools that allow for collaboration, commentary, and versioning. (As the members of this blog know, I have argued for this; and now that I'm contemplating moving to New Zealand I think this has become even more important to me). But more on those later. What do you think?
How do you use scholarly books? When I look at the reading I do for my research, I find that the "consultation" model describes quite well how I use them: I don't really relish reading them, but use the arguments that directly relate to my work. Of course, there are always exceptions - books that are exceptionally well written, or that relay arguments that are not easily synthesized in one or two chapters, or perhaps books whose entire bulk is relevant to the work I'm doing. This seems natural, yet at the same time seems like a bit of a waste. It's like I'm not quite doing justice to the author. (But can you imagine, with all the good stuff that's out there just itching to be read, to slog through all that German scholarship on Plato in the 19th century just for the sake of completeness and a misguided sense of justice towards their authors?).
Are monographs really the best way of communicating scholarly knowledge in political theory (and thus do they deserve the important place they have been given in promotion decisions)? The answer is of course going to be different in different fields, and perhaps even for different projects: but would it not make sense to have a greater degree of flexibility in the way in which the results of inquiry are created, communicated, and evaluated, including a greater degree of freedom regarding the kinds of publication venues that "count"? (I suppose I have a vested interest in this, as an article I wrote will be appearing in February in the Internet Journal of the Plato Society).
I think my dissertation, for example, which is basically a commentary on Plato's STATESMAN, would be much better served as an online commentary keyed to Perseus or some other place (something like this fantastic commentary on Augustine's confessions. Really, click the link, it's amazing. Much better than my dissertation, that's for sure.) And I think a wide variety of scholarly work would be better served if it were entirely online - and perhaps connected to some kind of threading or commenting mechanism, so that the work and its commentaries would be permanetly linked (kind of like the trackback mechanism, as Fitzpatrick's post mentions).
As the commenters on the post at the Valve point out, there's also a lot to be said for tools that allow for collaboration, commentary, and versioning. (As the members of this blog know, I have argued for this; and now that I'm contemplating moving to New Zealand I think this has become even more important to me). But more on those later. What do you think?
posted by Xavier Marquez @ 11:23 PM
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