Scratchpad

Edge Cases

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13 Feb. 2008

Great post over at Blue Flavor about the evil of edge cases. It speaks to me on the obvious level of web work and my current job, but it also really jumped out at me as being applicable to a lot of other areas, especially academia. In particular, it beautifully explains the tendency of graduate students (and, by extension, the later faculty members they become) to focus solely on the problems in an argument and thus miss the big picture. They seem to gain an impeccable ability to deconstruct, but no real impressive ability to construct.

At the end of the day, I think it comes down to the Behar quote included at the end: "If you stick your head out, you can't be afraid to have it cut off." We need less fear in academia. It holds us back. We need to be willing to make mistakes and look like idiots every now and then for the ultimately larger payoff of solving an intractable problem or discovering something new.

Read More....and then Shut the Fuck Up

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21 Jan. 2008

You know, if I have to read one more single fucking article or hear one more whiny lament about how reading is dying, I am just going to pull out some batshit crazy whupass on the mother fucker that dared to snivel out that ridiculous platitude yet again.

  1. Books are not the only form of reading, you fucking dipshits.
  2. Not everyone in the world has the leisure time to sit around reading all day. Some people have to actually work for a living doing all the things you rely on having done but are not able or willing to do yourself. When you learn and actually begin to do every single one of those things, come back to me and we'll rediscuss why reading is more important than all of those other things.
  3. Please note that historically, reading by the dirty unwashed masses was done as a means of personal and economic betterment. In other words, necessity and personal gain. Reading by the rarefied few was done for fun. The same is still true.
  4. Please note that both types of reading in point three are just that - reading.
  5. Stop only counting "acceptable" forms of reading in your bogus studies. It makes them painfully meaningless.
  6. Stop conflating change in reading habits with decline in reading habits.
  7. Pick a line in the sand and stick with it. Twats like you were decrying the death of reading over a hundred years ago. Then they were doing it 80 years ago. Then 60. If you are all to be believed, no one left in the world even understands the concept of a letter, much less has the ability to actually read it. Pick a definition of "death" that you can actually quantify and prove to me - one that doesn't involve comparison of others' reading to your own.
  8. Read a book on the history of reading, for the love of god.

Quick Notes on Digital Scholarship

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15 Jan. 2008

I had a truly pleasurable conversation with some faculty members recently about the possibilities that Web x.0 has for academia. I'm sad to say it was far to short to really delve into the endless possibilities that are out there, and for all the enjoyment I had, I also left feeling terribly dissatisfied at how little we were able to even scratch the surface.

So, if you'll bear with me, I am just going to throw an off-the-cuff list up here right now so that perhaps next time I get the chance to have such a great chat, some of these things will be more at the forefront of my mind and I will be able to pluck at them more quickly without grasping....

Network growth

Tools that allow you to discover like-minded researchers you may not have previously known about.

del.icio.us, vanity searches, any site containing "who links here" (Technorati, RSS subscriber lists, etc), blogs, mailing lists, Citeulike

Network maintenance, solidification

Tools that allow you to connect with existing contacts and strengthen your professional bonds.

social networking, facebook, friendster, blogs, mailing lists, RSS

Research tools

Anything that makes research - both online and off - more efficient, easier

Amazon bib-builder (Turkel) and other sites containing "users who looked at that also looked at this" functionality, Zotero, Citeulike, spiders, RSS, metadata, standards, programming, data viz, Yahoo Pipes, mashups, Swivel, intelligent agents, automated searches, distance collaboration

Public service

Tools that make work accessible, transparent, and meaningful to the public.

Upcoming, Google Calendar, blogs, YouTube, alternative publishing, Second Life, mailing lists

Reputation building

Technically, any of the above! If people know you and you are producing good work, your reputation will increase. This means not just churning out papers, but also putting yourself in the public eye and playing nice with colleagues, collaborating with folks at other institutions, and providing work for the benefit of the public. What good is a brilliant paper if no one else knows it exists?

I know this barely touches on all the possibilities, but it's a down and dirty list of what came to me in the last 10 minutes. There are, of course, dozens or likely hundreds of other possibilities.

Which is better - to think about food, or to eat food?

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17 Dec. 2007

Dan Cohen had an interesting blog post a few days back that I've only just bothered to read. Of course it turned out to be quite fascinating, which just goes to show that I should keep on top of these things better.

At any rate, the post in question is on digitization and repatriation. Specifically, he asks if digital objects, photos, etc. are so finely detailed that they convey as much information as the original object, should museums give back stolen artifacts and keep digital versions of the object for scholars to look at?

The interesting offshoot of this, at least as far as I am concerned, is the question posted by a reader "Which is more valuable - information about an object, or the object itself?" Scholars, naturally, would tend to say the information. Without information, an object is simply a pretty trinket. But when you imbue it with meaning, when you investigate it and understand it, then it obtains actual value.

Although I actually agree with this on a very gut level, as both a fake-scholar and...well...okay, fine an information fetishist, are you happy?....I also differ very deeply from many academics I've met in suspecting that this is a personal obsession and not, in fact, some sort of fundamental truth. I also suspect that this is likely at the core of the public's distrust and turn from academia (another topic of personal fascination and dread). The public, on the whole, doesn't care about ideas. They care about what they can do with those ideas. Ideas, knowledge, information for their own sake are simply wanking. But put those things to good use, and then we have something to subsist on.

So which is better? Cooking up a wonderful and delicious meal and being content in the fact that it's there and we know it's good? Or actually enjoying the fruits of our labor by eating the damn thing?

New Models for University Publishers

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31 Jul. 2007

It turns out, people just don't want to pay for academic books these days. So there've been a lot of rumblings the last few years about the possibility of changing publishing models, particularly for university presses and journals. Should we go digital? Should we have a sliding pay scale? Should we make the author pay for us to publish their work? Should we make the author's university pay?

But, all other things considered, I can't help but wonder if the real issue lies in this tiny, buried statement:

"Stanford rejects about 90 percent of submissions. Of the rejected ideas, Harvey said that about 60 percent either aren't of high enough quality or don't reflect Stanford's emphases as a press. But the other 40 percent are worthy of publication, he said. 'There are a huge number of project that we think "this is wonderful material, but there is a limited market."' " [emphasis mine]
- Inside Higher Ed

The Nature article linked above points the the same problem, even as they fail to note it as a problem (see Table 1).

Really, sometimes I just wonder what the point of academic publishing even is any more, aside from gladhanding and grandstanding. I mean, it definitely doesn't seem to be about educating or disseminating knowledge, so those are pretty much the only alternatives I can come up with given my limited imagination.