science.
Why is it that, in order to publish anything, it seems you are expected to always be saying something new? If your findings have already been found by someone else, your work is likely to be considered low priority or low quality for publishing.
Isn’t science partially built on the notion of confirming what we think we know? Given a good study design and execution, why should findings that don’t contradict what we know disqualify one’s work from serious consideration? How often do we see “important” studies replicated to see if the findings hold? Pretty much never.
In Memory Practices in the Sciences, Geoffrey Bowker mentions that it is well known that most scientific papers do not, in actuality, give enough information on methodology and methods for anyone to be able to replicate them. I’ve been frustrated with this before. I’ll find interesting studies with interesting findings that seem relevant to questions I may want to ask one day. But I can’t tell exactly how the researchers went about answering their questions. There are hand-wavy black boxes. “The data were analyzed” is probably my favorite. Explicitness of methods is one reason I enjoy reading dissertations; however, I keep in mind that dissertations are written by baby scholars and many experienced researchers have told me that after a few years you tend to realize just how embarassing your dissertation work was.
As with “not new” results, it’s the same with negative results. The big journals don’t want to publish them, even though they tell us a lot. So we have these Journals of Negative Results popping up in areas and disciplines.
Research, like everything else, seems to fall into the trap of privileging Newer Bigger Faster More! As some would say, “That’s life.”
I will not allow this to further demoralize me tonight.
assault.
This morning I finally got around to reading Thomas Mann’s most recent essay, “The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries” [.pdf].
HIGHLY recommended for everyone who has anything to do with research libraries.
Recommended for anyone because just in reading it, I learned one bibliographic research trick I didn’t know before (which could have been saving me LOADS of time recently).
Basically, this essay is a passionate yet reasoned, articulate argument that the direction many researchers/theoreticians in our field and library managers seem convinced is the right one for research libraries is an assault on the culture of scholarship and the ability to conduct scholarly research.
Keyword searching, relevance ranking, folksonomies, federated search, etc are useful additions to our systems, and are obvious good solutions for the Web. But they are not acceptable substitutes for professional subject cataloging and all of the structure it brings to the catalog and the library’s carefully built collections.
It is dangerous to conflate the the needs of person doing a quick information search with the scholar doing scholarly research, who engages in an intensive process of iterative information seeking and knowledge building.
Libraries are based on principles that serve the needs of scholars. Are we ready to admit that scholarship is archaic, unnecessary, and not worth supporting in today’s world? In today’s market? It’s not sexy. It’s not quick and easy. The cash value of it isn’t readily apparent.
I think LIS educators should definitely read this, and not just those who teach subject cataloging. It is highly relevant to reference and bibliographic instruction as well.
We need to continue to teach and champion the power and relevance of the principles on which libraries are based, without either clinging to the way things have been done in the past or claiming that everything needs to change.
(and this post is an example of why i don’t blog more. i’ve spent far too much time on it and it is still all over the place and doesn’t make my point well. practice?)
what has been keeping me busy.
Working on my lit review for comps. It is coming together. I intend to finish by the beginning of August. At the VERY LATEST before classes start. I don’t want to be finishing this up while I’m starting to teach.
I’ve moved from thinking of it as five separate reviews I need to do, and have begun thinking of it as one thing that really needs to be interconnected and coherent. I need for it to be obvious why I think these topics go together and inform what I want to do in my dissertation. So I have 2.75 completed separate reviews that need to be severely revised/shortened and fit into the new structure.
I have finally outlined that structure and written the initial intro to the review, which you may read behind the cut. Consider this also the official unveiling of my Really Final For Real This Time dissertation topic. *eek*