Author: Kristina

open peer commentary

The journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences has a very interesting format.

Articles selected for publication are then circulated to a large number of experts in the field, who write commentary. This “Open Peer Commentary” is then published immediately following the article, and this material is often more lengthy than the article itself. Finally, there is a response from the author of the article addressing issues raised in the commentary. More description of the process here.

One of my mantras is “Every paper is a work in progress,” and I try to keep in mind that scholarship is a conversation happening in slow motion. So it is fascinating to see that conversation and development of ideas all put together in one easily accessible place. Of course, the conversation doesn’t stop there, but this format makes it so explicit.

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*

Continue reading what has been keeping me busy.

things to look forward to.

I’m pretty psyched about Zotero. It’s not yet developed to the point that I can use it. I really need batch record editing to get anything done (and to import my thousands of already-gathered-in-Procite citations).

Where this might come in handy for me now is gathering citations from the web. Then I can export them in RIS and import them into Procite to work with them.

serious research.

phrase frequency on icanhascheezburger.com
(as per Google)

i are not          2
i is not           3
i not              2
ir not / i r not   6
im not / i m not   1

I sense I am forgetting some important construction…

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Works consulted
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Linguistic Mystic — im in mai blog, postin’ bout cats: The Cuteness of Grammatical errors

Anil Dash — Cats Can Has Grammar

LOL-Kitteh as a Second Language (LKSL-101) in Five Easy Steps

Language Log — Kitty Pidgin and asymmetrical tail-wags

lcsh of the day (11 april 2007)

(C) 150 Bison in art [Not Subd Geog] [sp2007001734]

(C) 150 Cake in art [Not Subd Geog] [sp2007001431]

150 Feminine hygiene products [May Subd Geog] [sp2007001895]
450 UF Menstrual hygiene products
550 BT Hygiene products
550 BT Women–Health and hygiene–Equipment and supplies

150 Nineteen seventy, A.D. [Not Subd Geog] [sp2007002090]
450 UF 1970 A.D.
450 UF Nineteen hundred seventy, A.D.
450 UF Year Nineteen seventy, A.D.
550 BT Nineteen seventies

150 Paganism in rabbinical literature [sp2006002404]
550 BT Rabbinical literature

151 Rue Montmartre (Paris, France) [sp2007002092]
667 This heading is not valid for use as a geographic
subdivision.
451 UF Montmartre Street (Paris, France)
550 BT Streets–France

(C) 150 Sacrifice in motion pictures [Not Subd Geog] [sp2007001695]
550 BT Motion pictures

150 Sanitary napkins [May Subd Geog] [sp 85117294 ]
* 550 BT Feminine hygiene products
* 550 BT Menstruation CANCEL
* 550 BT Women–Health and hygiene CANCEL

(C) 150 Scars in art [Not Subd Geog] [sp2007001698]

150 Schnoodle [May Subd Geog] [sp2007001381]
053 SF429.S378
550 BT Dog breeds

research that matters.

Aaron Swartz puts out a call for submissions of really important studies–science that matters:

In the comments, post your favorite study — the one that makes you sit up and say “wow, this result ought to change everything”. If you don’t mind, we’ll take the best to help fill up a new website we’re starting, collecting and sharing these new research results.

I’ll look forward to seeing what this new site turns out to be, and I’ll be mulling over my submission…

Read the full post and make your comments here.