The Academic Call to Code and the Networked Self

February 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A few months ago, Cathy N. Davidson wrote a blog post on HASTAC in which she argues that all schoolchildren should be taught computer programming in order to achieve a “basic computational literacy.” She laments the lack of demographic diversity in programmers and wonders “What could our world look like if it were being designed by a more egalitarian, publicly educated cadre of citizens, whose literacies were a right not a privilege mastered in expensive higher education, at the end of a process that tends to weed out those of lower income?”

USC Phd student Alex Leavitt followed her proposal by inviting other academics to make 2012 their “Year of Code.” Numerous people across the twitterverse are also participating in Codeacademy.com‘s #codeyear.

Davidson and Leavitt’s calls to code, both of which espouse a leftist politics of democratic or Do It Yourself coding, make me reflect on the different values that are currently competing in the software programming and academic spheres; proprietary models v. open access/open source models. In particular, the academic debate about open access to academic knowledge recently reared its head in Congress, when in December of 2011 the Research Works Act, an act that would block mandates of public access to federally-funded research, was introduced to the House of Representatives. This act is likely a response to recent moves on the part of the Obama administration toward better access to scientific publications (see the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 and the subsequent Request for Information on Public Access to Digital Data and Scientific Publications). While the Research Works Act will probably not pass, it speaks to the conflict inside and outside academia between privileging information and disseminating information, between profit and public interest.

What, one might wonder, might code coming from within the academy, produced, as Davidson envisions, by an educated public, look like? And, in terms of student grades or professional tenure, how would it be evaluated?

It is an interesting exercise to compare Google and Facebook with academia. Google and Facebook are widely successful because they are a contradiction–they are free to the public and friendly to the non-expert, yet their code is secret and they make money from said public through ads.  They are open but closed, profit-making but free. American academia, on the other hand, makes its “secrets” available, but only to those who pay large amounts of money and who strive to become experts.

Traditional academic tenure and evaluation is alien to the kind of collaborative (and proprietary) code farming that Google encourages. How could a tenure committee evaluate one coder out of a team of hundreds? Even with a trail of changes made by each individual, it would be almost impossible to separate that person’s work from that of others. Of course, not all coding is done collaboratively, but I would argue that most large scale projects with major impact are. As more examples of academic coding emerge, the tenure process will hopefully adjust to accommodate new modes of authorship in the digital age.

One high-profile academic seems frightened at the prospect of academia’s descent into the digital. Stanley Fish calls “‘blog’” “an ugly word” for its impermanence.  As someone who wants his critical insights to be “decisive” and “all [his],” Fish dislikes thinking of himself as a blogger–a figure who seems so interconnected with everything around him that he ceases to exist. Fish is disturbed by this possible loss of identity and “linearity,” by the web’s tendency to move “into a multi-directional experience in which voices (and images) enter, interact and proliferate in ways that decenter the authority of the author who becomes just another participant.” Poor Stanley Fish experiences this every time he opens his browser.

Fish goes on to quote Kathleen Fitzpatrick as affirming this death of the author:  “all of the texts published in a network environment will become multi-author by virtue of their interpenetration with the writings of others.”

I would argue that coding and other digital forms of authorship do often invoke this sense of the networked self to an even greater extent than traditional scholarship. In part that is probably because online social networks allow scholars to continually mix and concentrate their ideas with the ideas of others. Seeing one’s own voice as just one tweet in a tsunami of tweets can be a bit humbling. But then again, when people band together and find like ground, their accomplishments can be even grander than what one can do alone. There is a happy medium that can be found between solo pursuits and selfless proprietary software. I am optimistic to note that a vast amount of software developed through academic institutions is open access and open source, including as Sakai, Weka, and Stanford NLP software.

 

Filed Under: Literacy, Scholarship, Tools, What if . . .

The National Conversation

December 19, 2011 By 4 Comments

One of the points frequently made about Occupy Wall Street is that it has shifted the national conversation by putting income inequality and financial deregulation back on the table. At the same time, one of the most inspiring things about the actual site of Zuccotti Park, and the other Occupy encampments, has been their creation of a forum for open conversation about issues of local and national policy.

But what is the national conversation? Where does it take place? Whose voices are involved? Today I want to ask: Could expanding the national conversation become a focal point for political mobilization? Could activists mobilize around a clear articulation of the need for a more open, engaged, diverse national conversation? Could this be a way to bridge constituencies that currently have a hard time talking to one another?

Image Credit: Ubiquitous Clip Art

As a rhetorical strategy, the idea of expanding the national conversation is double-edged. It encourages us to pull back from direct, explicitly partisan mobilization, and to look instead for more “neutral” (read: widely acceptable) ways of framing the issues. At the same time, it also takes for granted the idea that “more” conversation on such issues will ultimately mean “better” conversation.

(When OWS puts income inequality on the table, we assume that this is a push in the direction of less inequality, since current norms don’t allow an explicit argument for greater inequality. Those who want to bolster inequality have to reframe the issue, for example by shifting to a conversation about “job creation” — also something that can’t be explicitly rejected in the current political climate.)

Image Credit: HappyPlace.com

Yet I think there is a lot to be said for this kind of strategy, especially in this moment, when the national conversation in the U.S. is operating on a very shallow level, with little substantive debate and much divisive sound-biting. Is this the best we can do?

It bothers me, for example, when my political comrades describe our country as if it consisted of three constituencies: left-wing voters, left-wing leaders, and right-wing leaders. It’s as if they forget all about the right-wing voters, the people who actually vote for and support Romney and Perry and Gingrich. Then they turn around and say: The politicians are ignoring the will of the people! I don’t hear enough activists on my side of the spectrum talking about what motivates Republican voters.

2008 Electoral Map

Of course, gerry-mandering and voter suppression are real. There are all kinds of problems built into the system. To some extent, the politicians are ignoring the will of the people. But we do still hold elections, and plenty of people participate in them — and, of those people, plenty are voting for right-wing candidates. The Republican party has a strong electoral basis in social conservatism and religious fundamentalism. I don’t see how we can hope to change or understand the current situation nationally without taking that into account. And that means framing the national debate to include the issues that mobilize those communities alongside our own.

So: How do we open up the conversation?

Image Credit: Scoop NZ

Sometimes it seems as if presidential debates are just about the only time when a national conversation actually takes place. There, campaign finance reform is a central issue, and already a main focus of political activism. But I usually hear this issue framed in terms of who gets elected, as if the only purpose of presidential elections were to find out which of two parties will hold power for the next four years. Shouldn’t presidential debates be the highest level of national conversation? Shouldn’t they be supported by a layered, systemic national conversation that continues throughout all phases of the election cycle? Isn’t campaign finance reform really about trying to make the presidential contest less of what Brian Lehrer calls a “horse race” and more of a substantive conversation on national issues?

In short, I don’t think it’s enough right now to mobilize on specific issues. The bill that just passed in the Senate is a good example: It’s terrifying. But even more terrifying is the fact that we have arrived at a moment where such a bill can pass without significant national debate. There are only so many petitions that one can sign against specific bills that most people in the country have never even heard of. I am yearning for a longer-term view of politics, for a vision of the future that goes beyond slowing or preventing the slide toward authoritarianism.

Photo Credit: Cover Lay Down

And so I wonder:

  • What if expanding the national conversation became the explicit platform of a social movement or political party? What kinds of implications (for campaign finance reform, for education, for civil rights, for financial regulation) could be woven into an argument for more open and thorough debate?
  • What kind of articulate challenges could be put forth in terms of how actually to accomplish this expansion? What type of debates, conversations, forums, round tables, symposia, performances, and educational programs would support such an expansion? What kinds of institutions and media are best situated to accomplish this? What kinds of pressure could cause them to do so?
  • And finally: Is there a special role here for education and academia? (Here’s a challenge for intellectuals to support OWS. And here’s a proposal to shed light on how politicians interact with experts in relevant fields.) How can we counter the spinning of higher education as an elitist club? What are the real systems that can raise the level of public debate and get people interested in the national conversation?

Filed Under: Audience, Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Debating, Education, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Media, New York, Politics, Punctuation, Scholarship, Social Media, What if . . .

The History of Communication Courses (Part One)

October 25, 2011 By 1 Comment

The utilization of the theories behind the Writing Across the Curriculum movement varies at the institutional level, meaning, for example, that the duties and goals of WAC fellows differ across CUNY. Likewise, Baruch’s definition of Communication Across the Curriculum is uniquely situated within the college as an institution.

Yet, when I came to the Schwartz Communication Institute, I wondered about the origins of Communication Across the Curriculum as a movement and Communication Intensive Courses. I’d like to spend two to three posts looking at how the theory behind communication courses emerged and changed over a number of decades.

Using the chart feature of JSTOR’s Data for Research, I first took a look at how many articles have been published each year which contain the term “communication courses.” This does not include all articles ever published, but rather the articles published within publications archived by JSTOR.

The above graph shows the raw number of articles published containing that term. Clearly, most articles that reference communication courses were published in the mid 1940s to mid 1960s.

The second graph above shows the number of articles published that reference “communication courses” relative to the total number of articles published on any topic. Again, the obvious peak occurs in the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s.

Happily, the above data concurs with the usual “old school” explanation of the rise and fall of communication courses.

As you can see from the above graphs, the idea of communication courses existed prior to their rise in the 1940s. In his 1987 book Rhetoric and Reality, James Berlin associates early communication courses in the 1930s with Alfred Korzybski’s notion of “General Semantics,” an approach which sought to teach students to discern the ways in which rhetoric can distort reality (10). General Semantics rose “when the United States was concerned about the threat posed by Germany,” and was therefore largely “a device for propaganda analysis” (10). Specifically, Berlin writes that “Semanticist rhetoric was also highly influential in the communications course—the course that combined instruction in reading, writing, speaking, and listening, occupying a large place in the general education movement in the thirties, forties, and fifties” (10).

Yet, as we know, communication courses didn’t really take off until the mid 1940s, igniting what Berlin terms the “Communications Emphasis” which he claims spanned from 1940-1960. To be more accurate, I would argue (based on the data), that it spanned from 1945-1965. As a side note, the Conference on College Composition and Communication was founded in 1949, at the beginning of the wave. And what is the meaning of this rise and fall? The rise was largely occasioned by an influx of WWII veterans who went to college after the war concluded on the GI Bill.  Berlin writes that “the communications approach gave composition courses a new identity, placing them in a special program that carried with it a commitment to democracy and to the welfare of students who had just suffered the horrors of war” (106). These courses were “commonly interdepartmental” and “combined writing instruction with lessons in speaking, in reading, and sometimes even in listening” (93).

Movements in college instruction do not have neat beginning and end points. As I wrote previously, Berlin dates the Communications Emphasis from 1940-1960; he also says that there was a Renaissance of Rhetoric from 1960-1975; and there is a turn towards a student’s personal development and expression which occurs in the late 1960s.

I would attribute the fall of communication courses in the late 1960s to the last development, the rise of a style of instruction centered around a student’s personal growth and expression. This movement is alternately called “subjective rhetoric” or the “expressionistic approach” by Berlin (139). Its beginnings can be charted in the 1966 Dartmouth conference which produced John Dixon’s Growth  through English, a report which emphasized writing as a tool for  “’personal growth’” and “’the use of English studies for building an ‘inner world’” (Dixon qtd. in Berlin 149). I should note, however, that I do not have any evidence to show that the rise of subjective rhetoric caused a decline in interest in communication courses. To argue that one caused the other would likely be a logical fallacy; yet I think it is telling that the fall in discourse around communication courses coincided with the rise in discourse around subjective rhetoric.

Along with this interest in personal expression came attacks on traditional education. Berlin describes how “In a 1967 essay entitled ‘English Composition as a Happening,’ Charles Deemer attacks the university, charging that it is opposed to education because it fragments and alienates students.  Citing such figures as Normon O. Brown, John Dewey, Paul Goodman, Marshall McLuhan, and Susan Sontag, Deemer calls for the composition course to become ‘an experience’ in which the teacher’s authority is removed by having the student become an equal participant in learning” (150).

Naturally, this interest in free expression and in overturning traditional education emerged alongside the various social movements of the late 1960s.

Here, funnily enough, we can see a dramatic rise in the number of articles in JSTOR which refer to “personal growth” beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s (again, this is relative to all articles published).

So the emphasis on communication courses did decline in the late 1960s, but as we can see from the first two graphs, discourse around communication courses came back not long after. In my next post, I want to look at the ways in which communication courses were framed in the succeeding decades. Also, if I have time, I want to examine the beginnings of the Communication Across the Curriculum movement.

Filed Under: cac, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Pedagogy, Politics, Scholarship, Writing Instruction

Seeing double

April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Several of us have been preparing and sharing ideas ahead of our faculty roundtable discussion today. For you Baruchians, it will take place Tuesday, April 12, 2:3o-4pm, in the SOC/ANT department conference room.

We will talk about sources, citations, designing plagiarism-resistant assignments, using technology in research, turnitin.com, and more.

The subject has me reflecting on a book that I read months ago but has yet to release me of its coiling grip. It seems absurd to say this, but The Culture of the Copy, by Hillel Schwartz (Zone Books, 1996), is utterly original. It’s hard to imagine a more kaleidoscopically visionary 565 pages. Maybe I exaggerate, for irony’s sake, but this is essentially a cultural history of copies, fakes, forgeries, doubles, twins, reproductions, and the like. The focus is a sidelong view of our obsession (and ambiguity) vis-a-vis originality, authenticity, singularity, and identity. Its central argument is, I think, that our human nature, the making of ourselves, has always been the making of doubles and likenesses. Schwartz is keenly interested in moments when facsimiles stand in for originals, when duplicates dupe, when samples take on their own lives. The book’s introduction (cleverly titled “Refrain”) is the story of the man known as the Real McCoy, and this biographical story itself also functions as a recapitulation of the rest of the book. It’s an entertaining read, letting the myriad curiosities and strange tales speak for themselves, and yet the back of the book contains more than 150 pages of endnotes to satisfy the scholar.

I will stop short of a book review here. There are some very provocative insights throughout, but I will stick to the several pages Schwartz discusses plagiarism, which comes on the heels of this conclusion about sampling: “Sampling is what imperialists did when they colonized ‘undeveloped’ lands, calling theft ‘development’; sampling is what ghettoized colonies do in revolt against property laws wired around them” (310).

Schwartz traces complaints of plagiarism back into antiquity, suggesting that it is not a feature solely of literate societies. There are audacious examples galore: “Samuel Taylor Coleridge rabidly charged others with theft, but his own perpetual plagiary he considered a form of spirit possession: ‘I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed…” I doubt many Baruch students can claim the right to rip off with such transcendental air, perhaps underlining how plagiarism is defined morally as a debased form of copying. Appropriating in the name of poetry is not quite plagiarism?

Plenty of ironic cases in the history of plagiarism:

  • A passage on seeing double was stolen repeatedly by 18th-century scientists.
  • The first book on photography published in the US retouched an English book.
  • Victorian ministers hand copied sermons on honesty from printed books to make them look like originally penned texts.
  • The Boston Globe ran a story on a plagiarized 1991 commencement speech that was published in the New York Times.
  • Lexicographers responsible for defining plagiarism were accused of plagiarizing definitions.
  • A University of Oregon booklet plagiarized its section on plagiarism. (312-13)

Schwartz is gloomy about defending against plagiarism: “our culture of the copy tends to make plagiarism a necessity, and the more we look for replays to be superior to originals, the more we will embrace plagiarism as elemental.” (313)

The radical left has offered solutions: “the 1988 Festivals of Plagiarism in Glasgow, London, San Francisco, and Berlin exalted plagiarism as a defiance of capitalism, whose commodification of the world and of art proceeds upon the pretense of originality and the projection of uniqueness… plagiarism must be a thoughtful assault upon privilege, retaking that which should belong to everyone” (314).

After more citations of students and scholars caught plagiarizing papers and exasperatedly insisting they thought it was their own words, Schwartz concludes: “Plagiarism in our culture of the copy is sticky with feelings of originality-through-repetition, revelation-through-simulation. That plagiarism should be taken up on all sides–as a means for subverting the System and as a means for getting an edge in business, science, or politics–is proof of its centrality and the reason why plagiarism is treated so gingerly, defended so boldly, resumed so intemperately. Like forgery, plagiarism is a personal addiction… Plagiarism is, moreover, a cultural addiction, and I use that word with malice, for the ubiquity of the metaphor of addiction is itself a clue to our embrace of the rhetoric of replay despite a professional anxiety about disorders of repetition” (315).

Do you think plagiarism is not an epidemic but endemic not only to the academic world but also scientific, political, business, and cultural life? If so, do we need a new paradigm to deal with the matter of intellectual and cultural property in an age of mass duplication and duplicity?

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Baruch College, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Internet, Literacy, Media, Plagiarism, Politics, Scholarship, Search Engines, teaching, Technology, To Ponder, What if . . .

Sweetness, hubris, and the advanced research essay

November 8, 2010 By 2 Comments

A friend told me recently that it was a tradition for Jewish children introduced to religious study to be given honey, so they’d associate it with sweetness and joy.

I’m teaching a class on “The Advanced Research Essay,” which is really a workshop on how to write a thesis paper. I’m leading this workshop as I work on finishing my dissertation, and halfway through the semester my students and I are very much in the same boat.

They’ve finished their annotated bibliographies, they’ve worked hard to assimilate and categorize books and articles on their topics. Now they have to pull their heads out of the waters of research, and turn to their thesis—go from broad and inclusive to incisive and narrow focus. At this stage in my research, I became a bit obsessive-compulsive. Asked a simple question like “What are you studying?” I’d use a word like “empathy” and have to run through a trail of citations from Kant to Hannah Arendt. Grad school can do this to you, and as a fellow fellow and I said last week, second exams train you not to make succinct claims without following every word down the rabbit hole. I think this is partly what accounts for the logic of titles that Alessandro pointed out. The colon is like “towards”, (another class title and dissertation title favorite). Rather than making a statement, or asking a question, we say we’ll go in a direction, or go around. We’d never dream of, you know, declaring something. That would be so…pedantic. I’ve been trying to think of the most daring titles I admire. The Great Gatsby: it dares to say its protagonist is great, and also to tell you its subject is just a guy. And, The Human Condition. Not On the Human Condition, or Towards the Human Condition: fill in the blank. So, we’re not all Hannah Arendt and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I realized that during their annotated bibliographies, not only had my students lost a lot of hubris, but they’d also lost some of the idiosyncratic attachment and associative logic that brought them to their topics in the first place. So, I went back to The Craft of Research, by Booth, Colomb, and Williams, my grad school freshman text, and pulled out a fill-in-the-blank assignment:

1. Topic: I am studying _____.

2. Question: Because I want to find out ______.

3. Significance: To help readers ______.

Many of my students exhibited what I recognized as insecure-student syndrome, rattling off the now ingrained phrases and logic of their readings. We had to talk about real, idiosyncratic questions; and in getting to the impetus for their work, we sometimes realized the original question, or deep unease that made the private string of lights under this tent of citation, was too personal to talk about in class. That too was worth recognizing. “Death and literature” is indeed a naïve topic for a career, but maybe interests should be on a larger, less sophisticated scale than career strategies. If not, there are so many jobs which do not provoke the question “So what are you working on?”

Filed Under: Pedagogy, Process, Scholarship, Writing Instruction

Starting at the top: Notes on cliché and seduction in academic titles

November 4, 2010 By 4 Comments

As a writing fellow, I’ve had a few glimpses into the importance, faculty tell their students, of doing research. Part of this activity inevitably involves going to the library, or at least the library website, and scouring publications for pertinent scholarship to one’s inquiry. Since conducting “original research is a novelty for undergraduates, and since the electronic media offer myriad sources of information ready for the cutting-and-pasting, it make sense that a professor would be concerned with (1) making sure the student does not plagiarize others’ work and (2) instilling a sense that one’s research must enter an already ongoing conversation. So much of instructors’ pedagogical emphasis tends to lie in two fields: the moral and the intellectual, oftentimes in that order. I suspect that students do not make the connection between the two, too terrified of not (appearing to) tread on someone else’s intellectual toes to recognize that the point is to stand on their shoulders. Or, for those enterprising cheaters, the exercise may consist in, as Hillel Schwartz puts it (since I have no original way to put it), “mak[ing] their name by standing on shoulders buried in sand.” But my point here is to draw attention to a third register of the research experience: the aesthetic. Every stroll down the stacks aisles, every click through JSTOR articles, what faces the browsing scholar are titles, titles, and more titles. There soon appear patterns, styles, conventions, some kind of comforting regularity to the vastness of knowledge. Here I want to make some observations of the norms of titling in academic writing. These remarks are not (all) disparaging or snarky about the re-use, mis-use, or abuse of certain linguistic conventions in academia; I simply want to draw attention to how scholars label their work, reproducing in playful or unintentional ways specific kinds of headlines.

  • Present participles: This seems to be a symptom of the interest in and championing of processual approaches, that is, to present the world as in motion, in circulation, always becoming. The title of this post is parodying this cliché of the -ing verb. I am looking at my bookshelf right now and can spot them everywhere: Re-Presenting the City, Losing Control, Colonising Egypt, Exploring the City… I also see some clever variations on the theme: for example, where the title referencing another, more famous title (Coming of Age in Second Life), or where the present participle suggests multiple meanings (Enduring Innocence). Generally, however, the present participle has become a tired trend in titles. (I credit a former boss in publishing for bringing this to my attention and making it a minor obsession of mine.) Moving on…

  • The colon: You know you’re reading academic work when the title is cloven in two by the two dots. There’s not a precise anatomy, but generally the title proper is allusive in tone. The subtitle buttresses it with an explicatory phrase, as in: Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. The latter part is the only bit you really need to get a sense of the topic of the book. Usually the title itself is, ironically, a stylistic flourish, as if to communicate that the book also contains some panache and wit (not a guarantee).
  • Quote as title: I feel like this became vogue during the 1990s when high postmodernism celebrated the voice of the Other and pastiche between high and low culture. But you will still encounter titles, especially in anthropology, that headline a pithy phrase uttered by an ethnographic informant, or a Biblical or other textual bit. I suppose the function of this strategy is to convey some sense of the author’s egalitarianism vis-a-vis her subject.
  • The casual approach: This can go either way. “Notes on…” or “Reflections on…” or even “Some thoughts on…” can communicate the sense that the text will not be especially pedantic, written merely as some loose ideas that suggest more than they argue. Of course, if upon reading the piece disappoints and betrays the airy mood of the title, it can become a marker of pretentiousness.

In a winking gesture, I’ve tried to incorporate all these features in the title to this post. But I wonder what the undergraduate novice, wading through vast oceans of titles, makes of these kinds of conventions, if she makes anything at all of them. The title is not only the first thing you see about an article or book, but in the case of those you don’t actually sit down with–that is, the majority, the title can also be the last thing you read.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Asides, Copyright, Education, Fun, Higher Education, Language, Literacy, literature, Pedagogy, Plagiarism, Scholarship, Style, To Ponder, What if . . .

Academic-ish Magazines

April 8, 2010 By 1 Comment

Reading scholarly journals is more of an acquired taste than a cherished pastime. Even the most devoted student of her field, I assume, doesn’t curl up by the fire with the latest issue of Critical Inquiry or devour the pages of PMLA late into the night. Marvi well - ماروي جو کوھIn part, this is because the journal contributor’s purpose is not to rope in the semi-interested, semi-informed reader. Rather, she must demonstrate her erudition. She must meticulously, tediously lower a very tiny bucket down a very deep well of very specific knowledge, only to draw up a tiny new droplet and deliver it to an already flooded field. Of course such deliberate pacing and careful scholarship delight me when the article relates directly to my specific research interests. But when a journal article discusses something other than the five topics I know a lot about, I often wish the well were a bit shallower, the lowering a little quicker, and the bucket a great deal larger.

That’s why I’ve come to love what I’ll call “academic-ish” periodicals. I subscribe to Cabinet, a quarterly arts and culture magazine full of gorgeous, colorful images and polished, thoughtful, jargon-free prose. The articles, which vary in length, feature the kind of geeky historical and literary subjects I want to know more about without being weighed down by extensive medicine chestcritical apparatuses. According to the magazine’s mission statement, Cabinet’s “hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal. Playful and serious, exuberant and committed, Cabinet‘s omnivorous appetite for understanding the world makes each of its issues a valuable sourcebook of ideas for a wide range of readers, from artists and designers to scientists and historians.” Agreed; I love its eclecticism and readability, for which it never seems to sacrifice depth.

I’ve also been regularly reading an online quarterly of what I can only term “scholarly journalism” called Common-Place. It features the research and ideas of historians, librarians, teachers, antiquarians, Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Third President 1801-1809)grad students, and other scholars of early U.S. culture; it also includes reviews, news, and first-person anecdotes. The tone is informed and serious but lively and engaging. In the magazine’s own words, it’s “a bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine.” As a student of early American literature, I find it wonderful—both light and dense, accessible and thought-provoking.

I came upon both of these alt-academic magazines via recommendations from like-minded friends, so I’m actively soliciting more suggestions from you, gentle reader.

Filed Under: Scholarship

Sociology light?

February 15, 2009 By 7 Comments

I am currently in the middle of reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and think it could make a great addition to some sociology courses (actually, a sociology professor recommended it to me and does use it her course).

It explores a variety of social factors that contribute to individual success, and provides a very strong (and elegant) counter-argument to generally shared assumptions about how individuals work their way to the top. It is particularly interesting in light of my teaching in deviance, where I try to get students to see social factors that contribute to individual and group marginalization.

Gladwell holds a doctorate in sociology, and Outliers refers to a number of classic texts and experiments. His writing is so jargon-free, and his story-telling abilities are so exceptional, that the content is accessible to anyone. For this reason I can see how it would be useful in an introductory course.

However, I suspect that many would have objections to using a popular, non-academic text in the classroom. Because it is outside the academic discourse community, it might not be appropriate. Additionally, he can be accused of dumbing down or glossing over material. I would like to hear more of these objections, if any readers here have any, as well as objections to using popular and/or journalistic books in other disciplines.

Filed Under: Pedagogy, Scholarship

Blog Your Discipline

April 3, 2008 By Leave a Comment

How do academic blogs reflect the disciplines of their authors?

I’ve become interested in this question while following our Anthropology/Sociology working group, and also through my own surfing.  A relatively new blog–The Edge of the American West–run by historians Eric Rauchway and Ari Kelman from U.C. Davis, has quickly become one of the better U.S. history blogs.  What makes it good is a steady flow of mixed content: scholarship and book reviews, “This Day in History” posts, pick-ups on contemporary political issues and reporting, and some discussion of teaching.  Mix in the authors’ fine senses of humor and an occasional reference to sports and, voila, you get pretty good insight into just what it is historians do.

Early in The Edge’s life, Rauchway answered the question, “Why Blog?”  I was particularly struck by his fourth reason:

To change the profession: be the academic discourse you want to see in the world. You want historiography to move quickly, have relevance, be sharper? You can’t make it that way book review by book review: but you can if you blog.

This argument supports the notion of a blog as a personal publishing platform, as an opportunity to get your name and voice out there, and to contribute to the shaping of the discourse in your field.

So, how about it, BLSCI fellows?  Your very own blog, and all the opportunity that comes with it, is now just a click away.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Scholarship Tagged With: