SWJ: praise given and reviews (merged)

[Mike Innes]

Hi Marc. I lost track of this thread and had to dig around for it...

It's an interesting question / problem set, Mike. I think it is made even more interesting by the shifts that are happening, partly as a result of the new communications technologies, in the very definition and meaning of "academic". For example, one of the major changes that I see happening is a revitalization of the older, "independent scholar" type of academic who may be affiliated with a university (or research unit), but whose career is not controlled by them.

I agree, technology is definitely morphing the dialogue and building bridges in all sorts of ways - SWC involvement in the new Foreign Policy being a pretty strong case in point.

Re. independent scholars, I see that too - or at least, I see the benefit of it, from a personal viewpoint. I'm a full time practitioner with several such affiliations, and they allow me to at least participate on the periphery of academia. It's an interesting position to be in (though pecking order atmospherics can get a bit weird, like in the dept. where I'm actually working on a PhD ).

Rex's earlier comment about his students' accomplishments is a good one, too: academics are practitioners, some practitioners are heavy-hitting scholars, some practitioners have a wealth of first-hand knowledge and experience to share, and between the three there's a useful synthesis that's available, if we're able to spot it when it happens (or wily enough to engineer it ).

And, just as a note, in my department, blogging does count for academic credit in the tenure system, albeit not for very much.

Do tell. I've never heard of the before. How progressive is Carleton? I wonder how prevalent that is? In developing CTlab, I polled quite a few academics on their view of blogging. Interesting, some junior academics seem terrified of the idea, lest they jeopardize their professional trajectories by doing something as flakey as (gasp!) blogging. Dan Drezner's case (denied tenure at Chicago, some say because of his blogging) was cited more than once (though now his success seems to moot the rest of it). Older, established academics seemed to love the idea as a more effective way of engaging the public more broadly. And then, of course, there are the independent souls who couldn't give a rat's ass about establishment expectations, and do it anyway, under a pseudonym or their own names. Bless'em.

Hmmm. Back in 1996, I had the chance to sit down with a guy who used to be the main editor of the American Journal of Sociology and talk about this. One of the points he noted, and he had been involved in peer review and editing for about 40 years, was that editing had pretty much disappeared in most journals while peer review tended to be more about theoretical correctness than any type of scientific assessment of the merits of an article. His point was that the heavy pressure to publish when combined with the huge increase in numbers of academics and increasing specialization was what led to this sorry state.

Fair point, and it rings true. Again, when I was first getting into blogging (not so long ago), and scanning around the web for some insight on how a professional might, errr, blog responsibly, ie. in a way that complements professional activities and standards without betraying the nature of the medium, I came across Research Blogging. It has a pretty interesting approach to things: research blogging, for that community's purposes, is only "research blogging" if 1) the blogger is appropriately credentialed, and 2) is blogging about peer reviewed research. At the time, the Research Blogging community was still sorting out how it wanted to do things, but the big debate, as you might expect, was how to set the parameters of "peer reviewed research". Conference papers? Published articles only? In any self proclaimed "peer reviewed" journal? Or only articles from journals of recognized standard/standing? What about the open source movement in some academic disciplines, and online-only publication outlets? The discussions got into the problems with peer review that both you and John Fishel mentioned. I'm not sure I entirely agree with Research Blogging's full set of criteria, but they set an interesting standard in quality control for blogging, and suggests something akin to what John, Sam, and Bill were getting at,too.

Personally, I see the development of online, hmmm, let's call them "practitioner communities", can serve as an excellent model of where scholarly research could go (if not "academic" research). Over the past 40 years or so, the pressure to use theoretical models, rather than fieldwork and data, has increased (one of those cost issues), so a lot of social science work has been based on "data" that is increasingly divorced from the field actually being studied. Forums such as the SWJ/SWC and the CTLab () act as a work-around putting practitioners and scholars back in contact with each other.

"Work around" is an interesting way of putting it. Heh heh... I wouldn't put CTlab in the same league as SWJ/SWC (yet!), but both are definitely filling a gap and bridging communities. I'm really looking forward to what they'll evolve into (hint hint...).