The Problem with Digital Books

Sunday, January 15, 2017

If you’re expecting a screed from an ex-publisher about how ebooks are ruining the world, destroying the book business, and how much I love the smell ink in a new book, you’ll be disappointed in this piece. Move on to the next cute cat photo. This story is actually about Amy the Automaton.

But first, the problem(s) with digital books. A decade ago, they were going to make paper books obsolete, save many trees and swallow up the earth’s entire bandwidth, once Google finished digitizing them all. As most people who follow the book industry know, the ebook revolution hit…

Read more

How to Slam Dunk a Journal Editor

Friday, January 13, 2017

Joya Misra and Jennifer Lundquist, two well-known sociologists at U Mass Amherst, wrote an article for yesterday’s Inside Higher Education called How to Slam-Dunk a Revision, part of IHE’s practical advice for young academics on how to survive in higher education. I’ve written on this topic myself, including in my Essentials of Publishing Qualitative Research and a blogpost for the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology (Nov. 2014), and discuss it regularly in getting published workshops I regularly give for academics.

For the most part, Misra and Lundquist’s article is on target and well worth…

Read more

Dr. Lincoln Packs a Nail Gun!

Thursday, January 12, 2017

Last week, I had the pleasure of a catchup conversation with Yvonna Lincoln. Yvonna and I go back a long way in our respective careers and have been collaborating on books, journals, series, and dinners for at least three decades.

For those who might confuse her with a descendant of Honest Abe, Professor Lincoln is a big deal in both research on higher education and in qualitative research methodology.  Her official title is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and Human Resource Development and the Ruth Harrington Endowed Chair of Educational Leadership at Texas A&M University. Until recently, she was also…

Read more

Are you a Writer?

Monday, January 09, 2017

Are academics writers?

A provocative article on writing by Cydney Alexis, who runs the writing center at Kansas State, answers strongly affirmative, writers of many genres. Most of what she says are things I can easily agree with: “creative writing” exists in forms other than novels and poetry and should be banned as a term when developing writing programs at universities. People should embrace all forms of writing, not just the novel/poetry kind as being “writing.” We should make writing part of our lives as much as people have made reading, or at least as we did before the advent…

Read more

Join the Calendar Revolution!

Saturday, December 31, 2016

“I have found it fascinating how an arbitrary measure of time can become personified, despised, & blamed for all the events we've decided it contains. Someone with more time should write about this.”

That was the challenge my brilliant archaeologist friend Jane Baxter posted on FB a couple of days ago in response to the endless comments of people hoping for the many sorrows of 2016 to end.

“Get lost, 2016… Fuck you 2016... 2016: What else can go wrong?” They’ve been all over my feed as people mourn the losses of favorite musicians and celebrities, the ascendance of…

Read more

Editing Your Own Work

Monday, December 26, 2016

It’s winter break and you’re trying to use the time away from class to get an article written, edited, and submitted to a journal. You probably planned to get to two or three out, but your expectations have become more realistic as you actually have to fit time to work between family obligations, evenings with friends, and furtive trips to the bargain bins.

A big part of this process is editing your work after you finally get it written (I have some advice on that too). Not  much fun, is it? You’ve sweated blood just getting words on a…

Read more

What Was Your Best Moment in China?

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

The hot pink sweater should have tipped me off. I’m not just one of the dancers here, it said. I am THE dancer, the only person you should watch. Everyone else was in drab late-autumn browns and grays and greens and danced that way on cold, late-autumn Chinese night.

She didn’t really need to advertise. I was watching no one else. Meryem, let’s call her that though I never found out her name, was what a Uyghur dancer should be. The gracious spins, the elegant flow of her hands, the subtle arch of her back, the turns around her older…

Read more

Post-Truth Archaeology

Saturday, December 17, 2016

A nice piece about how archaeology is presented in social media by Adrian Maldonado. All archaeologists have grimaced over some sketchy archaeological claim rapidly infecting in the global social media.

My favorite, and one of Maldonado's, was the claim of a Canadian teenager of finding a lost Maya city in Mexico's rain forests using satellite images. Archaeologists who know that region well alternated between a good laugh and tearing their hair out when the media blitz wouldn't end. After all, it was probably only a set of field walls. And we felt for the poor kid, when his…

Read more

Citation Wars Heat Up Again, but Who’s Counting

Friday, December 16, 2016

Everyone in university social science and humanities departments complains about the journal impact factor (JIF). With good reason. They’re like the 1%, getting all the goodies while the rest of us resent their unfair advantage.

In this case, it’s more like the elite 11%. For those not familiar, the impact factor is a number created by a private firm called Thompson-Reuters, which maintains an index of 11,000 academic journals called the Web of Science (one source indicates that there are about 100,000 academic journals in all, but that’s a slippery, constantly changing number) and counts how many times each…

Read more

Sand dunes

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Long before Taliban or Al Qaeda were household words, I was a young archaeologist on a project in the remote western end of Afghanistan, a region known as Sistan. Famous in ancient times as the home of Rustam, hero of the Persian epic poem Shahname, it sure didn’t look heroic while I was there in the mid 1970s as a U Michigan graduate student. A few small villages with homes made of reeds and mud, some eroded ruins along the foothills of the Helmand River where we concentrated our work, and lots of sand dunes. Sahara-worthy sand. Sand that hissed…

Read more