Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 245.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
[1] From: Claire Warwick <c.warwick@ucl.ac.uk> (53)
Subject: Re: 17.240 critical reflections on publishing
[2] From: lachance@origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois (17)
Lachance)
Subject: Typos and Research
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 06:21:29 +0100
From: Claire Warwick <c.warwick@ucl.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 17.240 critical reflections on publishing
I came back from my holiday to find a great deal of interesting discussion
on this thread, but I hope you will forgive me for taking it back a little
to the original post, as I have read them all in one go.
The original author, Professor Corre, it seems was referring to the
problems of academic acceptance of scholarly publishing which takes place
only in an electronic form. How fortunate Prof Corre is not to have to be
part of the British academic culture of the Research Assessment Exercise.
(For those happy enough not to know about this, it means that every
research active academic must submit the details of their best four
publications over a given period of years for periodic review of
departments, the results of which determine how much government funding we
receive).
Despite the fact that electronic publication, or the creation or a digital
resource is officially recognized by the RAE as an academic endeavour, in
practice print still carries much more kudos. In the last exercise I
referred to the URL of an article that I had produced in an electronic only
journal, only to be advised that this was not sufficiently prestigious and
please would I offer page numbers for the printed version, so that these
might be photocopied and sent to the panel. Since there was no printed
version I chose instead to offer a link to the long abstract of a paper
given at ACH-ALLC 99. This would of course be easy to access for the
reviewers. Still no good, page numbers were absent. So, driven that the
journal version of the article had yet to appear I had to ask John
Unsworth, the conference chair, to snail mail me a copy of the proceedings
volume so that the printed version could be photocopied and sent off. This
was exactly the same text as the electronic version, but despite the fact
that it was clearly part of an official conference website I was advised
that the authority of print would confer more gravitas on my words. The
assessment panel was Library and Information Studies, so could hardly have
been seen as ignorant of electronic delivery of information.
This serves to demonstrate how slowly academic culture changes in response
to technology, and is part of the reason, I think, why journal publishers
are shy of producing content solely in electronic form, despite that fact
that some libraries now have switched to electronic only journal delivery.
So at least for the foreseeable suture and for British academics the option
of solely producing our research in electronic form is not one that appears
to be open to us, at least when one is relatively junior. As in so many
things if money follows what we do, then we are nervous of bucking trends
or questioning cultural norms. So despite the face that I received very
interesting feedback on my article in an electronic only journal
(Information Research), and despite the fact that it is run by a respected
academic (Tom Wilson) I have not yet repeated the experience.
Ironic, isn't it?
Claire
*************************************************************
Claire Warwick MA PhD
Programme Director and Lecturer
Electronic Communication and Publishing
School of Library Archive and Information Studies
University College London
Gower Street, WC1E 6BT
020 7679 2548, c.warwick@ucl.ac.uk
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--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 06:29:01 +0100
From: lachance@origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Typos and Research
Willard,
The recent does/dopes typo uncovered through
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v17/0240.html
leads me to wonder
if QWERTY and Dvorak keyboards produce typos of differnt import and if
touch typists are prone to making different keyboard infelicities than
two finger typists. Multilingual writers?
Any research?
There is of course automatic text funging on MOOs of which note
Katherine Parrish's work MOOLIPO
http://www.meadow4.com/moolipo/
and her paper on automatic poetry generation
http://www.meadow4.com/cybertext/autopres.html
curious
-- Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
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