51 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2017
    1. In order to benchmark national performances and identify Canada’s strengths in SSH, it is possible to use research articles published in journals representing disciplines where this medium of communication is popular, such as economics. For other disciplines, journal-based bibliometric analysis may be used with due caution and databases can be built in order to factor in other knowledge dissemination media. However, one must be wary of conducting comparative analyses of SSH disciplines without taking into account the effects of the knowledge dissemination media of each discipline on the bibliometric tools being used.

      On the issue of cross-disciplinary comparisons even within the humanities.

  2. Sep 2017
    1. The results were less clear, however, concerning the relative importance in writingof fact and interpretation. By this point in the course both ‘arts’ and ‘science’ studentsseemed to be aware that essays in the history of science involved the evaluation ofdifferent views. ‘Arts’ students, however, more often indicated that they had expecteda more factual course, preferred writing about facts than opinions and considered‘getting the facts down’ as the most important criterion. This orientation towardsfacts in the ‘arts’ students’ questionnaire responses appears surprising, given that intheir writing they were more likely than ‘science’ students to represent ideas as provi-sional and mediated rather than factual.This apparent discrepancy may perhaps be resolved by distinguishing betweenstudents’ perception of an issue as problematic and their actual performance withrespect to that issue. ‘Arts’ students’ views of the role of fact and interpretation mayindicate an awareness that the representation of reality is not straightforward and thatessays require a sophisticated discussion and evaluation of different points of view.They may deal more effectively with these issues precisely because they realise thatthey are problematic. Interviews with ‘science’ students suggested that they were notalways conscious of the significance of this type of discussion and might perceive it as‘waffle’ or ‘padding’.

      very interesting. I don't find her account of the counter-intuitive part of the arts students interviews and surveys convincing though as there's no evidence (it sounds like an attempt to make the data fit hypothesis, frankly). But I do wonder if it isn't the fact that it is a History of Science course that we're talking about here. Maybe that makes them more focussed on facts?

    2. Kuhn (1970, p. 167) commented that science education tends to elide the processthrough which knowledge has been constructed, whereas students of other subjectsare exposed to varying interpretations over time. As a result, he suggested, sciencestudents are blind to the history of their subject, seeing it only as unproblematicprogress. The interview data suggest that this is indeed a point of difference betweenthe ‘arts’ and ‘science’ students in this sample. While both of them tend to have adualistic view of science itself, the ‘arts’ students seem to be more at ease with arelativistic view of knowledge in history.

      Kuhn on lack of training science students receive on how knowledge is constructed.

    3. Seven of the ‘arts’ students described a process of this sort, compared with only twoof the ‘science’ students. There was, however, another approach to revision, involvingonly one revision cycle. This was mentioned by five interviewees, four of whom werefrom ‘science’ backgrounds. Um ... rewriting? No. I can probably, once I’ve got the, I’ve got the feel of it, it probablytakes me a couple of hours to write, and then, shuffling stuff around, ... it’ll probably takeme, I don’t know, a morning or something to do a fair draft of it. (Ewan, 2002, science)Only one ‘arts’ student mentioned using a single revision cycle, and he had originallygraduated in science before starting his OU arts study

      science vs arts revision cycles: science students one draft; arts multiple moving things around.

    4. Although some ‘science’ students reported similar problems, it was only ‘science’students who talked in terms of ‘padding out’ their answers in order to reach therequired length: I’m more this, get all the facts down, yes it’s only three hundred words, but that’s it in anutshell. And it’s a lot harder then to flower it up to say either five hundred words or athousand words. (Larry, 2002, science)I’m not used to waffling I think that’s the problem. A lot of the art students say oh I’vewritten too much, ... and I have the opposite problem I kind of write down what Ithink the answer’s and I’ve only got like 200 words and I have to pad it out. (Ruth,2003, science)The tendency for some ‘science’ students to write relatively short essays may berelated to their conceptions of knowledge. If it is seen as factual, then once the factshave been stated, the student might see the task as complete; as Larry said, ‘that’s itin a nutshell’. If knowledge is relativistic, however, then competing views are equallyworthy of consideration and greater elaboration is needed to make a case

      how science students see "waffling"

    5. While the ‘arts’ students frequently described a strug-gle to make their essay ‘flow’, the ‘science’ students did not talk about textual struc-ture as problematic

      science students don't see structure as an issue; arts students do.

    6. North, Sarah. 2005. “Different Values, Different Skills? A Comparison of Essay Writing by Students from Arts and Science Backgrounds.” Studies in Higher Education 30 (5): 517–33. doi:10.1080/03075070500249153.

    7. Geisler (1994) and Russell and Yañez (2002) discuss a comparable situation in theUSA, where to fulfil general education requirements, undergraduates take a numberof disciplinary courses in fields which are not their major. They note the contradic-tions involved in conflating the aims of general education and disciplinary encultura-tion, with lecturers using a disciplinary discourse that is not only unfamiliar tostudents, but also seen as irrelevant to their individual aims and aspirations. Similarly,Moore (2000) discusses the tension between integration and disciplinarity in an inter-disciplinary foundation course in South Africa, voicing concerns that the attempt topromote generic competences risks undermining the disciplinary basis of academicperformance (p. 192).

      research and bibliography on the mismatch between gen ed or breadth students and the rhetoric of instructors who are intending to socialise people in their field.

    8. The distinction between hard and soft fieldsrelates to the extent to which knowledge is constructed on the basis of a frameworkof shared assumptions. The pure sciences (hard) typically maintain a degree ofinternal unity over aims, methods of investigation and evaluation criteria, which maycome to be seen as derived from reality itself, rather than constructed by disciplinaryconvention. The humanities and social sciences (soft), in contrast, tend to becharacterized by internal discord, encouraging a view of knowledge as a matter ofinterpretation.

      disciplinary differences in the construction of knowledge

    9. ‘However’ is a textual theme with the function of indicating the relationship of theclause to the preceding text; ‘it is apparent’ is an interpersonal theme with the func-tion of indicating the writer’s stance towards the proposition that follows; ‘during thesecond half of the sixteenth century’ is an experiential theme providing informationabout circumstances surrounding the event or situation. In the discussion that followsI refer to these three types of non-subject theme as orienting themes. Unlike thesubject, none of them is grammatically compulsory and their use reflects a choicemade by the writer about how to frame the proposition presented within the clausecomplex.These orienting themes were consistently more common in the ‘arts’ students’essays, and the difference between the two groups was highly significant (t= 2.865,p < 0.006). ‘Arts’ students used on average 31.50 textual and 15.14 interpersonalelements in every 100 clause complexes, compared to 24.28 textual and 9.75 inter-personal elements for the ‘science’ group. They also tended to use more clausecomplexes containing an experiential orienting theme, although this difference wasnot significant. Since essays which used more orienting themes were also significantlymore likely to receive a higher mark (t= 2.336, p< 0.023), it is clearly worth investi-gating further the differing ways in which these were deployed by ‘arts’ and ‘science’students.

      Very interesting. This agrees with my experience that Science students have a lot of trouble with signposting!

    10. Research suggests that students majoring in hard fields with a high degree ofdisciplinary consensus are more likely to subscribe to beliefs in absolute knowledgethan those majoring in soft fields, and that these beliefs may be encouraged byaspects of the disciplinary context in which they work (Paulsen & Wells, 1998;Schommer-Aikins et al., 2003). Neumann (2001) reviews evidence of disciplinarydifferences in a number of aspects of teaching and learning, noting that soft disci-plines tend to emphasize critical thinking, oral and written expression, and analysisand synthesis of course content, while hard disciplines tend to emphasize skills indealing with facts and figures, with little writing required beyond the exposition ofexperimental results. In a large-scale undergraduate survey Entwistle and Tait(1995) found that students’ learning styles varied between different disciplines in linewith the demands of their course. Students of science and economics, for example,were more likely to use surface strategies, perhaps encouraged by assessmentpatterns that emphasized the reproduction of facts. In contrast, markers in historyand English were likely to penalize a reproducing orientation and a serialist (listing)style (Entwistle & Tait, 1995, p. 96).

      How disciplinary differences affect approach to knowledge and grader expectations.

    11. Such tutor comments suggest that ‘science’ students are less ready to criticallyevaluate source material, a feature that can be related to the tendency already notedin their writing to downplay the role of human interpretation in the construction ofknowledge

      This whole section so agrees with my read on this! What an amazing bit of research to show specifically what the hunch was.

  3. Apr 2017
    1. pp. 70-71

      Interestingly, although most lists were from the sciences, the general science list was completely inactive: her guess is that the more specialised ones had taken over

    2. pp. 65-66 disciplinary differences between HSS and STEM in terms of breadth of focus:

      In the categories of the social sciences and the humanities the electronic mailing list topics tended to have a broad focus, such as history of literature. The interdisciplinary category category also had this broad thematic quality. The sciences and communications were the only two categories where the electronic mailing lists had more specific content, such as "Bees in Biology" or "Computer Mediated Communication."

    3. p. 12 at the time she was writing, many respondents said they were the only members of their HSS departments with a computer and an internet connection.

    4. p. 2

      Originally wanted to study HSS and STEM but scientists didn't qulify. See chapter III

  4. Jul 2016
    1. Page 220

      Humanistic research takes place in a rich milieu that incorporates the cultural context of artifacts. Electronic text and models change the nature of scholarship in subtle and important ways, which have been discussed at great length since the humanities first began to contemplate the scholarly application of computing.

    2. Page 226

      Borgman on why we need a common effort in building a scholarly Commons

      Striking contrast exists between disciplines and artifacts, practices, and incentives to build the content layer. Common approaches are none the less required to support interdisciplinary research, which is a central goal of the research. Scholarly products are useful to scholars and related fields and sometimes to scholars in distant fields as the boundaries between disciplines becomes more porous, the interoperability of information systems and services becomes indispensable.

    3. Page 223

      This is Borgman discussing the role of priority in the humanities

      cultural and historical events can be reinterpreted repeatedly. Prizes are based on the best interpretation rather than on the first claim to a finding.

    4. Page 223

      Borgman is discussing here the difference in the way humanists handle data in comparison to the way that scientists and social scientist:

      When generating their own data such as interviews or observations, human efforts to describe and represent data are comparable to that of scholars and other disciplines. Often humanists are working with materials already described by the originator or holder of the records, such as libraries, archives, government agencies, or other entities. Whether or not the desired content already is described as data, scholars need to explain its evidentiary value in your own words. That report often becomes part of the final product. While scholarly publications in all fields set data within a context, the context and interpretation are scholarship in the humanities.

    5. Page 219

      In the humanities, it is difficult to separate artifacts from practices or publications from data.

    6. Page 219

      Humanities scholars integrate and aggregate data from many sources. They need tools and services to analyze digital data, as others do the sciences and social sciences, but also tools that assist them interpretation and contemplation.

    7. Page 215

      What seems a clear line between publications and data in the sciences and social sciences is a decidedly fuzzy one in the humanities. Publications and other documents are central sources of data to humanists. … Data sources for the humanities are innumerable. Almost any document, physical artifact, or record of human activity can be used to study culture. Humanities scholars value new approaches, and recognizing something as a source of data (e.g., high school yearbooks, cookbooks, or wear patterns in the floor of public places) can be an act of scholarship. Discovering heretofore unknown treasures buried in the world's archives is particularly newsworthy. … It is impossible to inventory, much less digitize, all the data that might be useful scholarship communities. Also distinctive about humanities data is their dispersion and separation from context. Cultural artifacts are bought and sold, looted in wars, and relocated to museums and private collections. International agreements on the repatriation of cultural objects now prevent many items from being exported, but items that were exported decades or centuries ago are unlikely to return to their original site. … Digitizing cultural records and artifacts make them more malleable and mutable, which creates interesting possibilities for analyzing, contextualizing, and recombining objects. Yet digitizing objects separates them from the origins, exacerbating humanists’ problems in maintaining the context. Removing text from its physical embodiment in a fixed object may delete features that are important to researchers, such as line and page breaks, fonts, illustrations, choices of paper, bindings, and marginalia. Scholars frequently would like to compare such features in multiple additions or copies.

    8. Page 215

      Borgman discussing the half-life of citations and humanities :

      while the half-life of literature is considered to be the longest in humanities, the large comparative study discussed earlier found the shortest citation age of an average article in humanities…. [another study] also found that the usage of history articles was much more concentrated in recent publications and was the usage of articles in economics or mathematics (the three fields studied). A close inspection revealed that the use of history articles was widely scattered across countries, without the clustering around classic articles from the other two fields. Although history can be considered within the humanities or the social sciences, comparisons between these findings do reinforce others conclusions that humanists’ may read current journal articles to keep up with their fields, but rely more heavily for their research on sources not covered by journal indexes. The findings also amplify concerns about the validity of citation studies of journal literature in humanities, given the reliance on monographic and archival sources. In sum, the humanities draw on the longest literature time span of any of the disciplines, and yet have the least amount of their scholarly literature online. So far, they are the discipline most poorly served by the publications component of the content later.

    9. Page 214

      Literature in the Humanities goes out-of-print long before it goes out of date, so efforts to make older, out-of-copyright books available greatly benefit these fields.

    10. Page 214

      Borgman notes that the bibliographic coverage of journal literature is shallow in the humanities. The ISI Arts and humanity citation Index only goes back to 1975. In Sciences it goes back to 1900. In the social sciences it goes back to 1956. Also SCOPUS does not include the humanities.

      What is interesting about this is that the humanities are the least cumulative of all the disciplines in the sense that they do not build on previous knowledge so much as we examine previous thought.

    11. Page 214

      Borgman on information artifacts and communities:

      Artifacts in the humanities differ from those of the sciences and social sciences in several respects. Humanist use the largest array of information sources, and as a consequence, the station between documents and data is the least clear. They also have a greater number of audiences for the data and the products of the research. Whereas scientific findings usually must be translated for a general audience, humanities findings often are directly accessible and of immediate interest to the general public.

    12. Page 204

      Borgman on the different types of data in the social sciences:

      Data in the social sciences fall into two general categories. The first is data collected by researchers through experiments, interviews, surveys, observations, or similar names, analogous to scientific methods. … the second category is data collected by other people or institutions, usually for purposes other than research.

    13. Page 202

      Borgman on information artifacts in the social sciences

      like the sciences, the social sciences create and use minimal information. Yet they differ in the sources of the data. While almost all scientific data are created by for scientific purposes, a significant portion of social scientific data consists of records credit for other purposes, by other parties.

    14. Page 184

      In the section “Description and Organization in the Sciences” Borgman discusses some of the ways in which scientific literature is better organized: for example these include uniform language, taxonomies, thesauri, and ontologies.

  5. Jun 2016
    1. T he Future of Publications in the Humanities

      Fuchs, Milena Žic. 2014. “The Future of Publications in the Humanities: Possible Impacts of Research Assessment.” In New Publication Cultures in the Humanities: Exploring the Paradigm Shift, edited by Péter Dávidházi, 147–71. Amsterdam University Press. http://books.google.ca/books/about/New_Publication_Cultures_in_the_Humaniti.html?hl=&id=4ffcoAEACAAJ.

    1. The Hardy-Littlewood Rule

      "The rule states that anyone that joins collaboration in good faith will be listed equally as an author, regardless of the relative contributions they end up making.

    2. This has a list of guidelines about authorship in different disciplines, particularly the natural sciences.

    1. No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission

      Fish, Stanley. 1988. “Guest Column: No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission.” PMLA 103 (5): 739–48. http://www.jstor.org/stable/462513.

      An interesting essay in the context I'm reading it (alongside Foucault's What is an author in preparation for a discussion of scientific authorship.

      Among the interesting things about it are the way it encapsulates a distinction between the humanities and sciences in method (though Fish doesn't see it and it comes back to bite him in the Sokol affair). What Frye thinks is important because he is an author-function in Foucault's terms, I.e. a discourse initiator to whom we return for new insight.

      Fish cites Peters and Ceci 1982 on peer review, and sides with those who argue that ethos should count in review of science as well.

      Also interesting for an illustration of how much the field changed, from new criticism in the 1970s (when the first draft was written) until "now" i.e. 1989 when political criticism is the norm.

    2. . It follows then that the machinery of the institution does not grow up to accommodate needs that are independently perceived but that, rather, the institutional machinery comes first and the needs then follow, as do the ways of meeting them. In short, the work to be done is not what the institution responds to but what it create

      On the creative nature of literary criticism

    3. t "[ilf Northrop Frye should write an essay attacking archetypal criticism, the article would by definition be of much greater significance than an article by another scholar attack- ing the same approach" (Schaefer 5). The reason, of course, is that the approach is not something in- dependent of what Northrop Frye has previously said about it; indeed, in large part archetypal criticism is what Northrop Frye has said about it, and therefore anything he now says about it is not so much to be measured against an independent truth as it is to be regarded, at least potentially, as a new pronouncement of what the truth will hereafter be said to be

      author-function at work: Frye is an author-concept and his work is a coherent whole--an Oeuvre.

      This is absolutely fine for literary criticism and the humanities. The same is in practice true of the sciences--what Steven Hawking says about physics is more interesting than other people, especially if he reverses his previous claims. But in contrast to Frye, where a reversal is a change in the discursive practice (cf. Foucault), in the case of science, it should not be the case that hearing a "great man" reverse himself is more significant than hearing an unknown post-doc. The reversal should be evidence-based.

    4. . Predict- ably, Schaefer's statement provoked a lively exchange in which the lines of battle were firmly, and, as I will argue, narrowly, drawn. On the one hand those who agreed with Schaefer feared that a policy of anonymous review would involve a surrender "to the spurious notions about objectivity and absolute value that . . . scientists and social scientists banter about"; on the other hand those whose primary concern was with the fairness of the procedure believed that "[jiustice should be blind" ("Correspon- dence" 4). Each side concedes the force of the opposing argument-the proponents of anonymous re- view admit that impersonality brings its dangers, and the defenders of the status quo acknowledge that it is important to prevent "extraneous considerations" from interfering with the identification of true merit (5)

      Discussion of debate at MLA about plan to introduce blind submission to PMLA and comparison with sciences and social sciences.

  6. screen.oxfordjournals.org screen.oxfordjournals.org
    1. A study of Galileo's works could alter our knowledge ofthe history, but not the science, of mechanics; whereas, a re-examination of the books of Freud or Marx can transform ourunderstanding of psychoanalysis or Marxism

      A nice summary of the difference between "return" in a new discourse, and "revision" in a new science.

    2. In keeping with this distinction, we can understand why it isinevitable that practitioners of such discourses must 'return to theorigin*.

      This is a more convincing difference: practitioners of new discourses return to their founding documents in a way that practitioners of new disciplines do not.

      This is a basic methodological difference between science and the humanities, however, and it helps explain why Darwinism is in some ways really a branch of the humanities: it is a theory you come back to rather than an observation.

      Oral formulaic theory, on the other hand, is more like the scientific discipline: no need to go back to Parry and Lord.

    3. ficially,then, the initiation of discursive practices appears similar to thefounding of any scientific endeavour, but I believe there is a funda-/ mental difference

      How initiators of discursive practices are different from founders of scientific schools or disciplines.

    4. We can conclude that, unlike a proper name, which moves fromthe interior of a discourse to the real person outside who producedit, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts -separating one from the other, defining their form, and character-izing their mode of existence. It points to the existence of certaingroups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse withina society and culture. The author's name is not a function of aman's civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach,among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of dis-course and their singular mode of existence. C

      Again, an "Implied Author" type idea that is completely not relevant to science--although ironically, the H-index tries to make it relevant. In science, the author name is not the function that defines the text; it is the person to whom the credit it to be given rather than a definition of Oeuvre. This is really useful distinction for discussing what is different between the two discourses.

    1. he case for more collaborative work can be made. Indeed, most of us do it already, to some degree. We tend to discuss our ideas with colleagues and seek trusted opinions. We present talks at conferences and seminars, and use the feedback to develop ideas before publication. We solicit comments on drafts. Colleagues share a research environment that, if it is effective, contributes to the quality of all output. Yet when the work appears, the standard model is still sole ownership. A colleague could have given a lot of input, discussing ideas or providing comments on early drafts, yet their accepted reward is only to appear in the list of acknowledgements. This seems a paltry return on what can be a considerable amount of effort, an effort that is obviously a degree of collaboration. Perhaps one tries to mitigate the paltry reward by extracting a reciprocal amount of uncredited assistance in return.

      Bout how actual contributions to authorship of humanities work goes uncredited, except in acknowledgements

    2. Combination acts

      Mumford, Stephen. 2012. “Combination Acts.” Times Higher Education (THE). February 16. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/combination-acts/419019.article.

    1. However, a diverse body of work on thesocially situated nature of scientific communication alreadyexists which points the way. This ranges from Crane’s(1969) pioneering analyses of invisible colleges throughLatour and Woolgar’s (1979) classic study of laboratory lifeat the Salk Institute to Traweek’s (1992) richly texturedethnography of the HEP community. In addition, the workof Schatz and colleagues on the Worm Community Systemproject, which was designed to capture the full range ofknowledge, formal and informal, of the community of mo-lecular biologists who study the nematode worm C. elegans(see: http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/projects/wcs/index.html)can provide useful insights; so, too, research into the mate-rial practices and social interactions of scientists working incollaboratories, such as the Upper Atmospheric ResearchCollaboratory (see: http://intel.si.umich.edu/crew/Research/resrch08.htm) or the Space, Physics & Aeronomy ResearchCollaboratory (see: http://intel.si.umich.edu/sparc/) at theUniversity of Michigan

      great bibliography on ethnographies of different disciplines

    2. is wiseto avoid generalizations and to concentrate instead on show-ing how interactions between coworkers, specifically theorchestration of information exchange and coauthorship, aregrounded in local culture.

      "it is wise to avoid generalizations and to concentrate instead on showing how interactions between coworkers, specifically the orchestration of information exchange and coauthorship, are grounded in local culture."

    3. iomedical collaborations are moreheterogeneous and socially diffuse in character and do notappear to have the same degree of multilayered, internalreview as HEP research collaborations. T

      biomedicine is a less homogeneous group and so less internal trust

    4. TheHEP research community is thus characterized by highlevels of internal scrutiny, mutual trust—witness, for in-stance, the institutionalized practice of relying upon, andciting, preprints—and peer tracking, such that it is notsusceptible to systematic fraud. Contrary

      physicists live in a very trustful, observant, world; also they do a lot of internal, pre-referee, review

    5. The answer probably has to do with the relative intensityof socialization and oral communication (Traweek, 1992,pp. 120 –123), along with the character of the organizationalstructures and value systems, which define collaborations inlarge-scale, high-energy physics and biomedical research.

      Why is there less soul-searching about hyper-authorship in HEP? disciplinary differences

    6. s Rennie and Flanagin(1994) remind us, there is no standard method for determin-ing order, nor any universalistic criteria for conferring au-thorship status:

      bibliography on authorship practices

    7. But while the traditional model of authorship persists, mostnoticeably in the humanities, it is no longer the sole ordominant model in certain scientific specialties.

      Is not long dominant model in some specialisations (though it is in humanities)

    8. lphabetization through weightedlisting to reverse seniority (e.g., Spiegel & Keith-Spiegel,1970; Riesenberg & Lundberg, 1990).

      bibliography on authorship ranking and practices