Do clickbait articles like "Why professors are writing crap that nobody reads" erode the humanities? Here are 5 weird tricks to tell you the answer.

Figure 1. It got your attention, didn't it?

This little number--"Why Professors Are Writing Crap That Nobody Reads"--was all over my Facebook feed recently, as it may have been all over yours.

Why?  Why does this stupid piece of clickbait provocation keep popping up every few months? I didn't link to it because you don't need to read the article; Google tells me that there are 13 million+ hits on the same exact subject.

Although I'm calling out this one because it's the most recent, it's a whole genre, and you could take your pick of reasons why they're written and published:

1. It requires absolutely no thought at all to write, since the conclusion is always the same: "Well, the main reason is job security." No kidding! Do tell me more, Captain Obvious. 
2. It's quick to do, because you can always pick up some random figures from a recent study to "prove" your points.
3.  Snark is the currency of the internet, and everyone wants to raise their social profile by getting a lot of hits.  It's easier to hurt something than to build it up. 
4.  It's basically an aggregator paragraph or two that popularizes someone else's research with a few sensational provocations--calling what professors write "crap," for example.

Yes, we'd like it if more people read our stuff. And yes, we ought to reach out to the general public, as I do, or try to, on my other blog, and as many of you on the blogroll already do. Yes, we shouldn't be enabling Elsevier and the rest to make the big bucks by profiting from our free labor as writers and editors. Finally: yes, it's true that we ought to give more weight to informative posts on social media like blogs or platforms like Vox, Medium, LitHub, and the late, lamented The Toast.

But there's an insidious side to all these calls to stop publishing for a scholarly audience and judge an essay's worth based primarily on its popularity. Here are the five weird tricks promised in every clickbait headline to tell you why, although I'll spare you the usual pointless slideshow festooned with ads to show you the list:

1. You can't judge the impact of an article by its immediate popularity. Did Vannevar Bush's classic "As We May Think" make as much of an impact in 1945 as it has since the development of the computer? Some pieces take a while to come into their own. How many ideas popular in their own time (cough*eugenics*cough) were popular and entirely destructive?

2. All research, and certainly humanities research, builds on previous work--standing on the shoulders of giants, I think they call it. The general public may think that an article mapping where speakers in England used "icicle" and where they used "isacle" is pointless, but maybe it tells later researchers where the Vikings landed, or something. I don't know, because I'm not a specialist in Old English, but that's exactly the point: I don't know, and neither do you, dismissive writers and casual readers on the web.

3. It plays into our current national value of being ignorant and proud of it. There are a lot of things I don't understand because I'm not trained in the field, but that doesn't mean that they are not worth attention. A civil society has to trust its members, and it ought to trust that people with expertise know something.

4. The people who read these essays are in a real position to harm funding for research--not just voters, but legislators, who like to wave things from the internet around during their speeches to prove that they're current with what the public is saying. Every time a state legislature moves to cut funding for higher ed, saying "why can't they teach 7 classes a day, 5 days a week?" this is the kind of article they cite.

5. People are hungry for real information, which is why we should share it, but not everything is going to make enough news to gain the kind of currency that these articles demand.  What's going to make a bigger splash on Google News--identifying the multiple authors of a manuscript or a cute walking molecule simulation?

When these articles appear on Facebook, I have held back from saying what I really think, in the name of being noncontentious. I think it's time to start being contentious.

Open access: you go first. No, YOU go first.

Note: Published as a distraction from the unrelentingly grim national news. For thoughtful reflections on those events, see the recent posts by Historiann and What Now.

At the Chronicle, Paul Basken reports that despite a faculty vote to encourage open access publication, "only about 25 percent of professors systemwide are putting their papers into a state-created repository that allows free outside access."

The title of the article is "The U. of California’s Open-Access Promise Hits a Snag: The Faculty."

Like everyone else, I love the idea of open access in theory, but I have questions.

Is it "the Faculty," though? Read between the lines and you'll see a few other lightly mentioned or unmentioned snags:

• "But publishers, predicted to be the primary obstacle, have proved surprisingly compliant: Only about 5 percent of publishers have made any attempt to ask faculty members to opt out, he said."  

Comment: "Asking faculty members to opt out" is not the same as a publisher giving his/her/its/their blessing to publishing on a university site before publication. Many publishers will allow only uncorrected proofs to be archived, not the final version of an article. Others allow only the manuscript, or "preprint."  What use is that to scholars? How do you cite this, since there would be no final page numbers? What's the point of preprints in this case?

• "Much of the open-access movement centers on efforts to persuade scientific journals to adopt revenue models that do not rely on subscription fees. A common alternative asks authors, or their institutions or funders, to pay a fee to cover the costs of reviewing, editing, and assembling their journals."

• Comment: For a humanities journal, that gold access "fee" that the essay so blithely skips over can be $3500 to $4000.  For ONE article.

• Would your university or department pay that? Mine would not.  

• Humanities grants would not pay for this, as the scientific ones do. 

• And what if one journal had a fee of $2500 and a more prestigious one had $4000? Wouldn't you feel pressured to publish where the fee is lower, even if the higher-ranked journal would accept your article? 

• And wouldn't this fee-for-review model encourage the kind of scammy "International Journal of Everything under the Sun" solicitations that clog my mailbox every morning?

• To get people to comply, "California has relied on automation, creating a computer system that looks for any article by a university faculty member. The system then sends an email to the author, offering a link that automatically puts the article into the state’s open-access repository. That approach has been key just to getting up to the 25-percent compliance rate, Mr. Kelty said."


• Comment: This is a good idea, full stop. I'd do this with articles I have already published, wouldn't you? 
• The push for open access is to create journals that will compete with regular $$$$ journals put out by Elsevier, etc., which have an unbeatable business model: pay the editors in nothing but prestige, the contributors ditto, and the reviewers not even prestige, since they're supposed to be anonymous, and rake in the profits. Cutting back on this business model is a worthy goal./b>
• Comment: Will publishing only in open access journals result in a tenurable record at Harvard or at your institution, or will a faculty member still need to publish in Science, Nature, PMLA, Novel, or whatever other top-level journals are out there? Once again, the most prestigious schools have to take the lead on this. Apparently people at UCLA, Berkeley, and the other California schools don't think that they can accumulate a tenurable record based on open access, and until they do, I doubt that others would follow suit, however worthy the goal. 




So, in short: it's not just about the faculty. It's about an entire academic system that is pushing the faculty to do things that are worthwhile but--surprise!--are not necessarily rewarded. 

For the research junkies among you: index cards

At The Junto: A Research Blog on Early American History, there is a post that is pure delight for everyone who loves to read about the research process. (Come on, I can't be the only one!)

Once I got to an archive, I created a new Word document for each collection I looked at. As I read, I transcribed the quotes I thought would be useful for me, making sure to note in bold when a volume changed over to the next volume. As I transcribed, if I came across a quote that immediately gave me something to say, I’d make a note to myself using all caps so that I could spot it easily when skimming a document. I should say that sometimes these notes were useful, and sometimes they were completely useless; at various points during the write-up stage I found myself vehemently crossing out my capitalized notes.

The author, raherrmann, then used to put these word documents into 3 x 5" formats and print them onto index cards, though how this happens exactly--does Avery make sheets of index cards? do you stack them up like photo paper?--isn't specified.

The end result is a stack of index cards that you can shuffle around, with page numbers to help you put the whole thing back together. Doesn't this sound orderly?

I've tried with index cards a few times just to see if it will help my writing process, but I am too impatient to type everything out in this way, although like raherrmann, I take copious notes and transcribe a lot at archives. I always go back to the tried and true.

To wit:

• books bristling with translucent colored tags or post-its piled high around me
• a nest of printed Word documents in front of me
• a yellow pad with "Don't forget to write this!" and a lot of handwritten things on it
•  more Word documents open on the computer.  

Each book has a special place, too, depending on how soon it's being used: side bookcase, bookcase above the desk, space ahead of me on the desk between keyboard and monitor, space to the left of me on the desk. It looks as though I've built myself a book fort and have drawn up the ladder behind me.

Evernote would be smarter, probably, but I can't get the hang of it. If it's in a file, even if it's an Evernote file, it's invisible to me. It doesn't help that I've never gotten it to read handwriting, as it's supposed to do, and that sometimes the things I think I've captured on the web are blank.  I know I'm doing something wrong, but it takes too much time to figure out.

Scrivener has helped immensely with making the whole manuscript in chapters visible at once, but if I put research in the research folders, I still forget about it. The research journal has helped, too, since I can search for terms and see what I thought about something.  750words.com lets you download all your daily writing as a text file, so that's searchable, too.

But wouldn't it be great to have all those thoughts in index cards ready to be put together?

What's your research/writing process?

Of newspapers, libraries, and H. L. Mencken

Tenured Radical has an interesting post up about her travails in getting the paper copy of The New York Times delivered early enough to read it before it ends up in the recycling bin. Hearing that the NYT is going to an online-only model in the future, she concludes with this: "Then I was struck by a brighter thought. At a certain point you have to stop running from a problem, and do the sensible thing: throw money at it. So off to the iPad store I go." She also writes about Jeffrey Hamburg and Anthony Grafton's article on saving the Warburg Library.

I've experienced some of what she's talking about-- (I used to subscribe to the Sunday NYT but had to give up because it usually arrived on Tuesday)--but the part about the Warburg Library was what caught my attention.

A visionary scholar, Warburg was obsessed with cultural exchanges of all kinds and in all periods, and tinkered throughout his life with new ways to frame and display visual images, in order to reveal their interconnected meanings across time and space. His unconventional tool for studying this shifting web of historical relationships was a picture atlas that remained in perpetual flux, and to which he gave the name Mnemosyne, or memory.

The library is in danger of having its special character changed and its stacks closed, not to mention the possibility of having parts of its collection sold, which would, of course, destroy the connections and interconnected meanings that were possible by seeing the materials in context. (Go read the article, which says this much better.)

Not everyone agrees, I know, but regular libraries foster those connections in a smaller way when you browse the stacks. There's a process, and I don't know what to call it, when you're gathering information on a topic and working with its concepts in the back of your mind. You browse through your own books, or journal articles, or the library stacks, and suddenly you're making more connections. Conferences have always helped with this, but in recent years, the online bookstores (amazon.com, Powells, and university press web sites) added to the process, as have Google Scholar, Google Books, and the online journal databases. It's not exactly research, because you're not "searching" so much as "informing" yourself in a casual way, and it's also not research because it's not in depth. You skim information; you don't take notes on it. But it's a useful and important process, because it feeds your mind with pieces of information that may not seem useful at first but may arise at a later state in the project. It's our own version of the picture atlas, maybe.

Why H.L. Mencken? Because Mencken believed in the value of books, and because Hamburg and Grafton quote him to good effect:

A center of European culture and a repository of the Western tradition that escaped Hitler and survived the Blitz may finally be destroyed by British bean counters. It is a picture, in the words of H.L. Mencken, “to bemuse the vulgar and to give the judicious grief.”

And because it's his birthday, of course!

Clearing the decks

It's the academic new year. Notorious Ph.D. has sent off her book manuscript, Bardiac now has a clean desk, Bittersweet Girl has cleaned her office and made discoveries, Dame Eleanor Hull has been excavating and throwing out old PMLA issues, Dr. Crazy is getting into the groove, Fretful Porpentine is outsmarting her smart classroom, Profgrrrrl is contemplating service and has a handy faculty retreat scoreboard, Lesboprof's planning orientation activities and contemplating being a full professor, Ink is feeling first-day stress, and Horace isn't feeling the usual excitement about the start of the new semester.

So it's time to buckle down here at Chez Undine, too. The MPF-Famous Author article has been sent, and I need to tear myself away from the curio cabinet of fascinating distractions (the Whatnot of Wasted Time) from which I procured that and get going on Major Project.

• The first step is saying no (as Historiann pointed out) to service requests. Others in my position are not showing up on campus, and they're not making excuses for it, either.
  
• Saying no includes some other service scholarship requests, including requests for book reviews and maybe some manuscript reviews. I have two new mantras for this: "I can buy the book. I can't buy the time that I spend reviewing it" is one. The second is "Would you rather be reviewing this manuscript for the press or getting your own sent out?"
  
• The second step is to stop clearing the decks literally (cleaning my desk) and to start doing this metaphorically, by getting to work on the project. When I clean, I break down the task into smaller pieces so that it seems manageable and I'm not overwhelmed. I need to do the same for the project.
• The third step is to stop thinking that this is an endless summer just because I'm not showing up at class with a syllabus in my hand on Monday at 8 a.m.

My desk is cleared, and so, in a manner of speaking, are my decks. Time to sail, I think.

Working as procrastination

It just hit me today that working on this essay about MPF is unfortunately a really stellar means of procrastination.

While I keep reading and looking things up, trying to find out obscure details of an obscure person's life, I keep catching sight of Major Project sitting in the corner.

I'm obsessing about whether MPF ate corn flakes or Cheerios, and in the meantime Major Project is waving at me.

"Helloooo--you there! Look over here! Remember me?"

I catch that set of books out of the corner of my eye, the way a dog looks sideways when it knows it's done something wrong. I can't answer back, because what could I say? "Sorry, but I'm trying to find out whether MPF would have met another equally obscure figure at a party on November 30 of that important year."

I guess there's only one way out of this dilemma: dialing the level of detail back a notch and going not around but through the essay on MPF. In the meantime, Major Project is going to have to wait, but she's looking kind of impatient to me.

Seek and hide

Still working on the puzzle. The published edition of the selected letters of Famous Author has one letter to MPF, but in keeping with some principle entirely unrelated to my convenience or that of other researchers, declines to give the collection name, let alone box or folder numbers, for that letter. The notes indicate only that the letter is in Well-Known Research Library.

Well-Known Research Library's finding aid for the collection on Famous Author has no record of the letter, or indeed of any letters or information relating to MPF under any of his names. WKRL has nothing on MPF in any collection, finding aid, or reference in the catalogue.

The letter's there, along with (probably) others to MPF, but is it really there if it can't be found? If a tree falls in the forest, and no one sees it fall--oh, never mind.

I guess it's time to write to WKRL, and I'm dreading it a little because the research librarians I've written to or had contact with in the past have primarily been of two types: fantastically helpful or eager to snub researchers. Most have been the former, but as someone wrote recently in a blog post about feeling as though she's finally arrived because famously snooty librarian deigned to answer a question for her, that's not a given.

Crowdsourcing in peer review

Michele's comment in response to the crowdsourcing post made me think again about Kathleen Fitzpatrick's post at Planned Obsolescence on "The Cost of Peer Review." The whole post is worthwhile, but here's the essence of it:

In that case, we’d be much better served, I believe, by eliminating pre-publication peer review. Perhaps the journal’s editorial staff reads everything quickly to be sure it’s in the most basic sense appropriate for the venue (i.e., written in the right language, about a subject in the field, not manifestly insane), but then everything that gets past that most minimal threshold gets made available to readers — and the readers then do the peer review, post-publication.

This is an attractive idea in some ways, but I can also see some problems with it.

Especially in the sciences, wouldn't there be a risk of factionalism--that is, supporters of the author giving the article a thumbs-up and those opposed to his or her theories a thumbs-down? I say "the sciences" because I understand that STEM disciplines really place a lot of weight on numbers of citations as well as grants as indicators of professional development.

Print publications have only so much space, a limitation that they've carried over to their (subscription) web versions. While this seems to be a bad thing at first--why limit yourself to 5 articles when the server can contain 100 for the same issue?--this could fall prey to the same consumer behavior that happens when people are confronted with too many choices. Recent research suggests that people given a huge number of choices are less likely to buy, say, a jar of jam than those given only 5 or so, because they're overwhelmed by the numbers. If you're confronted with a Table of Contents that's even 50 items long, are you more likely or less likely to read all the articles and vote on them?

Let's say that you've decided that you really want to find out about this subject and are going to read some of the articles; wouldn't the arrangement of the articles count? For example, would an essay by Amy Aardvark get read more than one by Zeb Zebra? Would people just go through looking for famous names? Or, if the ratings system made some articles rise to the top of the Table of Contents, wouldn't those lower in the pack get less attention? Would people be tempted to game the ratings system to get their article placed higher? In a perfect world this wouldn't happen, but at Amazon this happens a lot, apparently.

Here's another scenario: although the English Romantics aren't your field, you're teaching an entry-level introduction to literature class and you want to find out some of the best current ideas about Coleridge's "Christabel" for Wednesday's class. You go to a special issue on this subject and are confronted with 30-50 essays. You could read them all to decide, but you have to move on to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" on Friday, and life's too short. What do you do? How do you decide?

In keeping with the need for numbers in "crowdsourcing," what about if you're in a small field where only about a dozen of you are really expert enough in the field to judge, but maybe the field is hot or trendy enough (or the author or subject popular enough) to attract a lot of readers/voters who don't know the field as well?

These are just questions. I don't have any answers.

The plot thickens

Thinking about the "failure" hypothesis for MPF, here's what I come up with:

Hypothesis 1: "Failure"--does that mean simply failure to become as famous as Famous Author? Problem: Like most writers, Famous Author had a lot of friends who hadn't become famous or indeed ever left his home town, but he used the concept of failure primarily for this one. Is it just that MPF didn't live up to Famous Author's expectations? Other references speak of MPF in glowing and affectionate terms.

Hypothesis 2: MPF died fairly young and on a significant national holiday. He was a military man, so did he maybe kill himself? Problem: See #3.

Hypothesis 3: A letter of condolence to MPF's widow speaks of MPF and his loved ones being "prepared" for his death and his dying in peace (so much for #2). It also speaks of remembering the good parts about MPF and his life. Now, this could mean that he had an illness (TB, cancer, etc.) that led to some kind of physical deterioration. It could also mean something like alcoholism, which could help account for an early (and expected) death. Problem: MPF, as a public figure, apparently gave eloquent speeches, although I haven't found any yet. (That'll have to wait for the microfilm to arrive.) Of course, all the stuff about "peace" could simply be standard condolence rhetoric.

What's interesting about this, to me at least, is the way in which it affects my reading of the letters. I read a sentence and think, "Is that genuine praise of MPF or the praise of pity?" It's like reading the letters and a negative of the letters in which everything could have two meanings.

I'll have to receive more documents before I can unravel this.

The Puzzle Factor

Lately I've been trying to find out more about a minor public figure's relationship with a major author.

Even Major Author spells MPF's name in various ways, and since it's a common name, it's not easy to distinguish MPF's information from that of others. Sure, Scott Fitzgerald always misspelled his friend's name as "Hemmingway," but we all knew who he was talking about. Think "Smith" and "Smithe" for the names, along with various spellings of the (common) first and middle names (like "John" and "Jon"), and then project that out into looking at census records.

Score! Obscure publication from a far-away state with information on MPF is actually in our library.

Double-score! An out-of-print regional history has a reference to MPF that links him/her to major author. I love you, Google Books.

Helpful transcriber, I appreciate the efforts you made, but in looking at the originals, I can see errors in the transcriptions. I guess that's why we always want to look at the manuscripts ourselves.

Definitive Biographer of major author devotes only one passing reference to MPF and then only to quote Famous Author as calling him/her a failure. All the documents I'm seeing show a pattern of success--not earth-shattering fame, but a respectable life. Why is MPF called a failure?

Now I'm off to the library to pick up more books to keep trying to solve these mysteries. Maybe this is why I don't read murder mysteries. The puzzle factor in this kind of research is enough to keep me going for days.

Lessons from the archive III: monkish life

When I told people I'd be coming to Research City, they said things like, "I live right near there! Let's get together" or "I want to take you out to lunch."

But I didn't contact them, partly because of basic inertia, partly because I didn't want to take hours out of research time (how selfish is that?), and partly because I didn't want to disturb this whole monkish life thing that is working in the archives.

There's a simplicity to this trip, after all the travel planning (which I hate) and arranging that goes into it. It's a combination of knowing what you're going to do and not knowing what you're going to find.

Knowing what you're going to do: Every day I get up, make the bed, go to the archive, work, eat something that's easy to find, read, and get some sleep. Except for a nightly phone call to my family, about all I say every day is "Yes, I'm finished with this box; can I have the next one?" and, at lunch, "Do you have iced tea?" I'm not here to fight with the phone company, or pay bills, or cook, teach, or do anything except work: read and think. (And write--I finished a long-promised and long-delayed article I had started and sent it off while I was here.)

Not knowing what you're going to find: I didn't find any smoking guns, anything that would tie together an entire line of reasoning, as I had done in a previous trip here. But reading through the materials was a kind of revelation, in that it made me see connections that I hadn't seen before, and that's a really good thing. I found enough to make me want to come back and live the monkish life a little more. It's not a contemplative life in a religious sense, but it's a contemplative life in an academic sense, and that's fine with me.

Conversations with colleagues on research practices, (or advice to the gradlorn, part 2)

Among the most compelling kinds of blogposts I read are those in which people talk about their research and their research methods; those are like chocolate to me, and there is no higher praise. A lot of bloggers have written about their research practices, including good recent posts by Dr. Crazy, Tenured Radical, Flavia, Dr. Virago, Mel, and Professor Zero.

My IRL colleagues talked about similar methods when we talked a couple of weeks ago.

Both mentioned that they used freewriting and other methods to get started and that ideas had to be worked out over weeks, not written up in a mad dash a la the old days in grad school. (This is the "advice to the gradlorn" part of the post.)

One said that she often would write actual proposals based on various ideas she has, even if she hasn't seen a call for papers for that topic; in that way, she's ready if a call does come up. I'd never thought of doing this before, since usually the CFP and its promise (threat?) of a deadline spurs me to action rather than the other way around.

One also mentioned having some special program that allowed her to search her hard drive for materials related to her project. I mentioned using Google Desktop for a similar purpose, but it may be that her program is more specialized. I'm all about the free when it comes to software, so I probably will never know whether the special program does a better job.

We all agreed that reading and taking notes at the same time was disruptive; you read differently if you're stopping to write every few minutes. Of course, we were talking about reading primary texts; it's different, I think, if you're reading secondary sources.

A few of my own methods:

The Post-It note is my best friend; I should have bought stock in 3M years ago just based on my own use of it to mark passages that later get transcribed into a file for use. Sometimes, if I'm in the midst of writing, the passages just get used even without being transcribed. Usually, though, I try to prepare a file of notes as well as quotations as part of the preparation; if I'm working with a short story collection, I write summaries, too. I always think I'll remember the stories, character names, and so on, but if I get pulled away for a several months because of department business, teaching, or other projects, I'm always glad that I took the time to note the particulars.

Dr. Virago mentioned putting questions into her research preparation files, and I do that as well. ("Preparation file" is my term for it; what do you call those things that aren't yet a draft but are more than notes?) The preparation file usually looks like a mess, with some paragraphs that are more formal in tone, some running dialogues in which I argue with myself about the validity/relevance/originality/logical inferences of points that I'm writing about, and notes about "didn't so and so say this in X?"

About a research journal: I recently began to keep a record of words written for various kinds of tasks, including letters of recommendation, department service obligations, manuscript reviews, work on the main project, and so on. The idea behind this was to keep track of how much writing I'm doing is necessary but isn't going to keep my own work moving forward. It's been useful, but it's not a research journal.

I'm working my way into keeping one, though, and am looking for advice, so if you keep one:

Are these kept in a notebook or on a computer?
Do you write in it every day, and if so, do you make yourself write a set amount?
Do you go back to these and mine them for ideas, or does the mere fact of writing down the information help to spur on your writing?
Do you keep your research notes in these, too, or do you just write about the writing process itself? Or do you write about the ideas?

Thanks for any ideas.

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