Comments on: Scholarly Publishing

By: Neil

Neil — Sat, 27 Sep 2003 00:32:00 +0000

Analytic philosophy is not typical of the humanities, and one of the ways in which this is clear is the importance of the journal article. Part of the reason is that AP has a set of tools and relatively well individuated problems to apply them to. We agree on methodology and on what counts as a good argument. In the (rest of the)humanities, including continental philosophy, things are quite different. There are no ‘problems’ in our sense – so a lot of the work goes into laying out the terrain, developing an approach, defending a methodology, rather than attacking the problem. Result: books, not journal articles.

By: Chun the Unavoidable

Chun the Unavoidable — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 21:10:56 +0000

Call me a traditionalist, but I’ve always believed that it’s important to actually read books. Read them all the way through, even. If your book doesn’t need to be read this way, it’s not really a book. Obviously, edited collections, unrelated articles, etc. do not fall into this category.

I’m proud of having read nearly every one of Fodor’s books, though I’m sure I could have gotten the gist from articles. And surely not one word could be cut from any volume of literary theory you’d happen to name.

Also, Jordan Ellenberg, I collect snarky outsider MLA accounts, and yours is one of my favorites, mostly because of the mild disbelief you expressed at learning that a woman with a Southern accent could be tenured somewhere.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 20:12:20 +0000

Is it possible that the kinds of arguments that historians and literary critics make generally require hundreds of pages to accomplish something serious? J. Ellenberg, that’s what I’d guess. I don’t know much about scholarly history and literary criticism, but it seems plausible that, in order to present an argument, a historian or literary critic might have to present a lot of facts—what happened when, what goes on in a book*—that no one has ever presented before. In math and philosophy, the background is more likely to be stuff that you can find in other articles. So if I want to write about Kaplan’s theory of Demonstratives, I just direct anyone who wants the background to read Kaplan’s long article. If Jim Dixon wants to write about the importance of some developments in Italian shipbuilding, 1484-1593, he’s first got to explain what those developments were. *This may or may not display astonishing naivete about what literary critics do these days.

By: Stentor

Stentor — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 18:04:12 +0000

Geography has also shifted toward an article-heavy publishing expectation. Tenure-wise, it’s more important (and harder) to get an article in the Annals of the AAG than to publish a book. And “publishing a book” usually consists more of wrangling various people into writing chapters then editing them and doing an introduction, and less of writing a 300-page monograph.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 16:43:32 +0000

Chun, I agree it’s horrible trying to read that much on a computer screen. Maybe screens will get better and reduce that problem, maybe not. But unless you need to closely read the whole book, you can always print out the pages/chapters you need and closely read them in print, while skimming the other chapters on the screen. Most times I get books now I’m only interested in a relatively short section. The ones I need to read in full are rare enough that I probably could get them bound without much difficulty. If the books in question are being widely read cover to cover, I agree this won’t work.

By: J. Ellenberg

J. Ellenberg — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 16:19:18 +0000

Mathematics is another field in which books aren’t relevant; most junior faculty members are well advised not to write books, as they take a great deal of time away from journal articles, which are what get you promotion. Is it possible that the kinds of arguments that historians and literary critics make generally require hundreds of pages to accomplish something serious? This happens in math sometimes too; in that case, you publish a monograph in the “Memoirs of the AMS” or Springer’s “Lecture notes in mathematics”—these are printed from camera-ready copy and are surely cheaper to produce than the scholarly books I see in humanities, which look as good as mass-market books. And there’s still a barrier to entry, though not as high as those in the better journals.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 08:33:20 +0000

If selection for The Philosopher’s Annual is a criterion for the prestige of a journal, I’d just like to mention – opportunistically – that a paper from Imprints (which I co-founded and used to edit) was included in vol 21. Namely, Christopher Woodard’s, “Egalitarianism and Desert”.

By: Chun the Unavoidable

Chun the Unavoidable — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 08:17:48 +0000

I don’t want to get all Sven Birkerts up in here, but we also have to consider the torture of trying to read a book-length manuscript on a computer screen. You can always take a large pdf to a copy shop and have them print and bind it, I suppose, but that’s no way to live.