Vote for your favorite academic haikus

by Eszter Hargittai on February 24, 2007

Jim got such great response to his academic haiku contest that he decided to categorize the submissions by field. You are requested to cast your vote in the following categories:

I’m surprised by some of the classifications, but I’m sure it wasn’t easy with some of those submissions. Why my paper that was published in Social Science Quartery was not classified as social science is beyond me, but perhaps Jim needed some excuse to create a fourth category to make things manageable and thus put some entries in the the fourth interdisciplinary tech/computer/Internet-related, but otherwise unrelated group. Even in the realm of academic haikus my work lands in a heap of confusion, the story of my academic life.

In any case, this was a really fun exercise and I thank Jim for inspiring so many of us to think about our work in 17 syllables. If you haven’t done it yet, I recommend playing with the concept even if you are too late to enter this contest. Go read the submissions and vote to get inspired.

{ 2 comments }

1

Jim 02.24.07 at 7:07 pm

Whoops, you’re right about your article, Eszter. Definitely belongs in the social science category. I was just flying through a text file of all the submissions that included only poems and titles (not the citation) and seeing something about the Internet I just bundled it with others. The other categories were also just slapped together without much thought.

On the plus side, you’re facing far less competition because the tech/computer/Internet category has the fewest entries! :)

2

Jacob Christensen 02.24.07 at 8:20 pm

A very fascinating competition. I’ve been in charge of the MA thesis course in my department for some time and at the introduction I usually tell the students that if they can compress their argument into a haiku, so much the better.

The reason is of cause that students always ask How many pages do we have to write? (and always think more pages = better grade) and I always have to say that arguments, not pages count in grading.

Well, now the joke has come back to haunt me…it can be done.

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