Blog Post 2, Module 3: Jamie Rand

I don't have much experience with academic papers. I guess that sounds somewhat contradictory, but let's be honest: in undergrad, they were another hoop I had to jump through, an assignment to get done a few days before they were due; I'd spend seven or eight hours wired on caffeine putting something on the page and praying it had some accidental value. Then, of course, I came to the bibliography, where I was never too sure what the teacher wanted (MLA and APA and Chicago are just names to the lowly undergrad slacker), so I'd go online, and out of necessity, find a tool like EasyBib to do the formatting for me. Despite doing nothing but following the letter of the law and not the spirit, chances are I'd come back with an A or a B not because it was any good but because, somehow, most everyone else's papers were worse than mine, and mine, although garbage, looked great in comparison.

I guess that comes off as completely cynical, but it was my experience; like Michelle, I'm a creative writer, and so I always regarded academic papers as ancillary to my field. That being the case, I don't really have enough experience to answer for the first question in this assignment: What do you think is the future of peer review in the humanities? I can hazard a guess, mostly based on what I gleaned from the articles, but please don't consider it educated.

First: In the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Angus Phillips states, way down in the conclusion, "We must also recognize that scholarly communication is changing. The system is global and increasingly based around communities that use a variety of collaborative tools, from social networking to virtual worlds. The journal article may be just one form of output from research. Repositories are accepting a wider range of media, including audiovisual clips and images, alongside documents." I agree with this. I sound like the boss in Dilbert when I actually have to use this turn of phrase, but...the paradigm of peer review is shifting, much like everything else in the publishing and research industry. And, much like Wikipedia, I think the majority of us will go to non-peer-reviewed sites to find out the basics, maybe dip our toes into new knowledge, but when we want to verify the truth, we'll go to those old gatekeepers of knowledge, the journals.

I'm going to be a little pert here and answer the second question--How do you find out about important works in your field?--with a snide answer: The New York Times Bestseller List. Popular fiction is what I like to read and what I like to write. I'm not looking for the truth. In point of fact, I'm looking for a good story, so I'm actually looking for a perfect lie.

Finally: the invisible college. Am I a part of one? Kind of. But that's kind of an impressive term for what it really is: sitting around drinking coffee and eating paninis and looking at each other's work, being jealous of great turns of phrase, being modest when your friend likes the way you characterized a person or described a scene. College, invisible or not, seems to me to be about education and the bureaucracy and rubber-stamping that entails; writing and reading for fun is more about learning. I'm a fan of the second far more than the first.

And I could really go for a panini right now.