Blog Post #3: Dana

Like Jaime, I was most interested by the Phillips article, "Where is the value in publishing?," for pointing out the issue in differentiating between a variety of new publishing choices without the necessity for a publisher. Consequently, I saw the Phillips article working interchangeably with ideas in Dalton's "A System Destabilized" in this way: If publishing work is still the form for legitimizing your stake in the scholarly world, how does one reconcile that fact with the growth of the internet industry of self-publishing? The only argument I saw posed by both articles in favor of the "old" method of having a publisher, was for the sake of establishing credentials and reaching a mass audience, which "going viral" can also accomplish.

Academia is constantly chasing after technology and seeks to make itself work in, what I believe, is an exponentially impossible forum. By that I mean technology stops for no one and the line has to be drawn somewhere. We're hitting a point where super-saturation is burning us out instead of abetting our scholarship, and it's impossible to keep up. A practical, though slightly off-kilter representation of this movement-at-the-speed-of-light-woe, is the number of status complaints we read this past weekend regarding Facebook's newest layout change. And while neither of these articles fit well with my work in terms of my research, it does make me wonder about the future of scholarship.

Practical application wise, I found the screencasts available for Newman library the most beneficial to my personal work. Establishing lists of different databases (and tutorials in navigating said databases) is helpful in terms of whittling down the ways to come by credited, applicable scholarship.