Tag: the ivory tower

Reference and electronic file management

If you’re an 21st cen­tury aca­d­e­mic like me, you col­lect a lot of ref­er­ences, bib­li­og­ra­phy and elec­tronic ver­sions of arti­cles and books. My hard drive has a hier­ar­chy of fold­ers for PDFs, and so forth, but it is hard to man­age them. I’m mul­ti­ply­ing fold­ers accord­ing to sub­ject, and that just doesn’t work very well.

There are two solu­tions to this prob­lem that I have dis­cov­ered so far: Zotero and Sci­Plore.

Zotero

Zotero is a browser plu­gin to Fire­Fox. This is a great advan­tage for brows­ing: find some­thing while surf­ing the web and a cou­ple of clicks later it is book­marked. You can add bib­li­o­graphic infor­ma­tion and anno­ta­tions to the doc­u­ment entry.

To sum­ma­rize the — to me — impor­tant features:

  • bib­li­og­ra­phy and cita­tion management
  • able to anno­tate entries
  • able to search entries
  • able to han­dle web documents
  • able to attach links to PDFs
  • han­dles Bib­TeX format

There are many other fea­tures, of course. See the Zotero web­site for fur­ther details.

Sci­Plore

Sci­plore is built on top of Free­Mind, a mindmap­ping pro­gram. It adds bib­li­o­graphic and cita­tion man­age­ment to FreeMind’s graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of ideas. One could describe it as a “graph­i­cal Zotero.”

I have not (yet) done a com­plete fea­ture com­par­i­son, but at first glance, the only thing Zotero can do that Sci­Plore can­not is to cap­ture web doc­u­ments and even cap­ture ref­er­ences from some kinds of web doc­u­ments. Both han­dle Bib­TeX and PDF links. Sci­Plore per­mits one to arrange the infor­ma­tion in a visual way; Zotero uses lists.

Con­clu­sion

I have only just dis­cov­ered Sci­Plore (check out the intro­duc­tory video on the web­site) whereas I’ve been using Zotero for more than a year now as a URL link man­ager. I have not — until now — felt the need to use Zotero’s bib­li­og­ra­phy man­age­ment fea­tures. I am very happy with Bib­Desk on the Mac and JabRef every­where else. The com­mon ele­ment among all three is Bib­TeX. If I hadn’t dis­cov­ered Sci­Plore to play with, I was plan­ning on using Zotero more exten­sively to han­dle my every expand­ing list of PDFs. I’m a firm believer in “the right tool for the right job.” Every soft­ware pack­age has its strengths and weak­nesses. I try to use a pro­gram for its strengths and aban­don it for a bet­ter tool when it is weak. The key to mak­ing this prac­tice work is to insist that my soft­ware store and manip­u­late data in stan­dard for­mats. In the case of bib­li­og­ra­phy man­agers, that for­mat is Bib­TeX.

We’ll see how these pro­grams will adjust to my workflow.

Exemplary Exegesis

As some­one who focuses on inter­pret­ing the Hebrew Bible, I face the prob­lem of “insuf­fi­cient data.” So much of the his­tory, cul­ture and lit­er­a­ture of the Ancient Near East has been lost, mak­ing the prob­lem of inter­pret­ing the ancient text very prob­lem­atic. The temp­ta­tion is to fill in the blanks to a greater degree than is sup­ported by hard, empir­i­cal data. Bible schol­ars for some rea­son hate to admit that they sim­ply don’t know and that we can’t know the answers to some ques­tions until and unless new evi­dence comes to light. So there is a lot of spec­u­la­tion and out­right fic­tion being writ­ten about the Hebrew Bible.

It is, then, a plea­sure to run across exam­ples of hon­est grap­pling with the data as it actu­ally exists. The most recent exem­plar are two related blog posts, here and the ear­lier Part 1 here, on the vexed ques­tion of the iden­tity of “Daniel” in Ezekiel 14:14 & 20. Does it refer to Ezekiel’s con­tem­po­rary whom we know from his epony­mous book, Daniel? Does it refer to the Canaan­ite leg­endary hero, dn’il, as nar­rated in the Ugaritic texts? Or per­haps to some­one whose exis­tence and biog­ra­phy has since been lost to us?

I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to peruse the details of the debate. What is exem­plary is that:

  • the extent and lim­its of the real-​​world evi­dence is described
  • the writer grap­ples with how far that evi­dence can be pushed
  • he refuses to go beyond what can be justified

The reader comes away with a clear under­stand­ing of the issues, the evi­dence, and the pos­si­ble con­clu­sions that may be drawn. Most of all, it’s hon­est. This is the way bib­li­cal schol­ar­ship (or any schol­ar­ship, really) should be done.

I’ve added this blog to the blog list at the bot­tom of the page (see Fur­ther Infor­ma­tion).

Peer review and the sacred cow

A recent arti­cle (“Wikipedia Age Chal­lenges Schol­ars’ Sacred Peer Review”) in the New York Times inves­ti­gates how schol­ars are start­ing to adjust to the Dig­i­tal Age by adjust­ing the notion of peer review. In a time when any­one can “pub­lish” any­thing on the Inter­net, the con­cept of peer review for aca­d­e­mic pub­lish­ing has come under severe pres­sure. Some crit­ics, cit­ing abuse, argue for aban­don­ing the idea. Oth­ers, men­tioned in this arti­cle, are exper­i­ment­ing with “cloud peer review.”

This makes sense to me as an aca­d­e­mic. Peer review can pro­vide valu­able feed­back, both in terms of val­i­dat­ing con­tent and in help­ing to improve the read­abil­ity of the text. On the other hand, review­ers often have the men­tal­ity of “keep­ing bad ideas out of print.” They ride their own ide­o­log­i­cal hobby horses. The Inter­net allows ideas to stand or fall into obscu­rity in the mar­ket­place of ideas. Slash­dot pio­neered (so far as I know) the idea of “mod­er­a­tion”: read­ers would rate com­ments on an arti­cle up or down. One could set fil­ters and read only the most highly rated com­ments out of the great flood. Granted, in spe­cial­ized dis­ci­plines (like mine) not everyone’s opin­ion is of equal value. So a peer review could have — as some jour­nals men­tioned in the arti­cle — a “core” of qual­i­fied spe­cial­ists. But this core could be very large, e.g., every­one who is a mem­ber of an aca­d­e­mic soci­ety of that dis­ci­pline. Based upon some rea­son­able cri­te­ria, some opin­ions would “weigh” more than oth­ers. Hav­ing an earned PhD in the field might add to one’s “weight,” and hav­ing pub­lished on the same topic as what one is review­ing might be another criterion.

As for me, I have never liked the elit­ist atmos­phere tra­di­tional peer review has engen­dered, nor have the ben­e­fits of the “anony­mous reviewer” out­weighed the dis­ad­van­tages of hav­ing “gate­keep­ers” guard­ing the entry of ideas into aca­d­e­mic con­ver­sa­tions with lit­tle or no account­abil­ity. I would rather deal with the dis­ad­van­tages of broader pub­lish­ing and try to fig­ure out ways to let the “cream rise to the top.”

The fun part of all this is that there is noth­ing that the Acad­eme can do about it. The Inter­net allows self-​​publishing and end runs around tra­di­tional peer review. How will the Acad­eme respond? Let the fol­lies commence!