SAMPLE REALITY · On Hacking and Unpacking My (Zotero) Library - 0 views
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We’ve all had that experience of reading a journal article or — damn it! — a mother effing blog in which the author tackles clearly, succinctly and without pause some deep research concern that we’ve been pondering for years, waiting for it to blossom into a Beautiful Idea in our writing before going public with it. And POOF! somebody else says it first, and says it better. Keeping our sources private is the talisman against such deadly blows to our research, akin to some superstitious taboo against revealing first names. We academics are true believers in occult knowledge. To put it in the starkest terms possible: before I published my library I was concerned that someone might take a look at my sources and somehow reverse engineer my research. Let’s face it, I’m an English professor. It’s not as if I’m working on the Manhattan Project. Are we in the humanities really that ridiculous and self-important? Let’s face it, I’m an English professor. It’s not as if I’m working on the Manhattan Project. My teaching and research adds only infinitesimally incrementally to the storehouse of human knowledge.
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I don’t mean to belittle what scholars in the humanities do à la Mark Bauerlein. On the contrary, I think that what we do — striving to understand human experience in a chaotic world — is so crucial that we need to share what we learn, every step along the way. Only then do all the lonely hours we spend tracing sources, reading, and writing make sense.
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"We've all had that experience of reading a journal article or - damn it! - a mother effing blog in which the author tackles clearly, succinctly and without pause some deep research concern that we've been pondering for years, waiting for it to blossom into a Beautiful Idea in our writing before going public with it. And POOF! somebody else says it first, and says it better. Keeping our sources private is the talisman against such deadly blows to our research, akin to some superstitious taboo against revealing first names. We academics are true believers in occult knowledge. To put it in the starkest terms possible: before I published my library I was concerned that someone might take a look at my sources and somehow reverse engineer my research. Let's face it, I'm an English professor. It's not as if I'm working on the Manhattan Project. Are we in the humanities really that ridiculous and self-important? Let's face it, I'm an English professor. It's not as if I'm working on the Manhattan Project. My teaching and research adds only infinitesimally incrementally to the storehouse of human knowledge."