The Scholar’s Space

FIRST MONDAY is an interesting animal. I guess you could call it a web zine. For a while now, a long while measured in Internet/web reckoning, First Monday has been producing some excellent articles on the future of scholarship, libraries, learned communication and the like, just what this blog is about.  In the August edition, Paul Duguid from UC Berkeley has some thoughts on his examination of  the Google Books project, and I think it’s important for library types to be familiar with his remarks and conclusions.  He uses Sterne’s Tristam Shandy as his test vehicle and found a rather large number of illegible pages and other poor practices. And, he thinks maybe Google is just the teeniest bit overconfident, cocky even, about the power of their searching tools.  There are some other matters covered, and the title itself is intriguing: Inheritance and Loss.   But, be warned. This is not an easy read. At least it wasn’t for me. These ole peepers can’t stay with screen reading too long. So make yourselves comfortable, or do it in bits.  It’s worth it.

  Duguid, Paul. Inheritance and loss? A brief survey of Google Books. First Monday, 12(8). August 2007. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/duguid/index.html

Our contributor colleague, Alex Bienkowski, has an interesting post at LibraryLink » Reforming the Scientific Paper. He’s suggesting that, at a minimum, scientific papers could be improved, ahem, we could improve our scientific papers, by banishing the passive voice. Hear, hear. I’ve been struggling with this since becoming a lawyer, where everything I encountered was passive. But at least as a practicing attorney, I was free to try to learn to write well and make my writing more interesting and readable.

My mentor was John Trimble, a neighbor and faculty member at University of Texas at Austin. I don’t think he’s managed yet to get my favorite of his books, Editing Your Own Prose, into print, but I cherish my spiral-bound copy of his notes that he said would one day make it into print. Maybe some day. But, back to this story.

The language of the law has nothing on the language of the scholarly paper. Not only must we endure passive voice (for starters) in others’ papers, we are actively discouraged from writing more invitingly ourselves. Alex suggests we can individually take a stand on this issue, and I concur. John Trimble’s notes included this admonition: “make your readers want to turn the page!” The author was talking about writing history, but I applied it to copyright (though at the first suggestion that it *could* apply to copyright, I laughed out loud), and I believe you can apply it to anything meant to be read.

In fact, the very existence of the more relaxed discussions that take place on blogs, listserves, and other interactive fora suggests that the days of the stilted unreadable paper may be numbered. I recently read (and blogged about) an article by Walt Crawford, Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, in which the author discussed the value of the blog to scholarly communication. He noted the fact that in a recent book he had written, about 80% of his citations were to blog entries. What an exciting time to be a part of the world of scholarly research!