As editors we should be aware of the dichotomy between our-own-stating of our-own-descriptions and our quoting of descriptions of others already published.
If Professfor Hausfleish says in "Journal of Jane Austen Studies" that "Jane Austen's portrayal of life in the English countryside is without any relevant basis." that is quite different from *me* paraphrasing my own understanding of Jane Austen with the reality of English living.
Our own interpretations, while editing, should be as-much-as-possible shelved. We, as expert editors, should know from where to pull those criticisms and interpretations, without creating them afresh with our own words vis-a-vis an appropos paraphrase of some one else's.
Will Johnson
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As editors we should be aware of the dichotomy between our-own-stating of our-own-descriptions and our quoting of descriptions of others already published.
If Professfor Hausfleish says in "Journal of Jane Austen Studies" that "Jane Austen's portrayal of life in the English countryside is without any relevant basis." that is quite different from *me* paraphrasing my own understanding of Jane Austen with the reality of English living.
Our own interpretations, while editing, should be as-much-as-possible shelved. We, as expert editors, should know from where to pull those criticisms and interpretations, without creating them afresh with our own words vis-a-vis an appropos paraphrase of some one else's.
Will Johnson
We still have an editorial duty to evaluate the reliablility of Professfor Hausfleish and the Journal of Jane Austen Studies. And, if they are not reliable, reject them as inappropriate sources. If they are just personal opinion, that's what they are, inappropriate sources.
Fred
On Dec 11, 2008, at 11:45 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
We still have an editorial duty to evaluate the reliablility of Professfor Hausfleish and the Journal of Jane Austen Studies. And, if they are not reliable, reject them as inappropriate sources. If they are just personal opinion, that's what they are, inappropriate sources.
I am uncomfortable with treating anything that has gone through a process of scholarly peer review as "just personal opinion." Period. Now, if it's an unreviewed journal that just publishes whatever it feels like, we run into more problems - then we have to start considering Professor Hausfleish on his own merits as a scholar, and look at how the piece compares to his other work.
But peer-reviewed scholarship is not personal opinion.
-Phil
On Dec 11, 2008, at 11:45 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
We still have an editorial duty to evaluate the reliablility of Professfor Hausfleish and the Journal of Jane Austen Studies. And, if they are not reliable, reject them as inappropriate sources. If they are just personal opinion, that's what they are, inappropriate sources.
I am uncomfortable with treating anything that has gone through a process of scholarly peer review as "just personal opinion." Period. Now, if it's an unreviewed journal that just publishes whatever it feels like, we run into more problems - then we have to start considering Professor Hausfleish on his own merits as a scholar, and look at how the piece compares to his other work.
But peer-reviewed scholarship is not personal opinion.
-Phil
What if the journal is a journal of opinion and what if Professor Hausfleish's reputation is built on opinion pieces?
Fred
On Dec 11, 2008, at 11:58 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
What if the journal is a journal of opinion and what if Professor Hausfleish's reputation is built on opinion pieces?
If the journal is a journal of opinion (which I am taking to mean not peer-reviewed), and Professor Hausfleish's work is based on such work, he will fail to get tenure at most Universities and quickly find himself out of a job, which generally brings to a close one's research career as well.
Which is to say, largely a non-issue. I mean, we should not deal heavily in un-peer reviewed work from scholars who have not built a reputation for peer-reviewed work. That's true.
But that is not, generally speaking, the bulk of what we'd be looking at if we were looking at journal articles.
However peer reviewed work is, by its nature, not simply opinion.
-Phil
On Dec 11, 2008, at 11:58 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
What if the journal is a journal of opinion and what if Professor Hausfleish's reputation is built on opinion pieces?
If the journal is a journal of opinion (which I am taking to mean not peer-reviewed), and Professor Hausfleish's work is based on such work, he will fail to get tenure at most Universities and quickly find himself out of a job, which generally brings to a close one's research career as well.
Which is to say, largely a non-issue. I mean, we should not deal heavily in un-peer reviewed work from scholars who have not built a reputation for peer-reviewed work. That's true.
But that is not, generally speaking, the bulk of what we'd be looking at if we were looking at journal articles.
However peer reviewed work is, by its nature, not simply opinion.
-Phil
No, I mean a journal of opinion which IS peer reviewed, and an authority whose literary criticism has passed such review. In other words, considered sound, or at least interesting, by a committee.
Fred
On Dec 12, 2008, at 10:27 AM, Fred Bauder wrote:
No, I mean a journal of opinion which IS peer reviewed, and an authority whose literary criticism has passed such review. In other words, considered sound, or at least interesting, by a committee.
This is such a complete misrepresentation of what peer reviewed academic journals are that I don't think there's really an answer for your question, Fred. The issue seems to be that you don't consider scholarship in the humanities to be legitimate scholarship, research, and knowledge. Which, ummm, I would hope that Wikipedia would not be so presumptuous.
-Phil
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Dec 12, 2008, at 10:27 AM, Fred Bauder wrote:
No, I mean a journal of opinion which IS peer reviewed, and an authority whose literary criticism has passed such review. In other words, considered sound, or at least interesting, by a committee.
This is such a complete misrepresentation of what peer reviewed academic journals are that I don't think there's really an answer for your question, Fred. The issue seems to be that you don't consider scholarship in the humanities to be legitimate scholarship, research, and knowledge. Which, ummm, I would hope that Wikipedia would not be so presumptuous.
I think you're overreacting to Fred here, Phil.
I don't think he's trying to diminish the role of humanities. Just acknowledge that some of it is less fact based than the hard sciences. Literary criticism, while well founded, is not as fact-based as Chemistry or Physics.
I know professional, academic literary critics focused on popular culture and science fiction, for example - there's at least one major annual conference of speculative fiction literary critics, whose papers are peer reviewed and do serious analysis. But those people know that they're based on intellectual constructs and opinion, not underlying physical truth.
I would happily accept any of their appropriate and topical work as commentary to put into a Wikipedia popular culture article. But neither they nor I would assert that it's as unambiguous as say a chemistry experiment.
On Dec 12, 2008, at 3:11 PM, George Herbert wrote:
I don't think he's trying to diminish the role of humanities. Just acknowledge that some of it is less fact based than the hard sciences. Literary criticism, while well founded, is not as fact-based as Chemistry or Physics.
Well, I wouldn't say it's not as fact-based. I think that's an over- simplification of the issue, in that it suggests that there is no normative force to literary criticism. There is.
I know professional, academic literary critics focused on popular culture and science fiction, for example - there's at least one major annual conference of speculative fiction literary critics, whose papers are peer reviewed and do serious analysis. But those people know that they're based on intellectual constructs and opinion, not underlying physical truth.
Sure. I am one of those academic literary critics. But I don't think that "intellectual constructs and opinion" quite captures what's going on there. I know of no literary critics who do not firmly believe that their views are correct, and who do not base this on the marshaling of evidence rather than on some blind religious faith. I think it is more accurate to say that, in literary studies, there is the practical expectation of disagreement, and an acceptance of the virtue of argument and debate as a mode of discourse.
I would happily accept any of their appropriate and topical work as commentary to put into a Wikipedia popular culture article. But neither they nor I would assert that it's as unambiguous as say a chemistry experiment.
I certainly wouldn't say it's as unambiguous as a chemistry experiment. But that is more often because of the fact of disagreement than anything else. There is a wider variety of perspectives out of the humanities than there is out of chemistry. But that is not equivalent to research in the humanities being opinions.
I mean, I suppose it's a problem if you look to academic research to provide absolute and irrefutable knowledge. But that's a pretty weird way to approach NPOV.
-Phil
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 12:28 PM, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Dec 12, 2008, at 3:11 PM, George Herbert wrote:
I don't think he's trying to diminish the role of humanities. Just acknowledge that some of it is less fact based than the hard sciences. Literary criticism, while well founded, is not as fact-based as Chemistry or Physics.
Well, I wouldn't say it's not as fact-based. I think that's an over- simplification of the issue, in that it suggests that there is no normative force to literary criticism. There is.
I know professional, academic literary critics focused on popular culture and science fiction, for example - there's at least one major annual conference of speculative fiction literary critics, whose papers are peer reviewed and do serious analysis. But those people know that they're based on intellectual constructs and opinion, not underlying physical truth.
Sure. I am one of those academic literary critics. But I don't think that "intellectual constructs and opinion" quite captures what's going on there. I know of no literary critics who do not firmly believe that their views are correct, and who do not base this on the marshaling of evidence rather than on some blind religious faith. I think it is more accurate to say that, in literary studies, there is the practical expectation of disagreement, and an acceptance of the virtue of argument and debate as a mode of discourse.
I would happily accept any of their appropriate and topical work as commentary to put into a Wikipedia popular culture article. But neither they nor I would assert that it's as unambiguous as say a chemistry experiment.
I certainly wouldn't say it's as unambiguous as a chemistry experiment. But that is more often because of the fact of disagreement than anything else. There is a wider variety of perspectives out of the humanities than there is out of chemistry. But that is not equivalent to research in the humanities being opinions.
I mean, I suppose it's a problem if you look to academic research to provide absolute and irrefutable knowledge. But that's a pretty weird way to approach NPOV.
I wouldn't expect even hard sciences research to produce absolute irrefutable knowledge - the acknowledgement that data can be wrong, theories can be wrong, or can be approximations with as yet unknown boundaries of accuracy, is a fundamental part of serious physical science work. Just yesterday, I discovered some papers which showed that a major engineering theory in a field I seriously hobby in had a inaccurate underlying assumption and inaccurate predictions across a wide range of possible values of the input constants. Those formulas have been used throughout the industry in question for over 60 years, and nobody noticed the flaw until about 10 years ago. Even then, when it was published, the textbooks that came out in the next couple of years didn't include the correction.
The issue at hand is that the standards for the humanities and for hard sciences aren't the same - one can argue about the verbage used, what I said comes from the viewpoint of someone who tends to the physical sciences. But it's not denigrating the humanities to acknowledge that they're different approaches and standards. There are plenty of people in the pure humanities who take scholarship very seriously and are as rigorous with their work as any physical scientists are.
This doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't use humanities publications as references in Wikipedia. It does introduce a bit more confusion about what standards we use for sources and claims meeting the standard of "reliable". It's fairly unambiguous that a paper in say Physical Review Letters can be treated as credible (not correct, but credible/reliable), absent a solid disproof. Which of the literary criticism academics, publications, etc. can be so assumed to be accurate is more opaque to the outsider and harder to demonstrate / validate, I think.
That doesn't mean that we should reject them as a field, no. It just means that when there's a question, it's harder to tell.
I am willing to live with that and put the effort in if such a question comes in front of me, because I value that type of information even though I don't participate in creating it. Hopefully the community at large in Wikipedia can operate in a similar manner.
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:45 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
If they are just personal opinion, that's what they are, inappropriate sources.
If something being personal opinion is enough to reject a source then there is a great deal we need to be rejecting that we are not, such as a rather large chunk of the popular media, many blog citations, and pretty much everything else that no body has ever bothered to create a formal review process for... I'd support it, but I thought Wikipedia's standard was verifiability not truth.
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:45 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
If they are just personal opinion, that's what they are, inappropriate sources.
If something being personal opinion is enough to reject a source then there is a great deal we need to be rejecting that we are not, such as a rather large chunk of the popular media, many blog citations, and pretty much everything else that no body has ever bothered to create a formal review process for... I'd support it, but I thought Wikipedia's standard was verifiability not truth.
Easy to verify that someone has an opinion. A little harder to verify whether the opinion is well founded. Is a scholarly opinion expressed in an academic journal of literary criticism different in essense from an opinion expressed in a New York Times editorial? Both opinions are the product of accomplished and experienced professionals.
Fred
2008/12/12 Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net:
Easy to verify that someone has an opinion. A little harder to verify whether the opinion is well founded. Is a scholarly opinion expressed in an academic journal of literary criticism different in essense from an opinion expressed in a New York Times editorial? Both opinions are the product of accomplished and experienced professionals.
Notable critical and reviewer opinions are generally considered relevant to cultural topics.
Then we get back to the problem that all this requires editorial judgement ...
- d.