Brainstorming the online peer review process
"Brainstorming" by Agripolare (Public Domain)
It’s not much of a surprise that I would be thinking more about the online peer review process we discussed last week, since that’s what I do many hours a week now. Again, whether or not it was wholly successful isn’t really the issue in my mind, but it’s that the folks at Shakespeare Quarterly and MediaCommons sought to innovate peer review and academic publishing. Like I mentioned last time, I’ve always been thinking about production and distribution when it came to imagining what digital media had to offer, and less about how scholarship and collegiality might also benefit. So the SQ experiment was definitely illuminating on that front.
What follows, then, are some things that could be brainstormed about the next time someone tries something like this, to build on what SQ and MediaCommons tried on this go-round:
Incorporating responses: One of the outcomes of the project was that there was so much feedback that authors found it took longer to process the comments, both in terms of time and page length. According to the journal’s editor David Schalkwyk in the piece that appeared in the Chronicle, editors and authors had to spend a good amount time keeping track of how the discussion of the articles went, which also led to more lengthy revisions. Think of it this way: Don’t you feel indebted to incorporate all the comments that people who’ve really taken the time to read your writing offer you? Well, multiply that by about 10 times, with the suggestions being public, so that there’s a record to check your changes against. Getting input is good, but there’s a limit to it, logistically for the editor and mentally for the writer.
More brainstorming below the fold…
Are Your Students Betting on You?
Did you think Rate My Professors was the only website you had to worry about when it comes to teaching college? Well, a new website is allowing college students to place bets on their own grades:
A website called Ultrinsic is taking wagers on grades from students at 36 colleges nationwide starting this month.
Just as Las Vegas sports books set odds on football games, Ultrinsic will pay you top dollar for A’s, a little less for the more likely outcome of a B average or better, and so on. You can also wager you’ll fail a class by buying what Ultrinsic calls “grade insurance.”
Since students can only bet on themselves and the site isn’t gambling in the sense that you’re betting on what others will do, Ultrinsic paints itself as a motivational tool. Ultrinsic’s home page text proclaims: “The right amount of cash should provide you with the needed motivation to pull all-nighters and stay awake during the lectures of your most boring professors.”
Via: huffingtonpost.com More after the jump! Image of the French gambling aristocracy from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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Great Employment Opportunity! #1: The ethnic lit catch-all
Now that we’re so close to the start of the academic job search season, I thought it would be good to begin a recurring series of posts highlighting the ridiculousness of job ads. Mind you, the new “Great Employment Opportunity!”–herein abbreviated as GEO!–is not meant to point out what are the plum positions, which, anyway, depend on the eye of the beholder. Rather, we’re gonna parse the rhetoric of job calls as best we can, though with the disclaimer that my track record on this front hasn’t been the greatest.
"Old Main, St. Olaf College" by Calebrw (Creative Commons license)
Our first example is a personal favorite of mine, the ethnic lit catch-all. Here’s the posting, courtesy of whoever posted the St. Olaf College position on the Academic Job Wiki:
“The Department of English seeks an individual with teaching and scholarly expertise in the area of twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature, with emphasis on post WWII multicultural literatures such as Latina/o, Native American, African American, Indian American, and Asian American literatures. Desirable secondary interests include film; transnational literature; and generic, cross-cultural, and cross-disciplinary approaches.”
So basically, this ad *could* appeal to pretty much anyone who works in 20th c./contemporary American literature, which is, like, half the job market. Indeed, the best thing about the ethnic lit catch-all is also the worst thing about it: anyone can apply. It can boost your spirits when a specific specialty has a dearth of openings in a given year, but that also means that the pool becomes insanely large.
The problem is that you might read the position as appealing to anyone, when, in fact, it might have a more specific target, but won’t commit to anything in the job ad. Here, I’d read into things and suggest that Latina/o takes priority and so on down the line to Asian American, because there’s no particular rhyme or reason as to why the different racial groups are listed the way they are. Of course, the vagueness of the ad also leaves it open for a strong candidate in any of those other ethnic lit fields to apply, so you might as well give it a shot. If you can work in multiple ethnic fields, your chances would probably tick up, too.
But even if the dept does want someone in a specific field, though won’t reveal it for whatever reason, it’s likely that whoever holds the winning ticket will be teaching in many of the fields vaguely alluded to, since the school (especially a smaller one with fewer faculty) obviously needs someone to fill those gaps. So in the end, I guess the job posting is accurate in what your teaching responsibilities will be, but only after the fact!
Post Academic is 6 months old!
We used to celebrate random milestones more often in the past, probably due to the immediate excitement of starting and maintaining the blog. We haven’t marked one in awhile, in part because we lost track of time and what counts as an accomplishment, but we are commemorating our first half-year as Post Academic! Not to toot our own horns, but we’ve achieved a lot of the goals we set out to meet when we started the blog and wrote up the statement of purpose, which we probably need to refresh now. Indeed, maybe the best way to judge whether or not we’ve done anything–at least for ourselves–is that our bios are now outdated.
"Six-ball rack" by SMcCandlish (Creative Commons license)
Rather than just point to our favorite posts to reminisce, let’s take a progress report to see if we’ve made any, you know, progress…
#1. Did we get jobs? YES, we did get jobs, as Arnold documented. Of course, Caroline did too, but she’s more circumspect and Arnold is a much harder case, really. Not sure if we’ve helped anyone else with concrete results or even could, per our statement of purpose, but we’ll take credit if anyone wants to give us any!
#2: Did we keep our minds and writing skills sharp? Another yes at least to us, though you, gentle reader, would be a better judge of that. One thing we’re definitely proud of is posting every single day during the last six months, often with multiple entries per day back when we started. Writing the blog has not only pushed us to write regularly, but it’s also imposed some much-needed discipline. Plus, we’re getting caught up with the social networking era, since we’ve been able to link up the blog with Twitter and Facebook, which we’ll try to keep expanding on, too.
#3. Did we get seek out audience participation and get much? Yes, we’ve gotten great feedback from our very smart and faithful readers! And that day WordPress touted Caroline’s post was most heartening because of all the wonderful responses we got in the comments thread. Still, we could do better on encouraging more audience participation than just running those fun little polls by putting out more calls for folks to contribute, although a lot of you have your own great blogs already. So if, say, anyone wants to be a guinea pig and ghost-write a diary-like series about her/his experiences on the upcoming academic job search, we’d love for you to get in touch with us.
#4. Did we piss anyone off? Not as many people as we think, but probably more than we know. We did get a testy retort from one of the subjects of a snarky post, but we might’ve deserved that. We probably don’t have the constitution to get into flame wars any more.
#5. Did we get academia out of our systems? Yes and not really. Caroline had gotten past the neuroses of academia long ago, which is why she’s able to write with more perspective and offer less baggage-laden observations. Arnold is still working on it, although maintaining a blog that gives iffy advice on how to approach diss writing and job rec gathering doesn’t really show much improvement, does it? But he really has gotten past a lot of the mental blocks in his way just six months and one day ago.
Thanks to everyone who’s read Post Academic! And here’s to another six months and hopefully more, if we can only get ourselves on the blogging equivalent of the tenure track…
Cover Letter Do’s
A few days ago, Gawker offered a potent example of what not to do in your cover letter. Now for a little constructive advice–how to tackle your cover letter. The key rule is to keep it short, so I’ll jump right in:
Match your skills to the job. If your skills and background don’t match the job, don’t send the letter unless you are confident that your skills are in the ballpark and you have a friend at the company.
Don’t get cute. A cover letter structure is basic. Let the reader know what position you want, where you saw the position and what you have to offer. Your life story and your passion are unnecessary. HR is not interested in your life story. In fact, HR is probably inserting your cover letter into scanner software that hunts for specific keywords that match the job description. Return to the importance of reading the job description above.
Suppress your emotions. Save dazzling them with your personality for the interview. Sob stories or rage about how you were laid off will not faze HR. They are looking for skills only, and in this economy everyone has been burned.
More after the jump! Photograph of a stentor (announcer) transmitting a program at the Budapest Telefon Hirmondó, which appeared in the “The Telephone Newspaper” by Thomas S. Denison, in the April, 1901 World’s Work magazine.” Image public domain from Wikimedia Commons.
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Academic publishing goes online–and mainstream?
So on the heels of finding the HuffPo College photo gallery/poll about academic publishers comes a well-circulated and oft-blogged-about story in the Monday’s New York Times about an online, open peer-review process experiment undertaken by Shakespeare Quarterly published by the Folger Shakespeare Library. To give credit where credit’s due, the Chronicle actually reported on what Shakespeare Quarterly (SQ) is doing last month, but you know it’s really big new when The Gray Lady reports on it. On the whole, we’ve been pushing for innovation in academic publishing on this blog, so this is a welcome development that bears observation.
"Folger Shakespeare Library" by AgnosticPreachersKid (Creative Commons license)
Here’s how the open, online peer reviewing apparently worked: Contributors to a special issue of SQ were given a choice to have their submissions assessed according to a standard blind review or have them posted online at MediaCommons and commented upon by a group of invited experts and “self-selected” readers who register to the site. From what I can gather, it looks like the online reviewers basically post comments on the submitted essays like you would add comment bubbles on MS-Word track changes. Guest editor Katherine Rowe of Bryn Mawr calculates that 41 reviewers–invited and party-crashers–posted 350 comments for the four article and three book reviews in the issue. Any commenter had to be registered, putting her/his good name and reputation behind the criticisms and/or suggestions.
More on the open peer review process below the fold…
Cover Letter Don’ts Courtesy of Gawker
Usually, Gawker’s salty snark is applied to celebrities and politicians, but this week it has been applied to garden-variety Hamsters who don’t know how to write a cover letter. An unfortunate Hamster looking for a job sent a cover letter to a company … which was promptly forwarded to Gawker.
Here’s an example:
DO: Explain that you’re a dedicated worker.
DON’T: “I don’t just think outside the box, I stand on top of it. I aim to appease my employer. If he/she isn’t satisfied with my work, I will sweat blood and tears until I get them the result that they are enamored with. If my employer wants me to be knowledgeable of a certain person, place or thing; I will research that particular subject until I know everything that Google, Lycos, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Encyclopedia Britannica has to say about them/it.”
This person is probably already embarrassed enough, so we’ll just glean a few lessons from this incident. First, keep your cover letters short so you can avoid embarrassing yourself. Second, hyperbole is a no-no, especially if you claim you can do the impossible, such as literally sweating blood and tears. If you can actually do that, HR will deem you a health hazard, and you won’t get the job.
More after the jump! These serious-looking individuals are reading a cover letter, and they might be on the verge of laughter if you don’t watch it. Engraving public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
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Decluttering the job application process: The spreadsheet
So it might seem bass-ackwards to start talking about the academic job application process by beginning with letters of rec, before you even know what positions you’re applying to. Really, it isn’t, though, because that’s the only step that depends on other people–well, unless you count the schools you applied to. But the “next” step should really be the first one–finding job openings and making a spreadsheet listing them in a way that’s easy to access and sort. If only schools would cooperate and, you know, start posting positions now!
"ExCel Exhibition Centre" by jasoncart (Public Domain)
(A quick aside before we get going: you might ask yourself why you would listen to the unsolicited advice of a post-academic who hasn’t gotten on the tenure-track, which is a good rejoinder on your part. Well, I’ll say that I did have good success getting convention interviews, though it was definitely a case of “quality”–however you define that–over quantity, since I never got double-digit invites at any MLA nor applied to that many jobs in a given year anyway. As for the next step hopefully coming at the beginning of 2011, you’re on your own–or we’ll try and find a sherpa who knows what s/he’s talking about when it comes to campus visits. Till then, you’re stuck with me.)
So back to the process: The first thing you need to do, obviously, is find where the jobs are, which has been easier said than done the past few years. In English, we’re still about three weeks away from the big unveiling of the MLA Job Information List–henceforth known as JIL–on September 16, a day we’ll commemorate for sure. But, for the time being, you can check the Academic Job Wiki for whatever has been posted–you might as well bookmark the wiki and get used to checking it, because it’s gonna be the equivalent of your browser homepage soon enough. The Chronicle online want ads, H-Net.org’s job site, and university HR sites (if you know what you’re looking for) have some early job postings in a variety of fields.
More about getting started with the process below the fold…
The first and only time anyone ranked academic publishers
A few days ago, Huffington Post College did up one of their snazzy photo gallery polls for — get this — the best academic publishers! You’d think that HuffPo College was trying to find its own U.S. News Top Colleges and Grad Schools list or Princeton Review’s Most Drunken Schools list with its incessant bombardment of photo polls. HuffPo probably should’ve just stuck to the celebs-in-school slideshows, but I guess there’s only so many times you can point out that Hermione Granger is going to Brown–although I guess talking about James Franco going to Yale English is ever interesting and fascinating, right?
"Oxford University Press at D Ground Park, Faisalabad" by "Minhajian" (public domain)
Anyway, HuffPo College must be scraping the bottom of the marketability barrel by compiling the 17 “Most Innovative” academic presses. When you skim through the story, two obvious thoughts come to mind: There are actually 17 academic presses that are still publishing these days and how is one of the top academic presses NOT Duke UP, which, for my money, comes out with the most interesting and best looking academicky books. When you include 17 U Presses on the list, you’ll obviously get (most of) the best and most obvious picks like UC Press, U Minnesota Press, NYU Press. But others are big name picks that aren’t exactly cutting edge both in terms of selection and design; I’m thinking of one of the industry’s standard bearers, Oxford UP, while Yale and Chicago have never really done it for me personally. And then there are the smaller UP’s that I never knew existed, like Kansas and Colorado.
Maybe Duke UP boycotted the rankings out of some kind of moral stand, like how Stanford sat out of the US News ratings and, coincidence or not, subsequently dropped in the poll. Oh yeah, maybe MIT Press sat out the rankings too, since it definitely covers very timely techie-fuzzy topics and its books look really awesome. Our new home team–the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press–didn’t chart either, but wait ’til next year when our online offerings are up-and-running!
What’s next, the HuffPo College list of best esoteric journal titles? Maybe we can beat them to the punch on that one, and make it Post Academic’s trademark rankings dealie.
