9 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2023
    1. Rhetoric of encomium

      How do institutions form around notions of merit?

      Me: what about blurbs as evidence of implied social networks? Who blurbs whom? How are these invitations sent/received and by whom?

      diachronic: how blurbs evolve over time

      Signals, can blurbs predict: - the field of the work - gender - other

      Emergence or decrease of signals with respect to time

      Imitation of styles and choices. - how does this happen? contagion - I'm reminded of George Mathew Dutcher admonition:

      Imitation to be avoided. Avoid the mannerisms and personal peculiarities of method or style of well-known writers, such as Carlyle or Macaulay. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/ROR3VCDEEe2sZNOy4rwRgQ )

      Systematic studies of related words within corpora. (this idea should have a clever name) word2vec, word correlations, information theory

      How does praise work?

      metaphors within blurbs (eg: light, scintillating, brilliant, new lens, etc.)

  2. Apr 2022
  3. Oct 2021
  4. Aug 2021
  5. Feb 2017
    1. h were more lo her satisfaction to find her Project condemn'd as foolish and impertinent, than to find it receiv'd with some Approbation,

      It is better for a woman to receive scrutiny and criticism prompting publication denial, as opposed to being somewhat praised but still denied a chance at publication.

      Basically merit vs. sexism, and Astell argues that merit is far superior. I don't think very many would dispute that.

  6. Jun 2016
    1. No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission

      Fish, Stanley. 1988. “Guest Column: No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission.” PMLA 103 (5): 739–48. http://www.jstor.org/stable/462513.

      An interesting essay in the context I'm reading it (alongside Foucault's What is an author in preparation for a discussion of scientific authorship.

      Among the interesting things about it are the way it encapsulates a distinction between the humanities and sciences in method (though Fish doesn't see it and it comes back to bite him in the Sokol affair). What Frye thinks is important because he is an author-function in Foucault's terms, I.e. a discourse initiator to whom we return for new insight.

      Fish cites Peters and Ceci 1982 on peer review, and sides with those who argue that ethos should count in review of science as well.

      Also interesting for an illustration of how much the field changed, from new criticism in the 1970s (when the first draft was written) until "now" i.e. 1989 when political criticism is the norm.

    2. what the Waddington-Lewis example shows (among other things) is that merit, rather than being a quality that can be identified independently of professional or institutional conditions, is a product of those conditions; and, moreover, since those conditions are not stable but change con- tinually, the shape of what will be recognized as meritorious is always in the process of changing too. So that while it is true that as critics we write with the goal of living up to a standard (of worth, illumi- nation, etc.) it is a standard that had been made not in eternity by God or by Aristotle but in the profes- sion by the men and women who have preceded us; and in the act of trying to live up to it, we are also, and necessarily, refashioning

      merit is fashioned by communal practice

    3. one bothers to define it, except negatively as everything apart from the distractions of rank, affilia- tion, professional status, past achievements, ideological identification, sex, "or anything that might be known about the author"

      People are able to define merit by its absence... like excellence.

  7. Jan 2014
    1. In the course of your research or teaching, do you produce digital data that merits curation? 225 of 292 (77%) of respondents answered "yes" to this first question, which corresponds to 25% of the estimated population of 900 faculty and researchers who received the survey.

      For those who do not feel they have data that merits curation I would at least like to hear a description of the kinds of data they have and why they feel it does not need to be curated?

      For some people they may already be using well-curated data sets; on the other hand there are some people who feel their data may not be useful to anyone outside their own research group, so there is no need to curate the data for use by anyone else even though under some definition of "curation" there may be important unmet curation needs for internal-use only that may be visible only to grad students or researchers who work with the data hands-on daily.

      UPDATE: My question is essentially answered here: https://hypothes.is/a/xBpqzIGTRaGCSmc_GaCsrw