Link of the week:
"This page is an electronic archive of images of people proving theorems while wearing sarongs." The Sarong Theorem Archive: quite possibly the definitive proof that no concept is too random, too specialized, or too implausible to have a web page devoted to it. Via Bitch Ph.D., who offers a sarong to the person who can come up with the best explanation.
First of all, hello to everyone who’s read parts 1 and 2 of this set of posts, and I’m awfully pleased to have been in the latest Carnival of the Infosciences. (Thanks for the nomination, Tangognat!) If you’re just tuning in, I’ve been thinking out loud about why it’s so tricky to decide what parts of academic humanities research are difficult because that’s the nature of the beast, and what parts are difficult because of how the pathways to the information are set up.
More on that in later posts. Right now I want to talk about academic culture and the effects it has on whether researchers (undergraduate, graduate, or faculty) even approach librarians in the first place. I’m going to generalize and be first-person and unscientific — which is part of what blogs are for, to my mind; if I turn this into an article, that’ll be the place to do an extensive literature review. For now, it’s a hunch. Thoughts about whether the hunch is on-target are welcome.
When I’m wearing my reference librarian hat, I help a fair number of undergraduates hunt down sources for term papers and similar assignments. Some of them are already armed with a suggested bibliography and just need to find the articles; some have a topic and need to know where to start looking; some approach the desk looking mildly sheepish (or mildly panicked) and admit that they’ve never done this before. But many seem to have been encouraged to ask for help; their professors recommend it, or they remember the library orientation they got as first-years.
I suspect that things are different for grad students, even the ones who’ve had a library orientation of their own. I suspect this because I remember what it was like to be a grad student, and I tended to assume I’d look stupid if I admitted ignorance. Grad students, unless they’re unusually well-adjusted, are often prone to “impostor syndrome“: they secretly think they’re the admissions committee’s mistake, and sooner or later they’ll be discovered and booted out of academia.* This post, which I found while Googling “impostor syndrome,” sums it up very well. If you ask for help, you reveal that you don’t know everything. I think this carries over to library interactions; it took me a while before I felt at ease asking the subject librarian for research advice, even though she was the friendliest person you could hope to meet.
So the student who fears looking stupid (because wait, shouldn’t I already know how to find this stuff myself?) misses out on the chance to learn more about the research process. And old habits die hard. If our hypothetical student doesn’t shake off the feeling of fraudulence, he or she could become the faculty member who’s reluctant to ask questions. When your professional persona is built on what you know, and how much more of it you know than anyone else, you may well worry that revealing ignorance is the same as admitting a professional failing.
I could go on and hypothesize that true education probably has a lot to do with the willingness to look stupid, and screw up and start over, and say “huh? I don’t get it.” But I had a really busy day today, and now I’m going to make an early night of it. A hot bath and this week’s New Yorker are calling my name. Good night…
* It’s not limited to academics, of course. It also happens to librarians. And people in lots of other professions as well.
Via Clancy at CultureCat: The University of Newcastle on Tyne is conducting a Musical Listening Test. You listen to pairs of short tunes and then indicate whether they’re exactly the same or different. I got 28 out of 30, and, like one of the commenters at Clancy’s, am now wondering if there’s a link between poetry-perception and music-perception. Except the test seems to measure how you recognize pitch more than rhythm. Actually, it reminds me of using using a collator: the differences between similar-but-not-identical tunes pop out in 3D. Which also makes me wonder about shape perception.
Query to the readers, out of curiosity: What’s it like when you recognize a tune? Fellow poetry people (and musical people), do you tend to think of poetry in musical terms and vice versa?
I have a job interview in two weeks! Very, very excited. I can’t reveal the details, but it’s for a job I’d be very happy to have, and I think it’s rather a good sign that the job talk topic coincides almost perfectly with a topic I’ve been mulling in my head for months.
I’m off to D.C. tomorrow to update my interview wardrobe and, if the shopping part of the day goes quickly enough, to see if I can spot some cherry blossoms and have tea at Teaism. And to reconnoiter the area around Kennedy Center so that my friend R. and I can better plot a potential operagoing trip later in the spring.
Back to the posts about the travails of research next week, if I can spare a moment.
Thinking back to more or less a year ago, I realize it’s become a pattern: in early spring, get on the waiting list for a Tuesday Evening Concert featuring a mezzo I don’t know as well as I could; luck out and get a great seat within bouquet-tossing distance of the performers; spend the evening listening raptly; blog about it afterwards. Last year it was Katarina Karnéus; this year it was Magdalena Kožená.
The program consisted of arias and ballet music by Rameau and Gluck, with some Jean-Féry Rebel for good measure; Les Violons du Roy were the orchestra. The gods of seat-assignment must have been smiling, because I was in the third row of seats almost directly in front of the stage. I love watching musicians’ faces as they play. It’s a sight I don’t get to see often enough, given how many concerts and operas I’ve seen from the upper reaches of the balcony.* By the end of the evening, I felt as if I knew everyone in the orchestra.
And then there was Magdalena Kožená. To see someone sing at that close range is startling. You’re not looking at a remote figure under the spotlights. You’re almost near enough to touch another person whose voice seems almost too big to really be issuing from her. You wonder where it all comes from, this braided liquid current of song that contracts to an almost-whisper at some moments and then expands to fill the whole auditorium. She made it all sound effortless. She excels at pathos; she began with Gluck’s Alceste and ended with Rameau’s doomed Phedre from Hippolyte et Aricie. In her first aria, insisting that dying to save Admetus would be no sacrifice next to life without him — “Non, ce n’est point un sacrifice! …. Pourrais-je vivre sans toi?” — she laid out Alceste’s grief and inner struggle and resignation so clearly that I had no need to follow the translation in my program. There was something moving even in the way she articulated the word “tombeau” in a short, sombre aria from Rameau’s Castor et Pollux. The whole evening was full of moments like that.
I also thoroughly enjoyed the orchestral parts of the program, especially the music from Dardanus, which had everyone leaning forward. Also Rebel’s Les Élémens, which started with an evocation of Chaos that sounded startlingly modern. In fact, if I have any complaint, it’s this: as one of the people near me said at intermission, the orchestra got to vary the mood of the evening quite a bit, while most of Magdalena’s arias were of the lamenting “Alas, cruel fate!” kind. But I was very glad to hear her in something closer to rage-aria mode halfway through the program. Her Clytemnestre (from Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide) showed that her clear, pure voice could conjure bolts of lightning as well as tears.
Sadly, there were no encores. I’m going to keep an eye out for her “French Arias” CD so I can hear her in something more recent for contrast.
* I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a novel whose first chapter takes up the points of view of a whole series of musicians at the same concert. Someday I may even write it, if I can ever decide where to go from there and how to avoid turning it into knockoff Virginia Woolf.
I’m going to hear Magdalena Kozená sing tomorrow night! Gluck, Rameau, Rebel, and some as-yet-unannounced Mozart. Huzzah for other people’s last-minute ticket cancellations! I think I’m going to be pretty close to the stage, too.
Cole Swensen’s poems are hard to describe: you never know where she’s going subjectwise, but the way she breaks up sentences and lines and the visual field of the page are a constant and consistent signature. I once read in a biography of Keats that the way Keats managed to sound like Milton when he wanted to be all Miltonic, or Pope when he was being Popean, was all in the placement of the caesura. Swensen’s broken and reassembled and half-parenthesized lines are like that caesura; they’re even more of a linkage than the thematic connections she likes to work with. And yet one is never bored. I’m partway through The Book of a Hundred Hands and keep wanting to quote it. So, here:
The Hand as Staircase
Or as sunlight on a stair
Follow the curve
across a brow. Later
a film still in which a Venetian blind, a streetlight outside,
and the face climbs,
one at a time, spiraling outward as the flight turnswe revert
to the brow. The shadows thrown by the streetlight
are not quite parallel, a city on a hill.And how happy we are here! On a corner
about to cross the street and enter the parkat the top of a hill, from which you see the tops of dozens of hills.
(Cole Swensen, The Book of a Hundred Hands, Part 3)
Some of these poems make me think of Georges de la Tour’s paintings of people by candlelight, with their hands silhouetted against the candle flame, like the Repentant Magdalen in the National Gallery.
Yipes, it’s late. Time for bed.
(This is the second part in a series of posts. Part 1 is below. And, just to disclaim clearly in advance: I’m talking specifically about humanities research here, where most of the evidence a researcher works with consists of documents of some kind or other. The sciences are a whole other ballgame.)
During the CLIR fellows’ seminar two summers ago, we talked about whether access to scholarly information is
unnecessarily complicated. And I said that I’d always considered the learning curve for research tools to be a part of the larger learning curve for academic research in general. I was thinking of my first year in grad school, when “oh no, I don’t know how to telnet to the English Short Title Catalog!” and “crap, everyone else has read Foucault already
and I haven’t!” didn’t seem all that far apart in my mind. In other words, anyone learning the research ropes for the first time is assimilating all kinds of unfamiliar practices, all of which seem equally esoteric to newbie eyes. The unfamiliar information-organization practices I encountered were just one more part of a brand-new skill set. I would eventually learn to assemble an annotated bibliography; properly cite early modern books with no page numbers; mine someone’s footnotes for further sources; decipher secretary hand; and understand the language of literary theory. Figuring out the ISI Arts & Humanities Citation Index was no more arcane than all that, so I tended to class library skills in the same larger category with everything else.
I don’t know if I’d do that anymore. There are some skills that are unquestionably part of the research-qua-research set, like knowing where information you need is indexed and how to interpret the index when you find it. And there are some skills that clearly apply to the tools the researcher uses rather than the ultimate end of the research process. Knowing what kinds of articles the MLA Bibliography does and doesn’t include? A research skill. Knowing the difference between what the *, ?, and ! characters will let you do in an MLAB search? A tool-using skill.
But even that example illustrates that there’s not a clear line between one type of skill and the other. After all, if the asterisk makes the crucial difference in your search for “tennyson*” by pointing you to articles on Tennysonianism in later Victorian poets,* which you wouldn’t have found otherwise, well, who’s to say that isn’t part of the researcher’s toolbox as well? Even though what you really care about is getting to the articles, the way you get to them is still part of the process — kind of like knowing how to operate a circular saw is part of knowing how to build a cabinet.
The thing is, though, that when graduate students are learning these skills, the latter type of example is the kind their professors may not bring up. I remember professors offering some advice on finding articles one one’s chosen topic, and we did have a brief library orientation (which, among other things, got us all acquainted with our subject librarian, who helped me a lot during later years). But for the most part, the tool-using skills were the ones I picked up on my own, by dint of a lot of experimentation and occasional queries at the reference desk.
So part of why research is hard has to do with the way scholars-in-training learn to research, which depends a lot on how individual graduate programs approach teaching them. If there isn’t much communication between a program and its library, there are going to be gaps in our hypothetical graduate student’s knowledge. Throw in an ever-changing and sometimes user-unfriendly tool set, a faculty that may or may not be aware of how the tool set has been changing, and a culture that prizes expert knowledge, and it’s no wonder newcomers to the process get lost.
To be continued…
* Example fabricated at random. Was there such a thing as “Tennysonianism”? I can’t remember. I’ll have to look it up.
I have an idea for colleges and universities looking to do a
quick-and-dirty website usability check: Recruit every newly hired
employee to provide feedback on their experience using your site. Hand them a questionnaire, convene them
in focus groups with food as a bribe for participation,* whatever — I bet you’ll garner a ton of suggestions for
making your site easier to use.
If you really want constructive
criticism, ask them to comment on your institution’s
Human Resources website. It may be a little disconcerting when your new
hires start saying things like "My former
job title wouldn’t fit in the tiny little box in the online form your
HR site insisted I fill out!" and "It took me five minutes to find the
listing for the job I wanted to apply for!" and "Where’s your information about living in the local area? I couldn’t find any", but it’ll certainly be instructive.
I’m in the middle of another job search, and by
this point I could probably write an entire book on Usability for Campus Websites. The jobs I’m applying for all look really good. So
do the institutions. But I’ll be a happy camper if I never have to deal
with another HR site with a one-size-fits-all online submission form or a clunkily complicated database of job listings.
I’m not pointing fingers at particular schools, I hasten to add. And I’m not complaining about going through the usual channels. But I bet a lot of newly hired people would be in a great position to point out exactly where they thought they’d find a specific piece of information but instead had to click futilely or pore over the site map. And it would be an inexpensive way to incorporate a little user-centered design for schools that couldn’t afford to hire a full-time usability person (or even a usability consultant). Seriously, why not?
[Footnote: More on the "why research is hard" series tomorrow. Tonight, I’ve just had a lovely dinner with these folks, and am now full of good food and wine and gelato, and I’m going to go mellow out for the rest of the evening.]
* I can nearly always be bribed with food, and I know I’m not the only one.
I hadn’t been to Jeannette’s blog, Moot Thoughts & Musings, for a while, so I didn’t catch this post on the research process when it first appeared, but it rang quite a few bells of recognition. Jeannette, who was writing a paper at the time, comments:
I can’t figure how to assess a database. I think that if I type in a
word any book or article that contains the word will come up, right? I
mean, it’s supposed to search everything, right? Well, not necessarily.
Oh. I’ve been venturing out and trying other databases, but these
endeavors aren’t very fruitful. I feel like I’m missing something.
I’ve so been there. That "I’m missing something" feeling Jeannette describes? Completely familiar from my own grad-student days. Now that I’m on the other side of the reference desk, I’m much more aware of the factors that make academic research hard to do. It’s gotten me thinking about which factors might be intrinsic to the research process and which have to do with the design of the tools we make available to researchers.
And because it would make an awfully long single post, I think I’ll break it down into a series on Why Research Is Hard. Off the top of my head and in no particular order, the factors are:
To take Jeannette’s post as an instance: she’s having trouble formulating search strategies, and blames herself for not being able to figure out the databases. But the problems she describes point to the confusing nature of article databases (some offer full-text searching, some don’t; how’s a user to know which is which?) as well as to the unfamiliarity of her paper topic.
Jeannette concludes:
Right now, my favorite place to look for stuff is Amazon, because it
gives you suggestions for other books and often you search inside the
book or search other books it cites or that cite it. Now if we could
just get the Amazon model to work for articles, too.
I’ve seen lots of posts in the biblioblogosphere about this very phenomenon, namely: why can’t we design our search tools to do the things that Amazon, Google, et al. do so readily, and that users have come to expect? Why don’t library catalogs offer "Did you mean…" options when a user misspells a search term, like Google does? How come every article database has its own special learning curve while commercial search sites make everything intuitive? And so on.
Next up: Rambling thoughts on what scholars do when they go hunting for information. A rant about the least user-friendly database I’ve ever seen. Even ramblier thoughts about why librarians and scholars should spend quality time talking to each other. Stay tuned.
It’s been snowing all morning, and even though it doesn’t really seem to be accumulating, I think I’ll stay in today enjoying the snow-day vibe. I’m listening to Studio 360 on the radio, and they’re talking about psychoanalysis by way of W. H. Auden’s "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," which I was very pleased to hear them read, if only in parts. (You can read the whole poem at the Academy of American Poets; here’s my favorite section:
He wasn’t clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
like a poetry lesson till sooner
or later it faltered at the line wherelong ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
how rich life had been and how silly,
and was life-forgiven and more humble,able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
a set mask of rectitude or an
embarrassing over-familiar gesture.
I also love the final lines: "Sad is Eros, builder of cities, / and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.")
Speaking of snow and the radio, several years ago I was with friends in New York right after Christmas, and we ended up catching most of a WNYC "Selected Shorts" broadcast of Conrad Aiken’s "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" while crawling through Manhattan traffic. After the story ended, the announcer came on and said that the reader was Leonard Nimoy. I can still hear him intoning "…the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow — but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep."
Now I’m going to make some lunch, catch the Met’s Traviata broadcast, and catch up on neglected housework. I hope all of you further north are safe, indoors, and well-stocked to weather the big nor’easter.
[Update a couple of hours later: Aargh! Verdi interruptus! "Technical difficulties" cut off the Met broadcast right at the end of Act 1, just as I was really getting into it. Back again for Act 2. Yay!]
