Author Archives: Wayne Bivens-Tatum

Collection Development as Fairness

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One of the questions I perennially consider is how to justify a large research library, especially in the humanities. It’s certainly not because I don’t think the humanities are important, but because they seldom have direct, practical applications and seldom lead to money-making, they don’t draw the attention that fields such as science or business do. Some fields draw attention because of their currency as well, but humanities collections have a long shelf-life. People are, after all, still reading Homer, Sophocles, Plato, and Aristotle for enjoyment and study, not to mention Shakespeare or Rabelais or Cervantes, or even Wordsworth or Eliot, George and T.S.

The most frequent argument I encounter is that collection development, like public service, must be devoted to the user. I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I’m sometimes tempted to say that collection development is a public service, if we understand the terms properly. Collection development should be devoted to the user, but the question then becomes, who is the user of the research library?

Most librarians have an easy answer to that question. The users are those people who come into your library, who currently need your services. In an academic library, it’s standard policy to collect materials needed to support the current curriculum, which usually makes everyone happy, unless the university starts up a new research program and the library has no materials to support it because they’ve never collected them.

However, I think this is an insufficient definition of the user of the research library. The user of the research library shouldn’t be confused with the current users. I think it was Edmund Burke who described society as a partnership between the living, the dead, and the yet unborn. This is also a good way to think of a research library. The living are certainly benefiting from collection decisions made by the dead, and we the living selectors owe it to the researchers yet unborn to collect not just for the moment, but as much as possible for all time.

I’ve been thinking of putting these thoughts into a coherent article to try to get another line on the vita, and I’m considering building my basic argument around John Rawls’ notion of “justice as fairness,” hence the title of this post – collection development as fairness. Rawls in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism laid out his argument. I just read his Justice as Fairness: a Restatement in prelude to teaching Rawls this semester, and that book is considerable shorter than the thousand or so pages of his major works, so if you’re interested in knowing more about Rawls, I’d suggest that as a start.

Rawls describes society as “a fair system of social cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal,” which seems a good definition to me. He then bases his concept of justice on two principles.

“Two Principles of Justice

(a) Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all; and

(b) Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle).”

Politically, these principles have sweeping applications, but in general I, at least, think they show a good start toward defining justice in a liberal society. But he doesn’t just stop with these principles. He goes on to discuss justice between generations with his “Principle of Just Savings”:

“Since society is to be a fair system of cooperations between generations over time, a principle governing savings is required…. The correct principle, then, is one the members of any generations (and so all generations) would adopt as the principle they would want preceding generations to have followed, no matter how far back in time.”

I have something like this in mind when I think of the research library, and of collection development as fairness. Adapted, the principles might read:

Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate research collection; the research collection is to be accessible to all; and that the research collection should be to the greatest benefit to the least advantaged researchers. According to the principle of just collecting, the least advantaged researchers (or users) would be those researchers who are not yet born, and thus have no say in what we collect, or rather don’t collect, now, and the impact this collection will have on them in the future. The user of the research library is also the user of the future decades hence. What we don’t collect now, they won’t be able to study.

No Textbooks

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It’s that time of the year when I begin to think about teaching again. I’m on vacation this week, and one of the things I have to do is revise my writing seminar syllabus for the upcoming semester to reflect the change from “Liberal / Conservative” to “Liberalism and Its Critics.” (Less conservatism and more communitarianism, republicanism, feminism, etc.)

It might interest some librarians to know just how much I rely on the library to supply my course texts. The answer is, almost completely, since I don’t require the students to purchase any outside texts. I know a lot of teachers still put together course packets, but I think these are unnecessary if your academic library supplies the right services.

My course has no book-length sources, because I like to pack as many different viewpoints into 12 weeks as I can (we have only 12 weeks of class for a semester), and a single book of political philosophy could take up half a semester, especially with freshman. We usually get through about 10-12 essays over the course of the semester, many of which can be found on JSTOR, which has a strong political philosophy collection. Anything not available on JSTOR or another of our many databases can be scanned and made available through our electronic reserves. Thus, all the primary readings are available electronically to the students at all times via Blackboard.

For the writing resources, I rely mostly upon websites: Silva Rhetoricae, Nuts & Bolts of College Writing, and Research and Documentation Online. The Purdue OWL is good as well, but I don’t use it. Most of the material I want I create or recreate in my own handouts, also available electronically. I have a whole set of handouts on classical rhetoric and writing techniques, some of which I’ve made myself, and some of which I’ve borrowed (with attribution) from others. A lot of the writing instruction is embedded in discussions of course assignments and student essays, anyway.

When I started teaching 15 years ago, none of this was available. The WWW was still pretty new, and if there was much content on it about academic writing, I didn’t know about it, because I’ve never been an early adopter. (I’m embarrassed to say when I first used email, but let’s just say I avoided it as long as possible.) Reserves consisted of paper in folders at one specific physical location that could be accessed by only one student at a time, unless one wanted to duplicate the material in multiple folders. Thus, course packets were the best choice for those who didn’t like commercially available textbooks (and I’ve never been particularly impressed with the general run of writing textbooks).

And now, with some work by the library supplemented by a few good websites, everything my students need is online and easily accessible. The students don’t have to pay anything or go anywhere to get the material. They also can’t complain that the textbooks are sold out or that they’ve lost their course packets. I have the ability through Blackboard to control the presentaton and organization of the materials and make sure they really are available. I can repackage the same materials for different course emphases with ease. This is just one minor example of the way emerging technology and a library’s commitment to academic services can significantly improve the life of both teachers and students.

Monopoly

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Yesterday I mentioned the conflict between libraries and commercial vendors. One wants to collect, organize, and disseminate information. The other wants to make money. (Or, at least they usually do. This morning brought me an email from Marquette Journals, saying that in January they will begin publishing eight completely open access communication journals). That conflict is one problem that research libraries may not survive. Another problem is journal monopoly.

Almost every journal is a monopoly. This is especially true of prominent journals. A few years ago I made a presentation to a group of Princeton faculty on the economics of scholarly communication, making the argument to a diverse group that rising science journal costs can make it more difficult for humanities junior professors to get tenure. (I tried to be inclusive.) I included a slide with this:

Journals are Not a Commodity

  • Can’t unsubscribe to Brain Research ($18K)
  • And substitute Brain ($611)
  • Or Mind ($135)
  • Commercial publishers keep consolidating
  • Libraries have to buy

The prices have probably gone up, but the general point is the same. Research libraries are trapped as long as certain high-priced journals are considered necessities. The best scholars usually publish in them, and larger universities have to buy them. The vendors know this. They know that without a scholarly publishing revolution many libraries are going to keep paying, no matter what the cost. I occasionally make dire pronouncements about research libraries going broke because of certain rising costs, but I don’t really think that will happen. Instead, I think rising journal costs will rise until equilibrium is achieved, and certain vendors know that even the richest libraries just can’t afford to pay any more. Then they will maintain that equilibrium as every other goal of the library is sacrificed for certain expensive parts of the collection.

Or maybe most research libraries will either go broke or just not be able to collect necessary scholarly materials. With that equilibrium argument, I was just trying to present the sunny side of the picture. Then again, perhaps there will be a revolution in scholarly communication, even if it takes a generation or two.

Open Access Trouble

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Science won’t be putting its back issues on JSTOR anymore, Yale has stopped supporting BioMed Central, and now the American Anthropological Association (AAA)will be moving their publications from the University of California Press to Wiley-Blackwell. All in all, it’s been a bad month for open access, more access, or cheaper access. It seems that Yale is pulling out of BioMed and the AAA is moving to Wiley-Blackwell for the same reason – money. Yale doesn’t want to pay to publish their scholars’ research, or at least not so directly, since they’ll be paying for it one way or another. The AAA makes its money from its publications, and they can make more of it through Wiley than through UC.

The AAA decision may be the right one for them. They probably will make more money. In the case of that decision, the only people likely to suffer are scholars, not the association itself. I think Yale’s decision has more potential to backfire for them. If publishing, especially STM publishing, continues to be dominated by commercial publishers, prices will continue to go up. I’ve heard librarians complain that commercial vendors don’t seem to be good citizens, or something like that. The problem isn’t that they aren’t good citizens. And the problem isn’t that they don’t provide good content. The problem is that commercial vendors and scholarly institutions have two different goals. Scholars want to disseminate their research and libraries want to provide access to that research if they can. Commercial vendors want to make money. I don’t see a problem with making money, and I’d certainly like to make more of it myself, but there’s bound to be conflicts of interest. And as costs go up and libraries get strapped for cash, some research will be less available.

A commenter on the IHE AAA article notes that he doesn’t understand the negative reaction, because increasingly even commercial journal publishers are allowing authors to place their articles in institutional repositories and the like. He notes that the UC Press and Wiley are “both are “Green” on author Open Access self-archiving, meaning they have both endorsed immediate self-archiving of the author’s final, accepted draft (postprint) in the author’s Institutional Repository, providing immediate Open Access to the article.” It’s a thoughtful comment with many supporting links, but I still think librarians and scholars should have a problem. First, not every institution has an institutional repository. Second, libraries are still going to have to subscribe to the journals as long as they can afford to, at least at research libraries. The commenter argues that the “62% of deposits that are immediately made OA will soon draw the 38% that are Closed Access deposits over to their ranks under the natural pressure of research usage and impact alone.” Possibly. But if “green” commercial publishers aren’t making enough profit, how likely is it that they will stay green? If no one subscribes to the journals because pre- or post prints are available in repositories, will the journal continue to exist? And if it doesn’t, how will universities adapt?

I once heard an anecdote that I hope is mythical, but perhaps not. A consortium of 10 libraries were paying $10K/year for some science journal. They told the publisher that 9 of them were going to cancel their subscriptions and split the last subscription, and maintain access through ILL. The publisher said fine. The remaining subscription would now be $100K/year. It may or may not have happened, but it could happen.

Wikiscanner

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One problem librarians typically have with the Wikipedia is the anonymity of its authors. In a reference world understandably based on authority as a shorthand for reliability, Wikipedia is woefully inadequate right from the start. If authority – rather than truth, usefulness, convenience, or breadth, for example – is the criterion of judgment for a reference work, then the Wikipedia gets disqualified before the game even begins. I’ve given my two cheers for Wikipedia before, and addressed the problems of authority.

The new Wikiscanner helps to alleviate the problem of no authority a little bit. (Read the Sunday NYT article about Wikiscanner: Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikimedia Edits.) The Wikiscanner searches Wikipedia and links IP addresses to edited articles. The idea behind the Wikiscanner is to reveal self-interested edits to Wikipedia articles. The Times article notes such examples as someone from Diebold deleting criticism of voting machines and someone from the Washington Post changing “the name of the owner of a free local paper, The Washington Examiner, from Philip Anschutz to Charles Manson” (more mischievous than self-interested, but still a violation of public trust).

On the other hand, the Wikiscanner also reveals the fact that most of the edits don’t appear to be self-interested. This doesn’t mean that the editors are reliable, only that they aren’t trying to promote themselves. I did a Wikiscanner search for Princeton University IP addresses, hoping to find salacious edits like saying the Harvard football players are all cross-dressers or something like that. There were a lot of edits of “Princeton University” and Princeton-related topics which could have been self-interested, but just as likely to be based on authority. I didn’t check the edits to the eating clubs pages to see what mischief might be there. There were some bizarre early edits of something called “Easting Clubs,” the spelling mistake (“Easting” for “Eating”) surviving for several edits.

But there were also multiple edits for John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Equipotential, Computer, Filioque clause, Neocortex, John of Damascus, Particle in a box, Euler’s totient function, and many other topics that were probably not driven by self-interest, and, given the subjects, may very well have been driven by the desire of someone who knew to get the facts right online. Though I’m not sure this explains why in one week of March 2005 someone from Princeton made over 50 edits to the article on Yoko Ono.

The Wikiscanner certainly doesn’t eliminate the problem of authority and shifting entries, but it does help reveal some problems. It’s also another example of what’s good about the way Wikipedia works, taking advantage of dispersed knowledge. Wikipedia always challenges us to question sources, and now it’s easier to do this. Some critics of Wikipedia seem to act as if everyone is helpless when viewing information online, implying that without librarians to help them, people will just accept anything written on any website. I think most people are probably more skeptical than that, and the Wikiscanner now gives the skeptics one more tool. If only librarians would create tools for skeptics rather than just condemn projects like the Wikipedia or hope people don’t use them, because these projects aren’t going to go away. Pointing out all the ways the Wikipedia is bad just ignores all the ways in which it is good, especially when one considers that for many researchers, the good is often equated with the good enough.

Beautiful Campus

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Via the Kept-Up Academic Librarian, I discovered that one blogger has named Princeton as #2 in his list of The 20 Most Beautiful Colleges in the USA. It is a lovely campus. If you’re not familiar with it, you can take the virtual tour. You can also just watch the opening credits of the tv show House, since the big building you see from the air that poses as the hospital is actually the Frist Campus Center at Princeton. I discovered that when my lovely wife Jen ordered some House episodes on Netflix.

The list reminds me that I sometimes forget how beautiful the campus really is. When I’m on campus, I spend a lot of my day in my office and other windowless underground rooms in Firestone Library. I like my office, except it doesn’t have a window and it’s three floors underground (and five floors from the philosophy and religion collections). My last office did have a window, but it only overlooked the area outside a staff elevator and wasn’t nearly as pleasant a space, so it’s hard to complain too much. On the positive side, my office is very quiet and private, and it’s easy to get work done there as long as I remember to take vitamin D pills to make up for the lack of sunlight. Fortunately, the library supplies me with a fresh bottle of vitamin supplements on the first of every month so that’s not a problem.

It’s easy for me to get caught up in the daily problems of the library and forget the attractive world just outside the door. I need to force myself to leave the building occasionally and take some long walks around campus.

It also reminds me, though, of one reason I like being an academic librarian. I’ve been in some very attractive public libraries, but rarely are the surroundings as pleasant as a lot of college campuses. Princeton is especially attractive, but many colleges and universities have attractive campuses (my own humble alma mater the U. of Alabama was ranked #17). One of the perks of working in academia, at least at many colleges and universities, is the pleasant surroundings. Sure, at Princeton inside the building might not be that great (I love walking the stacks of Firestone, but it’s a workaday library on the inside, not a showplace), but all I have to do is step outside and take a look around to gain a completely different perspective. For example, if I walk about 20 yards across the courtyard, I can go in the chapel, which is magnificent and about the size of many a cathedral. I think the lack of collegiate surroundings would be what I’d miss most if I ever left academia.

I’m counting my blessings instead of sheep.

American Rhetoric

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As the fall semester approaches, I’ve been thinking more about political rhetoric. In my writing seminar, we mostly read political philosophy, but we also study rhetoric and analyze popular arguments as well. (My students last semester analyzed popular politics on the class blog, which I think is pretty good.)

Recently I came across the American Freedom Campaign, an effort by several groups to define “American” as including an opposition to torture or the suspension of habeas corpus. It’s hard to believe, but some powerful Americans seem to support these things. Not the American Freedom Campaign, though. Here, for example, is the “Freedom Pledge” they’d like you to sign:

“We are Americans, and in our America we do not torture, we do not imprison people without charge or legal remedy, we do not tap people’s phones and emails without a court order, and above all we do not give any President unchecked power.

I pledge to fight to protect and defend the Constitution from assault by any President.”

And they also say that, “under the pretense of the ‘war on terror,’ the White House is dismantling the Constitution, concentrating power in the President and undermining the rule of law. THIS IS UN-AMERICAN.”

In addition to its appeal on other grounds, it’s interesting for the way it plays with some traditional American political rhetoric. What is American? Is it everything that has happened in America? Or only the best parts of the American tradition? Or perhaps that which is unique to America?

Many people criticize America for its past slavery, for example, but slavery wasn’t unique to America. Creating a written Constitution that more or less enshrined classical liberal goals was unique, as was creating a country based on the ideas of liberty and freedom. (For a great book on the distinction between American “liberty” and “freedom,” read David Hackett Fischer’s outstanding book Liberty and Freedom. He uses liberty more in the sense of “freedom from” or what Isaiah Berlin would call “negative liberty” or Benjamin Constant would call the “freedom of the moderns,” while freedom is more like the civic republican notion of political participation and self-government, what Berlin might call “positive liberty” and Constant the “liberty of the ancients.” Fischer does a remarkable job of showing the power of these concepts in American history.)

So is the deplorable history of slavery and racism “American,” or instead are the ideas of freedom and political equality that inspired the founders and led to the eventual end of slavery more “American”? Can both be “American”? Only, I suppose, if “American” is taken in the least meaningful sense of “things that happened in America.” If “American” means those things unique to America, then the term becomes more meaningful, and not just politically. “American” then would include jazz and blues music, for example, but not racism or sexism, which are hardly confined to the United States.

There’s the old saying, “as American as mom and apple pie.” That’s just silly. I don’t know where apple pie originated, but I’m pretty sure there were mothers before the United States existed. But what could be more American than Robert Johnson, or Thelonious Monk, or Johnny Cash, or Wild Turkey, or the rule of law enshrined in a written constitution?

The American Freedom Campaign is plotting a different rhetorical course, though, one where “American” has a powerful political meaning, in this sense one of “a nation of laws.”

I think the American Freedom Campaign’s tactic is both more true and more useful than either a negative anti-Americanism or an overbroad definition of “American.” Defining “American” as whatever happened in America guts the term of any political usefulness, for the left or the right. Thinking of the history of America as the history of slavery, genocide, and oppression (as a friend of mine does) also reduces the power of the term “American.” American and Un-American could be politically powerful if used in effective ways. Reminding people that freedom, liberty, equality, and the rule of law are American, and their opposites un-American, can be persuasive in a way that hostile political rhetoric never can be.

Everything is Miscellaneous

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I’ve been on vacation the past few days and finally got around to reading Everything is Miscellaneous, by David Weinberger. I should have just watched the Google Tech Talk, but it was easier to sit by the lake with a book than a computer. If I dozed off and my book fell to the ground, it wouldn’t matter as much.

I liked the book, but I’m not sure I was the right audience, since much of it had a “well, of course” feel about it. All the speculation about the way current trends in sharing knowledge change our understanding didn’t surprise me at all. We seem to be in agreement on the benefits of both blogs and the Wikipedia, and he specifically criticizes Cass Sunstein’s worries about the rise of the “Daily Me.” Like most popular non-fiction I read, the book could have been reduced to an excellent 50-page essay, which could have developed the main point sufficiently without all the repetition. I can’t remember how many times Weinberger quotes Umberto Eco on ways to slice beef, but certainly more than once.

He didn’t seem to me to give libraries a fair shake. It seemed odd that he focuses so much on the Dewey Decimal System, and that in his frequent mentions of library catalogs, they are always card catalogs and he always refers to catalog cards, never to database records. He discusses “three orders of order” – the first order of things put in their places, the second order of “card catalogs” telling us where the things are (both orders of physical things), and a third order of bits and bytes no longer restricted by the physical. Libraries always seem to be examples of the first two orders, because a book has to go on a specific physical shelf, and a “card catalog” has physical cards that limit what can be said about the book. The Dewey Decimal System is an example of the old order, because it classifies each book and puts it in a particular place on a particular shelf. Weinberger makes much of the limitations of Dewey, both because it doesn’t order the world like many people now order it (e.g., too much focus on Christianity, not enough on Islam) and because it has only one place to put a particular book, whereas a third order system can locate the book in many places, even if only virtually.

When he mentions the Library of Congress, he mentions only their relationship to the DDC, not their more sophisticated LC Classification System or their LC Subject Headings. Even when he mentions subject headings in general, which he does once when listing what’s on a catalog card, he doesn’t notice that subject headings themselves are already a way to break out of the second order of order and into the third, even more so once the “cards” are in fact online records. Subject headings are still examples of central groups trying to organize knowledge, rather than letting the folk develop their own organization, but they’re not necessarily an example of the knowledge tree that Weinberger criticizes so often. In the knowledge tree of the library catalog, a particular leaf can hang on many branches thanks to subject headings. He might have mentioned that for a century the Library of Congress has been taking steps to create multiple ways to find a single item in a library, even though the item could be in only one physical place.

He goes on at length about the way social software such as tagging allows us to create new understandings and see the world in new ways. It’s an exciting discussion, but his examples seem to be mostly drawn from business and science. There’s a good discussion of the way customers can take back control from advertisers and producers by creating online forums for evaluating products, and celebrates the transparency that comes from sharing the little bits of knowledge that many people might have. He also notes that publishing science is easer thanks to efforts like PLoS ONE. We no longer have to wonder why “through a startling and persistent coincidence, all the knowledge developed in the natural sciences since 1869 has fit exactly into the number of pages alloted for it in Nature each week,” because now publication isn’t limited by the expense of paper, printing, or distribution.

I wonder, though, about the importance of this new model for other areas of academic research. Weinberger rightly celebrates the ease with which ordinary people can now produce and control knowledge, but most academics doing research have a different relationship to their field than a consumer does to a company. Academics are already knowledge producers, and often tend to have a good idea of who are the other similar knowledge producers in their field. Breaking down some print-bound publishing models will help people publish more easily, but the sense of wonder at being able to control your information must surely be less.

Evaluating Conspiracy

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I find conspiracy theories fascinating, and not because I’m a conspiracy theorist. One of my favorite conspiracy theories is the Shakespeare authorship question, but I also use conspiracy theories to discuss source evaluation with my students, and Shakespeare doesn’t generate that much interest among students. (There is a small but dedicated Shakespeare conspiracy theory movement, though, because every few months I get an email from someone trying to persuade me that their candidate “really” wrote Shakespeare’s plays and I should acknowledge such on my website.)

For the past few years, I’ve been using the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 as an exercise in evaluation. I treat the 9/11 Commission Report as the official source, though of course there are others, such as the NIST rebuttal of alternative theories of the WTC buildings collapse. The official story is that airplanes were hijacked and flown into the WTC and the Pentagon, and that the damage done by the airplanes caused the collapse of WTC 1, 2, and & 7 as well as the damage done to the Pentagon.

According to the conspiracy theories, there are all sorts of holes in this story, though the theories don’t always cohere. I’ve been watching a few videos available on the Internet, and the theories usually address alleged flaws in the official story. Often they’ll bring in the related “New World Order” and Illuminati conspiracies as well. When you combine that with other theories placing the origins of the New World Order in space aliens or Atlantis or a reptilian, shape-shifting race that secretly dominates the world (have you taken a close look at George Bush, Tony Blair, or the Queen of England lately?), then you can ultimately piece together a theory that reptilian space aliens secretly engineered human beings and have been trying for centuries to build a one-world totalitarian government and have now used the WTC attacks as a excuse to create a fascist police state, through a process that the conspiracy theorists all like to mention: Problem, Reaction, Solution, which they all claim has something to do with Hegelian dialectic, though I remember Hegel being a bit more complicated than that.

The 9/11 Truth Movement seems to be a gathering storm of questionable sources. I use The World Trade Center Demolition and the So-Called War on Terrorism as a comparison for the 9/11 Commission Report because it’s been out there for a long time, but I could use any number of sources, from the film Loose Change to plenty of blogs and websites and books. (Loose Change seems to be a major voice for the “Truthers,” since it has a hostile blog dedicated specifically to debunking it: Screw Loose Change. (If you’re curious and want to delve into a twilight zone, do some Google Video searches on 9/11 or Illuminati or look for anything about David Icke or Alex Jones.)

From a research perspective, though, these sources provide great examples for evaluating sources. First, there’s a lot of this stuff, especially about 9/11, and now they even have something called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Also, several of the conspiracy theory sources specifically ask people to question them. I noticed a number of videos, for example, that said, more or less, “hey, don’t believe us, go verify these facts.” Screw Loose Change seems to be taking that call very seriously. So the scholarly imperative to verify sources is explicit in many of these videos and websites, which could make a great research exercise. (On a side note, look up some of these conspiracy theories in the Wikipedia if you want to see examples of Wikipedia credibility warnings all over the place.)

But they’re also useful because of the political overtones of the movement, which lends another perspective to the sources. I mistakenly thought when looking into this that a lot of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists would be anti-Bush, anti-globalization progressives, but there seem to be many conservative evangelical Christians and militia movement-types in the mix as well.

The politicization of the debate is interesting, though. The 9/11 anti-conspiracy theorists don’t necessarily provide a calm, rational voice in this debate. One of the documentaries played a clip of Sean Hannity interviewing a conspiracy theorist from the University of Wisconsin, and I’d have to say from any balanced perspective, the conspiracy theorist came off looking better than one might think. I don’t watch TV, so I’d never seen Fox News, but Hannity shouting at the fellow onscreen could hardly impress anyone but the choir of how he was the sane one and the conspiracy theorist the insane one. (If that’s the norm on his show, I wonder why anyone watches.)

So for the suspicious, there’s not only the alleged questionability of the official story, but there’s also a lot of conservatives extremely hostile to anyone bringing up alternative theories. Add in a general distrust of the Bush administration of most people on the left, and it becomes more difficult to decide the issue. If the question comes down to, “do you trust the government or not,” this adds another dimension to the debate, leading some people to say, “well, I don’t normally trust the government, but in this case I will,” or perhaps, “well, I hate the President, but I don’t think he’s a reptilian shape-shifter who destroyed the WTC to bring about a one-world government to please his pals in Skull and Bones and the Trilateral Commission.”

In addition to the details and the political context, there are also fun large questions. For example, if there really is a secret group of space aliens called the Illuminati that control us all, then why would they let all these videos and websites get out on the Internet? Is it just to make people look crazy, and thus debunk their case even more? And don’t the conspiracy theorists seem rather arrogant? How have they somehow escaped the mind-control of the New World Order while the rest of us are too stupid? And how could anyone control such a large conspiracy? Does anyone think the government is really hyper-competent?

I think teaching a writing seminar on 9/11 conspiracy theories would be great, but I’m starting small. This year I’m planning to develop a quick research evaluation exercise based around this in addition to just using the standard techniques such as examining authorship, because I think it might be entertaining as well as informative. Unless it’s all true, of course, and the Illuminati are really out to get us, in which case it’s just scary, unless they want to let me in on their plans and make me fabulously wealthy, in which case it isn’t.

The Case for Careless Writing

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Is there a case to be made for careless writing? In academia, we usually don’t think so. As a librarian, I try to help students get the sources they need to carefully research an argument, and as a writing teacher I try to help students learn to write careful and nuanced essays. As a writer, I’m not sure sure. I try to be careful and nuanced, but I also tend to focus on small topics, or small parts of large topics. Maybe I’d get more comments if I were more provocative and less careful, if I created some turbulence.

During lunch today, I read the introduction to an issue of Turbulence (which I’d never heard of; I found the link through Bookforum). The issue is a collection of articles on the topic of “Are We Winning?” The “We” is progressive social movements around the world. The introduction notes the differences in focus and mood between the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and now, and wonders if the left is still winning, or what it would mean to “win.” I didn’t read any of the articles, and probably won’t, mainly because I was struck by this paragraph:

“We’re not offering a packaged and polished set of answers to these or any other questions. The 14 articles in Turbulence come from different contexts, different parts of the world; they have different tones, different paces and they certainly don’t all agree with each other; and some are harder than others to read outside their context. But we think this unevenness, what some might call roughness, is useful. It’s sometimes hard to engage with a collection of texts which is too polished. You’ve no sooner exclaimed, ‘that’s wrong, I don’t agree with that at all!’ or ‘but what about X?’, than the author’s anticipated your objection in a footnote, or else the editors have directed you to another article which plugs the gap. On the other hand, rough edges provide handholds, something to grab onto. They provide a way into arguments. Maybe you’ll pull at a loose end and everything will unravel. But perhaps you’ll be able to weave something else with those threads. What we want to do is put out articles that help us to think new thoughts. To think and act differently.”

It could be that roughness is useful, but it still seemed to me a way to excuse bad writing and careless arguments. Eliminating unevenness, considering and responding to counter-arguments, backing up your argument with footnotes and proof — these are some of the hallmarks not only of academic writing but good argumentative prose in general. What the editors, who call themselves the “Turbulence Collective,” seem to be saying is that thoughtful, careful, substantiated writing is bad, that considering and responding to counterarguments is a problem because it supposedly doesn’t allow people to think and act. Can this really be the case? Are we really to approve and justify political writing that avoids all usual standards of argument and thought, regardless of the side that puts it forward? And what of research? Is research thus bad, because it might make you less willing to put forward arguments that you know are faulty because you’re read their refutation?

The home page says that “Turbulence is a journal-cum-newspaper that we hope will become an ongoing space in which to think through, debate and articulate the political, social, economic and cultural theories of our movements, as well as the networks of diverse practices and alternatives that surround them.” Is this, I wonder, how the thinking through is to be done? Is it better to put out unsubstantiated or ill considered, though passionate, opinions, because careful thought and argument don’t leave enough spaces for disagreement and discussion? Or is instead the case, as much academic writing assumes, that careful argument doesn’t eliminate the handholds, it just eliminates the useless or sloppy handholds? People disagree passionately with careful arguments as well, but they have to be more thoughtful in their disagreement.

On the other hand, isn’t that what usually occurs on blogs, especially the popular and provocative ones? I read one library blog that regularly gets dozens of comments on many posts, and passionate arguments break out in the comments section. But it’s a blog that seems designed to provoke, to leave what the editors of Turbulence call a handhold, to irritate some readers so much they can’t help but respond. I think this is a useful function of blogs, and I suppose of Turbulence as well, to bring a lot of voices together on a topic. But as a general editorial rule, it seems a way to justify lowering the tone of argumentative writing, especially in politics, and the tone is low enough already.