Editing Your Own Work

Monday, December 26, 2016

It’s winter break and you’re trying to use the time away from class to get an article written, edited, and submitted to a journal. You probably planned to get to two or three out, but your expectations have become more realistic as you actually have to fit time to work between family obligations, evenings with friends, and furtive trips to the bargain bins.

A big part of this process is editing your work after you finally get it written (I have some advice on that too). Not much fun, is it? You’ve sweated blood just getting words on a…

What Was Your Best Moment in China?

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

The hot pink sweater should have tipped me off. I’m not just one of the dancers here, it said. I am THE dancer, the only person you should watch. Everyone else was in drab late-autumn browns and grays and greens and danced that way on cold, late-autumn Chinese night.

She didn’t really need to advertise. I was watching no one else. Meryem, let’s call her that though I never found out her name, was what a Uyghur dancer should be. The gracious spins, the elegant flow of her hands, the subtle arch of her back, the turns around her older…

Post-Truth Archaeology

Saturday, December 17, 2016

A nice piece about how archaeology is presented in social media by Adrian Maldonado. All archaeologists have grimaced over some sketchy archaeological claim rapidly infecting in the global social media.

My favorite, and one of Maldonado's, was the claim of a Canadian teenager of finding a lost Maya city in Mexico's rain forests using satellite images. Archaeologists who know that region well alternated between a good laugh and tearing their hair out when the media blitz wouldn't end. After all, it was probably only a set of field walls. And we felt for the poor kid, when his…

Citation Wars Heat Up Again, but Who’s Counting

Friday, December 16, 2016

Everyone in university social science and humanities departments complains about the journal impact factor (JIF). With good reason. They’re like the 1%, getting all the goodies while the rest of us resent their unfair advantage.

In this case, it’s more like the elite 11%. For those not familiar, the impact factor is a number created by a private firm called Thompson-Reuters, which maintains an index of 11,000 academic journals called the Web of Science (one source indicates that there are about 100,000 academic journals in all, but that’s a slippery, constantly changing number) and counts how many times each…

Sand dunes

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Long before Taliban or Al Qaeda were household words, I was a young archaeologist on a project in the remote western end of Afghanistan, a region known as Sistan. Famous in ancient times as the home of Rustam, hero of the Persian epic poem Shahname, it sure didn’t look heroic while I was there in the mid 1970s as a U Michigan graduate student. A few small villages with homes made of reeds and mud, some eroded ruins along the foothills of the Helmand River where we concentrated our work, and lots of sand dunes. Sahara-worthy sand. Sand that hissed…

When Do I Start Writing?

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Having worked with hundreds of academic authors as their editor and ersatz psychologist, the consistent response to that question has been the desire to wait until you’re “ready” to write. But that’s a mistake. You should have started writing yesterday. Well, given the nature of the space-time continuum, start today.

I was puzzled when Harry Wolcott wrote in Writing Up Qualitative Research, “You cannot begin writing early enough…Write a preliminary draft of the study. Then begin the research.” But now I find the logic of it inescapable. You already know a lot about your topic. You’ve written an…