Interaction among scholars and intellectual progress

When scholars working on closely related topics get together, it is possible to make real progress and greatly advance understanding of the phenomenon at hand. Diverse perspectives and data sets generate synergies, and the give-and-take direct communication of ideas within a small group can generate real intellectual or scientific progress.  Too bad this rarely happens. Much of the structure of contemporary academia works against such synergies and progress. We have events that ostensibly promote intellectual progress -- conferences, symposia at annual meetings, edited books -- but actually serve to inhibit the kind of intensive intellectual interaction that generates advances.

 Several events in the past couple of weeks have brought this point home to me.

(1) A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Anderson posted a nice discussion on Savage Minds titled "numbers." Most of his ten items had to do with the amount of time spent on research and the amount of money required and available for scholarship. But his first item totaled the costs for ten people attending an annual meeting to participate in a symposium (actually, he seriously underestimated the costs), and asked:

But I think there are times when it might make sense to take that collective $5000, round up 10 people who want to collaborate, find a cheap central place to meet—and then do something.  Like write a book.  Create and actually start implementing a project. ... Imagine what 10 people with a common goal could really do if given some serious time to really put their heads together.

My sentiments exactly. You participate in a symposium at an annual meeting, and are given 15 minutes to talk. There is no time for discussion or questions from the audience. Official "discussants" may or may not say something useful. Often the most useful part is the trip to the bar or restaurant after the session.

(2) I spent a week at the Santa Fe Institute last summer. That place is really set up to foster the kind of face-to-face interaction that generates real scientific progress. In just a few days of discussion with a few colleagues, my understanding of urbanism advanced more than it had in several years of normal scholarly activity. A working group was formed, and when I got home I started working on a new topic (urban scaling). I now have a new perspective on urbanism as a social process, and I have many new questions about the similarities and differences between ancient and contemporary cities.

(3) I received received two invitations to participate in events on ancient cities. One was for a session at a larger conference where a bunch of archaeologists working on diverse urban topics in diverse areas of the world all gave papers. While there are some interesting people, and probably some good papers, this is the kind of dead-end event I alluded to above. I declined that invitation. The other invitation was for a targeted conference on urbanism in a specific area, with clear goals of addressing how urban concepts and theories relate to new data. I accepted that one. Part of my reason was to give me a chance to learn about an ancient urban tradition I don't know very well, but part was the greater chances that real intellectual progress would be made. Why? Because of the more focused nature of the topic, and because of the potential for good interactions with colleagues.

(4) I am reviewing an edited volume for a journal. While it has a number of excellent papers, it really falls short of the level of transformational scholarship that can happen when people get together under the right conditions. Consider two models.

Model A.  A group of organizers decide on an intellectual goal and how it can be reached. They invite participants and insist that each does X, Y, or Z in order to reach the goal. The session includes intensive discussion among the participants, and then they go back and write the papers needed to reach the goal (whether or not these match the papers they initially presented).

Model B. A group of organizers invite a bunch of people working on a topic to give papers. They provide some guidelines, but don't enforce strict standards. The papers are presented, there is a bit of discussion with the audience, and then the participants go revise their papers slightly for the published volume.

Guess which model generates more scientific progress? Guess which one is more likely to produce a publication that really advances understanding of a field?

I have blogged about this before, focusing more on the products: edited volumes:

Why are so many edited volumes worthless?
Buried in an edited volume
Swords, chainsaws, and edited volumes.



So, what can be done? Here are a few off-the-cuff suggestions. The basic idea is that participants, organizers, and sponsors should acknowledge the importance of give-and-take discussion among small groups of scholars and work to include this in their events.

• Professional societies should promote more forums and workshops at their annual meetings. The SAA, to take one example, has started to do this, but their annual meeting model remains overwhelmingly focused on the 15-minute, non-interactive, symposium.
• Funders and session organizers should promote these events. The close intensive sessions can be combined with public presentations, since it is good to share ideas more widely and many sponsors and funders require such public presentations.
• Organizers should be creative and diligent in constructing situations of intensive interaction even within the confines of traditional academic structures. Have a pre-meeting, have a post-meeting, set up a listserv for email communications, etc.
• Organizers should not be so hasty to bring every session to print in a lousy edited volume. Of course everyone thinks their particular topic and edited volume is of the highest importance to the universe, but, guess what? That is not always the case. On the other hand, if you have managed to generate interaction and synergy, then publication will likely be a positive step that is valuable to someone other than your mother. 
• Participants can urge organizers in this direction, perhaps by offering to help set up the kind of event I am talking about.

Swords, chainsaws, and edited volumes

I'm not the only one with a dim view of the value of edited volumes. As I've expressed previously ("Why are so many edited volumes worthless?") most edited volumes in archaeology are insufficiently integrated, have too many poor quality essays, and do a poor job of advancing research. I was thus not surprised to find the following comments in a recent book review published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. This was a review of "Comparing Cities: the Middle East and South Asia" (ed. by Ali and Rieker, Oxford Univ press, 2010. Review 2011, JRAI 17:671-672); review by Hayder Al-Mohammad:

"one is left to wonder what this edited volume is hoping to respond to or push in terms of new resesarch, ideas, and methods." (p.671)

"Comparing Cities should be a warning to future editors of volumes that readers require more than just a number of articles thrown together in one book to make it a worthy and coherent read." (p.672)

Well, I an dubious about whether the poor quality of any single edited volume will serve as a warning for future volume editors. If so, the genre of poor edited volume would not still be flourishing. 
 

 Unfortunately the kind of quality control shown in the cartoon above is typically absent from the evaluation of edited volumes by publishers. Maybe if we had more tough-looking reviewers armed with swords and chainsaws, and fewer pussycats armed with badminton rackets, the quality of archaeological edited volumes might improve.

Here are my older posts on edited volumes:

• Why are so many edited volumes worthless?
• Buried in an edited volume.
• Sloppy editing of edited volumes.

"The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies"

Yesterday I shipped off the manuscript for an edited volume, The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies, to Cambridge University Press. This is from a conference I hosted a couple of years ago at the Amerind Foundation and ASU that explored methods and results of comparative analysis of ancient states and chiefdoms. The volume as a whole emphasizes a scientific approach to the past, and an explicit and rigorous approach to comparison. Actually, I should say "approachES to comparison," since one of our points is that there are a variety of valid comparative methods and approaches to archaeological data, from large-N statistical studies to small-N heavily contextualized comparisons. One method that we do NOT consider a rigorous comparative method is taking a bunch of case studies, by different authors, and throwing them into an edited volume. In this book, there are two types of chapters: most are comparative studies; some are general papers about comparison.

The conference participants came up with a "manifesto" on comparative archaeology, and this is included as chapter 1 of the book. I talked about this in a previous post;  you can see the document here.

I think this may be the only edited volume I have edited (I've done three or four), where I have NOT said to my wife, "Remind me never to do this again!" This was an easier task than most, perhaps because there are fewer authors, and authors who are responsive and responsible. I take a dim view of most edited volumes in archaeology these days, but this CAN be a very good form of publication.

Here is the contents of the new book:

The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies
edited by Michael E. Smith
Cambridge University Press (in press).

1. Comparative Archaeology: A Commitment to Understanding Variation

            Group statement by all contributors

2. Approaches to Comparative Analysis in Archaeology

            Michael E. Smith (Arizona State University) and Peter Peregrine (Lawrence University)

3. Comparative Frames for the Diachronic Analysis of Complex Societies: Next Steps

            Gary M. Feinman (Field Museum of Natural History)

4. What It Takes to Get Complex: Goods, Labor, and Ideology as Shared Cultural Ideals at     the Beginning of Sedentism

            Monica L. Smith (University of California, Los Angeles)

5. Challenges for Comparative Study of Early Complex Societies

            Robert D. Drennan (University of Pittsburgh) and Christian E. Peterson (Washington     University in St. Louis)

6. Patterned Variation in Regional Trajectories of Community Growth

            Christian E. Peterson (Washington University in St. Louis) and Robert D. Drennan         (University of Pittsburgh)

7. The Genesis of Monuments in Island Societies

            Michael J. Kolb (Northern Illinois University)

8. Power and Legitimation: Political Strategies, Typology, and Cultural Evolution

            Peter Peregrine (Lawrence University)

9. The Strategies of Provincials in Empires

            Barbara L. Stark and John K. Chance (Arizona State University)

10. Households, Economies, and Power in the Aztec and Inka Imperial Provinces

            Timothy Earle (Northwestern University) and Michael E. Smith (Arizona State Univ.)

11. Low-Density, Agrarian-Based Urbanism: Scale, Power and Ecology

            Roland Fletcher (University of Sydney)

12. Comparative Analysis into the Future

            Michael E. Smith (Arizona State University)

Sloppy Editing of Edited Volumes

I’m writing this on the airplane on the way to the SAA meetings in Vancouver. I have discussed some of the problems with edited volumes in archaeology in an earlier post. Here I want to point out another problem: sloppy editing and production. I just read some chapters in a recent Mesoamerican volume edited by two archaeologists, both relatively new PhDs. I found an unacceptably large number of errors in the text, tables and figures. One or two mistakes will almost always get through the editorial process and into published books. But the large number of problems in these chapters suggests that the volume editors did not read the chapters carefully (there are nonsensical phrases, citations to wildly inappropriate sources, text in figures that makes no sense at all, etc.). It also shows that the copy-editors for the press (a university press) did a poor job.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that volume editors don’t pay close attention to the chapters in their books, given my earlier discussion of the problems with edited volumes. The idea seems to be to get a book out quickly, with more attention to speed than quality. And perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the press did a lousy job of copy-editing. Since I began publishing in the 1970s, I have noted a marked decline in the quality of copy-editing, particularly in books (most journals still seem to have decent editing). My wife is an editor, so I am very aware of the difference between good and bad editing. I’m not talking about subjective impressions of writing style, but about basic problems: errors in grammar, inconsistencies, meaningless prose, and the like (I will probably blog about editing at some point).

This particular press has a particularly bad reputation for the quality of editing and production. Many of their books are full of typos and errors, and sloppily produced art. Book reviews of their books often point this out, and it is quite obvious to the casual observer. When I pointed this out to someone at the press a couple of years ago (to explain why I was not interested in submitting any manuscripts to them), they assured me that things had improved. But the recent volume I mention above makes me wonder about that. From a scholarly and intellectual perspective, this publisher has published some good books. But from the perspective of editing and production standards, they leave a lot to be desired.

In the past couple of months I have heard at least two publishers of archaeology say they are reducing the number of edited volumes they will accept in the future. They are not cutting these out entirely, but they are trying to reduce the number of awful books (my term, not theirs) published. Perhaps presses are starting to come around on edited volumes. It would also help if archaeologists would pay more attention when deciding where and how to publish our research. Journal articles are a much better choice than book chapters because they are reviewed with more rigor and they have much wider visibility and distribution.

Buried in an Edited Volume

Back when I was a graduate student I asked David Freidel for a reprint of a chapter from an edited book. He sent it to me, with a brief note that lamented the fact that the paper was “buried in an edited book where no one would see it.” (I remember this because I recently came across the paper and his note in my files). At the time I was puzzled by David’s remarks—don’t people read the edited books in their field? That was before the explosion of edited volumes, however, and now my attitude is closer to his. Scholarship suffers when important papers are buried in edited volumes.

Two of my best papers were published in edited volumes, and I still regret not sending the first of these to a journal, where it would have had a much wider readership. It sits moldering in a mediocre volume not much consulted any more. I did post it (and other book chapters) on my web site, but the readership and impact remain lower than for a journal article.

I’ve blogged about problems with edited volumes before, from the perspective of authors and editors. Now I will make some remarks from the perspective of the reader and the advancement of the discipline in general. The example I am going to use is the following paper:

Sheehy, James J. (1996) Ethnographic Analogy and the Royal Household in 8th Century Copan. In Arqueología Mesoamericana: Homenaje a William T. Sanders, edited by Alba Guadalupe Mastache, Jeffrey R. Parsons, Robert S. Santley and Mari Carmen Serra Puche, pp. 253-276. vol. 2. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.

This is an important paper, one of the very few works that makes explicit comparisons among royal palaces in a variety of preindustrial cultures around the world. Any archaeologist who uses analogy to make inferences about activities in ancient royal palaces should cite this paper. But because it lies buried in an edited book, its impact on the field has been minimal, and numerous archaeologists have re-invented the wheel in their use of analogy for interpreting ancient palaces. I was astounded at the fact that none of the contributors to an edited volume on Maya palaces cited Sheehy’s paper, and I said so in my review of that book:

Christie, Jessica Joyce (editor) (2003) Maya Palaces and Elite Residences: An Interdisciplinary Approach. University of Texas Press, Austin.

I have just been going through a more recent volume on ancient New World palaces, and again was surprised that no one cited Sheehy’s paper:

Christie, Jessica Joyce and Patricia Joan Sarro (editors) (2006) Palaces and Power in the Americas: From Peru to the Northwest Coast. University of Texas Press, Austin.

This morning I googled Sheehy’s paper, hoping that it was more widely cited and used than is suggested by those 2 books. But I found only five matches. Two are my own journal articles, one is a syllabus of Ken Hirth, one is a book review of the original volume, and one is to the FAMSI bibliography. The paper IS listed in the Anthropology Plus database through OCLS FirstSearch (and if you have read this far and are NOT familiar with that database, you should be!).

I suspect that a big reason for the neglect of Sheehy’s paper is that it is primarily focused on an elite compound at Copan, with little indication in its title that it contains an important comparative section. It was quickly superseded by more fieldwork and analysis of elite residences at Copan, and today its contribution to Copan archaeology is minimal. And with its growing site-specific obsolescence its comparative contributions are neglected even more.

One problem with Sheehy’s paper is that he buried an important methodological section within a site-specific paper, with little evidence in the title of the paper. But a bigger problem is that it was published in a semi-obscure edited volume in the first place. One could argue that the blame for the paper’s obscurity lies with archaeologists who should know the literature in their field and cite it (or perhaps my judgment is wrong and it’s not an important paper at all). But if the comparative data had been published in a journal article, the discipline would have been much better served. And today, if important contributions like this were published in Open Access journals the impact on scholarship would be even greater. But that would require archaeologists to start OA journals and use them......

Why are so many edited volumes worthless?

Anyone who follows publishing in archaeology (and probably in academia in general) knows that there has been a great increase in the number of edited collections in the past decade or so. In my humble opinion, many—perhaps most—of these are close to worthless. I’ll spout off about this for a bit, and then provide some suggestions for graduate students and young professionals who are thinking of editing a collection of essays (since these tend to be the worst offenders in producing books of dubious value).

Why the profusion of edited volumes? Here are some of the reasons I see.

1. For the book editors:

• It’s easier to assemble a bunch of contributed essays than to write an entire book.
• It’s nice to have one’s name on the cover of a book. It looks good on a CV and sometimes people confuse the nature of the book and think that one has written a book. Your mom will be proud that you have produced a book with your name on it.
• It provides an opportunity to help shape the nature of scholarship within a field. Unfortunately this potential is seldom realized, for reasons discussed below.

2. For the chapter contributors:

• It’s a quick and easy way to convert a conference presentation into a publication.
• Book chapters are rarely subject to the kinds of rigorous review and critique that journal articles go through.
• It’s nice to have a paper in a volume that has some prominent scholars as contributors.

What’s wrong with most edited volumes?

• The quality of the chapters is uneven. One rarely sees a book review of an edited volume that does not point this out.
• More importantly, most books simply are not integrated intellectual contributions. They are too disparate, chapters are all over the map, they don’t cite one another, and there is no central message that the book communicates. Scholarship is thus not advanced by the volume beyond what a few of the better chapters may say.
• The central indications of this problem are: (1) there is no strong position paper; and/or (2) individual chapters do not cite the central concepts or ideas of the editors.

What can be done?

The most important thing is for the editor to have a vision that he/she carries out through the medium of the chapters in the book. There should be a central model or approach or some major idea ties together the chapters. Editors need to be strong and assertive to enforce their vision on the contributors. When the editors are graduate students or young professionals, they are often unwilling to exercise the necessary control over more senior scholars, resulting in disparate and low-quality edited collections.

• Write, or commission, at least one major chapter that sets the theoretical/ topical/ methodological setting of the work. This should be a significant intellectual contribution.
• Circulate that chapter well in advance. If one is thinking of publishing essays from a symposium, this should be done BEFORE the symposium.
• Insist that contributors respond to the position paper. Insist that they cite it, that they use the concepts or terms that are promoted, that they provide the information called for in the position paper, etc.
• If authors are unwilling to play along, drop their chapter from the book.
• Reject poor quality chapters (even if they are from a prominent scholar). Insist that poorly written chapters be rewritten. Insist on high graphics standards.
• Avoid chapters (introductory or final) that summarize the other chapters in the book. These are incredibly lame papers that contribute little.

Here are a few examples from my own experience. In the late 1990s I attended two international comparative conferences that were ultimately published as edited volumes. One, organized by Mogens Hansen in Copenhagen, was on city-state cultures. The other, organized by four archaeologists and held in a wonderful setting in Mijas, Spain, was on empires. Both were interesting and valuable sessions at which many scholars learned a lot. Both of the published volumes (Alcock et al. 2001; Hansen 2000) are valuable contributions with many very good chapters.

But only one—Hansen’s city-states book—makes a true advance and really moves scholarship forward in a significant way. The reason is that Hansen started with a tight definition of his key concept (“city-state culture”) and insisted that authors respond to that concept and use his terms and structure. Some participants objected to the concept, or argued that it did not apply in particular cases, and their voices were heard and discussed. But most of us employed Hansen’s concept usefully and thus our case study chapters contribute to a larger intellectual edifice (in my case, the fact that Hansen’s model coincided quite closely with my own understanding of Aztec city-states didn’t hurt). Hansen provided both an introductory chapter and a concluding chapter that defined key concepts, provided a historical review of key concepts, placed the theme within current debates, etc. Mogens Hansen was quite a fanatic about his notion (this is a compliment), and later published an addendum with additional city-state cultures (Hansen 2002).

The empires book has some good chapters, but it does not have a central, sustained argument. The field of scholarship on early imperialism is not advanced beyond what would have happened had most of the chapters been published as journal articles. Contrary to the statements of the editors, this was not truly a comparative study; as Richard Blanton pointed out in a review of the book, simply juxtaposing a bunch of case studies does not constitute comparative analysis (for my views of comparisons in archaeology, see Smith 2006). The book is valuable because it contains a number of excellent papers; in fact in terms of the quality of the chapters, it is head and shoulders above most of the edited volumes in archaeology today. But because the editors did not promote a central vision and enforce it on the participants, this book makes less of a contribution to scholarship than Hansen’s city-states book. I should note that the lack of central vision was in large part enforced by the funding agency—the Wenner-Gren Foundation—which had some kind of strange rule against enforcing a strong intellectual focus at its conferences.

With a few special exceptions, I have stopped contributing chapters to edited collections that do not have a strong position paper and some level of enforced adherence to the position paper by authors. In other words, I don’t publish too many book chapters these days. I’m tempted to list recent edited volumes that I have declined to contribute to, but I don’t want to embarrass the editors. But what is a young scholar to do? I think that it is more valuable—both the profession and to one’s reputation—to publish a couple of high-quality journal articles than to edited a low-quality collection of papers. But publishers are always looking for edited volumes (why this is the case is somewhat of a mystery to me), and people always want their names on books, so I suspect that we will continue to see a steady flow of poor edited collections in archaeology. If you are thinking of editing a volume, please at least think about my suggestions above.

References:

Alcock, Susan E., Terence N. D'Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli (editors)
2001 Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Hansen, Mogens Herman (editor)
2000 A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures. The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Copenhagen.

2002 A Comparative Study of Six City-State Cultures. The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Copenhagen.

Smith, Michael E.
2006 How do Archaeologists Compare Early States? Book Review Essay on Bruce Trigger and Adam T. Smith. Reviews in Anthropology 35:5-35.