Academia.edu wants to commercialize its "recommendations"

Academia.edu has a system of "recommendations" for publications that I have never been fond of. Now they want to commercialize them by selling commendations. The way the recommendations work is that some scholars are invited to submit recommendations. I can't find the criteria listed on the website, but as I recall the only criterion was that one had published one or two papers ever. The recommenders are then supposed to recommend papers by clicking a button on the paper in question. This information become public, and the number of views on those papers increases. Individuals are given an "Authors rank" based on the number of recommendations their papers have received, adjusted for the rank of the recommenders. My author rank is 3.6, but I have no idea if that is high or low; the nature of the scale is not revealed.

I tried being a recommender for a while. I recommended some things, and then I'd get messages stating that views of those papers had increased dramatically after I had recommended them. Wow, I am an influential guy in Academia.edu! I'll put that on my CV. But without information on why one is recommending a paper, these recommendations don't carry much weight. And when the system got started I snooped around to see who was doing the recommending. Some recommenders are serious scholars whose views I take seriously (people like Gary Feinman and Linda Manzanilla). Others are low-quality scholars whose views I do NOT take seriously (I won't name names here. I manage to get enough people pissed off at me as it stands, I don't need make a bunch more people mad). So having one's papers recommended by someone like Gary Feinman (one of the top archaeologists, in my opinion) has the same weight as having them recommended by low-quality scholars. Not a very good system.  Plus, there is no way to give a negative recommendation. Some papers are terrible and deserve to be described as such, but that is not possible with this system. This is one more example of the facebookization of online scholarship. You can like something, but you can't dislike anything.

I just got the following email from someone on the Academia.edu staff:

 Hi Dr. Smith,

   My name is XXXXX, here at Academia. I noticed you had received a few recommendations on your papers. Would you be open to paying a small fee to submit any upcoming papers to our board of editors to be considered for recommendation? You'd only be charged if your paper was recommended. If it does get recommended then you'll see the natural boost in viewership and downloads that recommended papers get. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Here are my thoughts (this was my email reply) - I don’t have a very high opinion of your system of recommendation. As it stands, you have a bunch of low-quality scholars making recommendations, and I don’t consider the recommendations any kind of rigorous or useful measure of anything. Getting visibility through Academia.edu is useful, I guess, but it is not very high on my list of professional goals. The idea of paying a fee for recommendations sounds ludicrous. Who is on the “board of editors” to make these decisions? Non-professionals? Low-quality scholars? I have previously looked at Academia.edu as an alternative to the trend of increasing commercialization of scholarship. But now you want people to pay for some kind of recommendation? The recognition that matters to me is citations, not some social-media type of “liking” or fee-based recommendations. Please leave me out of it.

(END OF EMAIL)

 Academia.edu is strange. It will have some very positive scholarly practices, and then it will introduce a retrograde, anti-scholarly features like co-authors listing. I think the whole idea of recommendations, as currently implemented, is a pseudo-scholarly feature, and I don't trust it. One could design a better and more transparent system but that might be too complex. But this idea of selling recommendations is terrible. If this is implemented, I might consider leaving Academia.edu and posting my papers elsewhere.

A grand challenge for archaeology: To say something useful about past human societies

This post is part of the  "Grand challenges for archaeology blogging carnival."

We do archaeology in order to learn about the past. This is a pretty broad purview. We learn about an amazing variety of past things from archaeology, from Richard III’s posture to the causes of the Maya collapse, from what the Natufians ate for breakfast to how the Plains peoples hunted bison. We work hard to recover treasure, garbage, dirt, tools, cathedrals and latrines, and we use them to make statements about what happened long ago. We ask all sorts of questions: Whodunnit? What the heck is that? Why is this particular coin sitting in that specific layer? What were they thinking?

We do archaeology for many diverse purposes, from reconstructing the lives of ancient kings and queens to creating historical narratives, from helping communities reconstruct their past to complying with government regulations. In this essay I will discuss one of those purposes—creating reliable information about past human societies. This is the primary goal of the archaeology I do, and to my mind this is the most important contribution archaeology makes to human knowledge. Another way of saying this is to claim that archaeology is a social science (Smith et al. 2012). That is, we contribute to the stock of knowledge about human societies around the globe and into the past. Our special brand of knowledge is distinctive in several ways that most of us can rattle off easily. We have access to human societies not documented by any other discipline (e.g., Natufian society). We can study change over longer periods of time than can historians. And we learn about aspects of past societies that cannot be studied well by other fields (e.g., material culture).

Over the past decade I have become involved in several transdisciplinary research projects. I have learned to interact with scholars in other disciplines (including geography, planning, sociology, political science, economics, and physics), and I have had to read widely in disciplines far outside my comfort zone of archaeology and anthropology. These experiences have made me simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic about the ability of archaeology to generate reliable information about past human societies.

My optimism has several components. First, our findings really do stand out as unique and important in bringing to light societies not accessible in any other way. I take examples from comparative urbanism, one of my research foci. Archaeology now describes quite a few fascinating and unique past cities and urban traditions—huge dense Tripolyan settlements (urban or not? How did so many Neolithic people live together?); the low-density urbanism of Mesoamerica, Africa and Asia (how did these cities work in a jungle setting?); or Çatalhöyük. Second, archaeology really does produce unique and important data—even on “historical” societies. No other discipline can study past settlement patterns, and archaeology has an incredible record of data on settlement sizes in many past regions. Third, a growing number of scholars in other disciplines actually take archaeological findings seriously and want to engage with archaeologists to learn more and to use our data. I am still surprised at this situation. Prior to going interdisciplinary ten years ago, my colleagues in cultural anthropology rarely expressed any interest at all in archaeology or my research. Now I interact with scholars in different disciplines who think our data can contribute to their research agendas. Amazing.

But I am also depressingly pessimistic about whether archaeological data can really contribute to social science knowledge and research beyond a couple of small projects here and there. Another way of putting this is to say that I think it will be hard to respond adequately to the many “grand challenges” to archaeology identified by Kintigh et al. (2014a, 2014b) until this higher-order challenge is pursued (click here for my take on those earlier grand challenges). This is my grand challenge here—to make the effort to change many entrenched archaeological practices to allow us to create reliable knowledge about past societies. We do good fieldwork, and our methods are constantly improving. We have access to a growing suite of sophisticated analytical techniques. But the results of our fieldwork and analysis are not yet building a solid foundation of evidence and data about past societies. Why not?

I see two major roadblocks:

• Our data are not available;  and, 
• Our epistemology is inadequate, particularly in the areas of theory and argument.

(1) Our data are not available

The “gray literature” of unpublished and poorly available contract archaeology reports is a vast sink of archaeological data. Some of it is reported in formats that can be used by other scholars, and some is not. Some is posted online, much is not. There is more contract archaeology going on around the world than grant-funded academic research, yet most of the results contribute little or nothing to building a systematic foundation of knowledge about the past. This needs to change. There are far too many academic archaeological research projects that are never adequately published, leaving important artifacts moldering in a dusty lab or analyzed data locked up in individual idiosyncratic data formats. And even archaeological data from projects that are published can be difficult to access; we need datafiles—not printed tables of numbers—and more excavation photographs—not the few that made it into the report.

This is getting uncomfortably personal now. My current project will be published and the data archived on tDAR before too long (I hope!). But the primary data for my earlier projects are sitting in ring binders, negative holders, a bunch of Excel and Access databases, and my own head. Should I start another fieldwork project, or spend my time archiving old data? The former is more fun, but perhaps the latter is of greater value to the discipline.

The challenge here is to change the behavior of individuals (like me) and to promote institutional solutions that will make our data available. Even when data ARE available, they will often need cleaning and sorting and recoding if we are going to compare our data to social science data about the present (Smith 2010).  Creating and using data archives is a big part of this challenge, and that is why archives like tDAR are so important. But a change in the culture of archaeology may also be required. When an economic historian publishes a study that uses quantitative data, the datafiles are regularly posted and made available for others to use and reanalyze. Could anyone reanalyze my data that way? Not yet. We don’t have a culture within archaeology that promotes the easy sharing of data. A change in these norms would be a big improvement.

(2) Our epistemology is inadequate

Archaeology is a science, in the standard social-science conception of science as having these traits:

• Knowledge is responsive to evidence
• Claims are exposed to challenge
• Findings should be internally coherent
• Arguments should be judged on the basis of explanatory power, generality, simplicity, and replicability.  For discussion of these traits, see: Gerring (2012) or Wylie (2000).

For those of my colleagues who view archaeology as a branch of the humanities, or who are hostile to science for reasons postmodern or other, please ignore the following discussion; it does not apply to you. But if one accepts the notion that archaeology does indeed (or can) conform to the model of science as outline above, then one has to be depressed about the current state of archaeological epistemology. Propositions are rarely tested, claims are too infrequently challenged, and formal arguments are rarely examined for adequacy. I explore this situation and provide suggestions for improving our arguments in Smith (2015). One result of our sloppy epistemology is that we have failed to create a solid body of empirical knowledge that can be improved, refined, and extended as research proceeds.

When postmodernism hit the social sciences in the 1980s, disciplines such as sociology and political science gave it a look, made a few changes, and got back to work. But in anthropology or archaeology, postmodernism settled in as a systemic infection and pushed empirical, scientific approaches to the margins. In the archaeology of complex societies, postmodernism is still festering (post-processualism, post-structuralism, post-humanism, etc.). The assumptions of postmodern approaches contradict the principles of science as listed above. Postmodern approaches are incapable of testing empirical propositions or carrying out rigorous comparative analysis. This is not just my peculiar view of the world; this is basic social science epistemology, discussed in a rather extensive literature rarely considered by archaeologists (6 and Bellamy 2012; Gerring 2012; Hedström 2005; Mjøset 2001; Tilly 1994, 2008).

Although few archaeologists use the phrase “postmodern” these days, this anti-science perspective is rampant in the discipline. As noted by a noted postmodern geographer, scholars now prefer to use the term “post-structuralism” because it is a “safer sounding label” than postmodernism (Soja 2001:11863). A major goal of scholarship from this perspective is to deconstruct or problematize knowledge. That is, the idea is to break down established knowledge. In science, on the other hand, the goal is to build and extend reliable bodies of knowledge. In several blog posts (here, and here), I have discussed two types of “science” in archaeology. Science type 1 is research with a scientific epistemology as discussed here. Science type 2 is work in an interpretivist or non-scientific framework that employs scientific techniques from other disciplines as part of the research process. Archaeologists pursing this model can sometimes fool scientific granting agencies by touting their use of archaeometry or “archaeological science,” while hiding the fact that their research is governed by a non-scientific epistemology.

Only research carried out with a scientific epistemology, making rigorous empirical arguments about data and about the past, serves to build a body of archaeological knowledge that is capable of generating reliable conclusions about past human societies (beyond descriptions of individual sites or finds). The prevalence of non-scientific epistemologies in archaeology (all the “post-“ approaches) makes it difficult to create this reliable knowledge. Yet for many of us, the goal of our work is to say something useful about past human societies. As in the case of the first roadblock—data availability—the promotion of a scientific epistemology will require a change in the culture of archaeology. If we want to contribute to a body of empirical evidence about human societies and their change over time, then we have our work cut out for us. If we fail to meet this "grand challenge," then it is hard to see how we can meet all the other grand challenges identified by Kintigh et al. (2014a, 2014b) and by the other bloggers participating in this event.

  

References

6, Perri and Christine Bellamy

2012 Principles of Methodology: Research Design in Social Science. Sage, New York.

Gerring, John

2012 Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Hedström, Peter

2005 Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Kintigh, Keith W., Jeffrey Altschul, Mary Beaudry, Robert Drennan, Ann Kinzig, Timothy Kohler, W. Frederick Limp, Herbert Maschner, William Michener, Timothy Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy Sabloff, Tony Wilkinson, Henry Wright, and Melinda Zeder
2014    Grand Challenges for Archaeology. American Antiquity 79 (1): 5-24.  

Kintigh, Keith W., Jeffrey H. Altschul, Mary C. Beaudry, Robert D. Drennan, Ann P. Kinzig, Timothy A. Kohler, W. Frederick Limp, Herbert D. G. Maschner, William K. Michener, Timothy R. Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Tony J. Wilkinson, Henry T. Wright, and Melinda A. Zeder
2014    Grand Challenges for Archaeology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122: 879-880.

Mjøset, Lars

2001 Theory: Conceptions in the Social Sciences. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, pp. 15641-15647. Elsevier, New York.

Smith, Michael E.

2010  Sprawl, Squatters, and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues? Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20: 229-253.

2015 How can Archaeologists Make Better Arguments? The SAA Archaeological Record 15 (4): 18-23.

Smith, Michael E., Gary M. Feinman, Robert D. Drennan, Timothy Earle, and Ian Morris

2012 Archaeology as a Social Science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109: 7617-7621.

Soja, Edward W.

2001 Postmodernism in Geography. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, pp. 11860-11865. Elsevier, New York.

Tilly, Charles

1994 Softcore Solipsism. Labour / Le Travail 34: 259-268.

2008 Explaining Social Processes. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO.

Wylie, Alison

2000 Questions of Evidence, Legitimacy, and the (Dis)unity of Science. American Antiquity 65: 227-237.

Don't create confusion by redefining standard concepts

Archaeology sometimes seems to exist in its own little scholarly world. Compared to other disciplines, we have strange kinds of data—sites and artifacts. These weird data require odd specialized methods, from lithic refitting to grave-lot seriation to dog-lease surface collecting. Scholars in other disciplines don’t do these things, and they don’t need labels for them. Quite naturally, archaeology requires its own specialized vocabulary. Does it matter whether our terms match up with those in other disciplines? After all, we are doing our own thing, and we rightly assert our ability to define our own terminology.

This is fine, up to a point. But there is a tendency for archaeologists to take this disciplinary autonomy—and its associated terminology—too far. We have a habit of adopting terms that have a standard definition in other fields, and giving them an entirely new meaning within archaeology. I am not referring to adopting a standard term (say, stratigraphy from geology) to the peculiarities of the archaeological record and maintaining a very similar meaning. I am referring to the practice of giving established terms an entirely new, unrelated definition for archaeology. Then the terms come into archaeological use, aided by the fact that too few archaeologists keep up on other disciplines. The result is confusion. When I run into the term “normative,” I have to stop and think. Does the writer mean normative in its standard definition in urban planning? Or are we talking about normative in Lewis Binford’s idiosyncratic vocabulary?  To me, this confusion is a serious problem. It helps isolate archaeology from other disciplines. It promotes conceptual sloppiness. And it helps keep archaeology down on the farm, and away from the scholarly centers where the intellectual action is.

I just found a new example is an article I read on the airplane returning from Aarhus. Norman Yoffee redefines two terms: infrastructure, and infrastructural power (Yoffee 2015), giving them definitions very different than understood in other disciplines (and in archaeology as well). So here are a few examples of this process that come to mind. I’ll start with Binford. At one point I had a list of four or five such terms that Binford blindly adopted, but right now only these two come to mind.

Middle range theory.

The term middle-range theory was invented by sociologist Robert Merton in the 1950s for a kind of empirical theory that applied to people and societies and their operation. It was devised as a contrast to “grand theory” or high-level theory, an abstract, philosophical brand of social theory. Then Binford came along and used the very same term for something completely unrelated: formation process. This had nothing at all to do with Merton’s concept, so the reason for the re-invention of the concept must have been ignorance on Binford’s part. Raab and Goodyear (1984) sorted this out decades ago, but because few archaeologists bothered to look at sociological epistemology, we kept on using Binford’s term. This created a real mess, and it had a seriously negative affect on archaeological theory and epistemology, since we very badly needed Merton’s insights decades ago. I discuss the situation elsewhere (Smith 2011). I sometimes wonder if the crisis in archaeological argumentation (Smith 2015) might have been avoided had we paid attention to Merton and other methodological works in the social sciences back in the days when Binford and Hodder were shouting at one another and filling the need for stock exam essays for archaeology students.

Normative.

I remember back in grad school days when Binford’s concept of normative was a pejorative label for models he didn’t like. Normative meant a theory that relied on any kind of ideas in people’s heads to explain something in the past. Binford and the materialistic new archaeologists would say disgustedly that Hodder and the post-processualists used normative theories. When I started reading in the urban planning literature, I was surprised to find that the term was a basic concept with a very different meaning. Normative theory refers to theories about good or positive values in urban design, “a theory of the kinds of urban environments town planning should seek to create” (Taylor 1998:22). Kevin Lynch’s excellent book Good City Form (Lynch 1981) is built around a single question: “What makes a good city?” (p.1). Normative theory in planning is usually contrasted with “descriptive theory,” which is theory without value judgments. I must admit that initially I had a strong negative reaction to normative theory in planning, since the cultural relativism of anthropology was strongly imprinted on my decades ago. How can one claim that some cultural feature or practice is “better” than another? But think about buildings and cities that you know. It should be obvious that some are better designed than others, and normative theory deals with how to achieve superior outcomes in buildings, cities, and built landscapes. I discuss normative theory relevant to archaeology here: (Smith 2011).

Top-down and bottom-up.

These terms are widely used in the social sciences to distinguish different types of dynamics and causality in complex systems. For example, in discussing governance, a top-down process is one where policies are made and implemented by a high-level authority with little input from the grass roots, whereas a bottom-up process is one carried out by the actions of people organizing on their own, typically outside of formal institutions. Laws are often created, and always implemented, by top-down actions of governments, whereas the Occupy Wall Street movement was a bottom-up process. Top-down and bottom-up are rarely considered analytical terms, but they are used informally (and frequently) as labels for things that have clear analytical definitions. The term “generative process” is often used for bottom-up social processes. As archaeologists become more sophisticated about things like governance, economic systems, and other manifestations of complex adaptive systems, we will turn increasingly to the analytical concepts behind the terms top-down and bottom-up. In fact I predict that an increasing understanding of generative processes in the next decade will revolutionize our understanding of ancient states and ancient cities.

So, how have archaeologists used these phrases differently? I have seen an increasing number of archaeologists use "top-down" to describe research that looks at kings and elites, while bottom-up refers to research that focuses on households. This is a very different concept. Both top-down and bottom-up processes (in the standard terminology) can implicate both elites and households. The new archaeological usage is a static descriptive concept, whereas the standard social-science usages describes dynamic processes. I have seen many cases of the new uses, particularly in research on the Classic Maya, but I haven’t been keeping track. My resources here in Dulles Airport are limited (with a delay; I’ll arrive in PHX at 6:AM Aarhus time, close to 24 hours traveling.....). I just saw an Andean example in a recent Latin American Antiquity. Again, this usage serves to isolate archaeology from other disciplines, and it causes confusion by the concurrent use of different definitions for the same words. If you are analyzing households, then say households; don’t use an irrelevant term badly.

Infrastructure and infrastructural power.

I find Yoffee’s reinvention of these terms the most puzzling case. Most or all of the above cases arose form ignorance. The archaeologists in question had no clue about developments in other disciplines, and were probably not aware they were sowing confusion. But Yoffee is clearly aware that his definitions diverge from accepted definitions, both in archaeology and outside. His article takes off from sociologist Michael Mann’s concept of “infrastructural power” (Mann 1984, 2008), and he cites Mann’s definition as the ability of the state to penetrate civil society. But then he redefines infrastructure. In normal scholarly discourse, infrastructure refers to the “sinews” of a city or a society, the physical features that bind different places together (Boone and Modarres 2006:95). Mann’s usage extends this concept to include facilities and practices that bring the state down to the level of neighborhoods and communities to interface with people. Mann contrasts this with “despotic power,” which means the power of the ruler to carry out his wishes unencumbered by other forces.

Yoffee defines infrastructure in an odd way: “By infrastructures, I mean groups of people and their leaders who stand apart from or are not a part of the institutions of the state” (unpaginated). Most scholars would call such groups “civic associations” or “institutions” (guilds, councils, religious institutions, neighborhood watch groups and the like). I can’t find an explicit definition of infrastructural power in the paper, but the usage suggests that Yoffee is referring to the power of such civic associations. He discusses cases where such associations have the power to resist the rulers of early states. This is an insightful discussion, and I like many parts of Yoffee’s argument. But why change the meanings of established terms? “Civic associations” works fine for these phenomena, and that term is common in fields outside of archaeology such as social history and urban studies (Friedrichs 2010; Prak 2011; Read 2008). Also puzzling is his avoidance of Blanton and Fargher (2008), the one source by archaeologists that deals most closely with Mann’s concept of infrastructural power!

I hope we can cut down on such terminological sloppiness in archaeology. It breeds confusion and it isolates our discipline from other fields. With increasing scholarly resources, it is easier now to follow, or at least check up on other disciplines now and then.

We all need to be more careful about this, and journal editors and reviewers should not give a pass to these confusions.

Blanton, Richard E. and Lane F. Fargher

2008    Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States. Springer, New York.

Boone, Christopher G. and Ali Modarres

2006    City and Environment. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.

Friedrichs, Christopher R.

2010    What Made the Eurasian City Work? Urban Political Cultures in Early Modern Europe and Asia. In City Limits: Perspectives on the Historical European City, edited by Glenn Clark, Judith Owens, and Greg T. Smith, pp. 29-63. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal.

Lynch, Kevin

1981    A Theory of Good City Form. MIT Press, Cambridge.

Mann, Michael

1984    The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results. European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 25: 185-213.

2008    Infrastructural Power Revisited. Studies in Comparative International Development 43: 355-365.

Prak, Maarten

2011    Citizenship in Pre-Modern Eurasia: A Comparison Between China, the Near East and Europe. Paper presented at the Modern and comparative economic history seminar, London.  http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/39751/.

Raab, L. Mark and Albert C. Goodyear

1984    Middle-Range Theory in Archaeology: A Critical Review of Origins and Applications. American Antiquity 49: 255-268.

Read, Benjamin L.

2008    The State's Evolving Relationship with Urban Society: China's Neighborhood Organizations in Comparative Perspective. In Urban China in Transition, edited by John R. Logan, pp. 315-335. Blackwell, Malden.

Smith, Michael E.

2011    Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18: 167-192.

2015    How can Archaeologists Make Better Arguments? The SAA Archaeological Record 15 (4): 18-23.

Taylor, Nigel

1998    Urban Planning Theory Since 1845. Sage Publications, London.

Yoffee, Norman

2015    The Power of Infrastructures: a Counternarrative and a Speculation. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory  (published online).

Posted during a flight delay in Dulles airport. Check out my post on the Viking Museum in Aarhus.