If one thing is non-negotiable about academic research in the arts and humanities, it is that there will be a lot of reading. In fact, there will almost certainly be too much reading, so you’d better have a strategy to cope with the bibliographical tsunami headed your way.
You can’t read every word that has been written about your subject in the same way, or ponder every word with the same depth, so you need to develop different reading strategies for different types of text. Here are four different strategies to get you going.
Continue reading here; for the others in this useful series see here.
Friday March 24th, ‘Foucault in Ireland‘ conference at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin.
This one-day symposium reviews the engagement of Irish Studies with the work of Michel Foucault. It begins with a roundtable on the recent work of Stuart Elden: Foucault’s last decade (Polity 2016), Foucault: the birth of power (Polity 2017). This is followed by papers on Foucault’s influence in various areas of Irish academic study including: criminology, literary criticism, historical geography, international relations, philosophy, sociology, and others.
Yesterday I attended one of the best theatrical experiences of my life – Shakespeare’s Roman Tragedies at the Barbican by Toneelgroep Amsterdam, directed by Ivo van Hove. In the last couple of weeks I’d already seen the first two instalments of the RSC’s Rome season – Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Both were good performances, classic dress with a range of intelligent performances and an impressive stage design.
But Roman Tragedies was something else entirely. The concept is to compress Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra together, for a performance that lasts six hours. There are several short breaks of three to five minutes, and one of ten minutes. It is in Dutch, with surtitles in English. It sounds brutal, but it wasn’t, and the time went by quickly. I only started to get tired in the last long act of Antony and Cleopatra, but that was far more to do with me than the performance.
This was a revival of a 2009 production, which I’d missed but of which I’d heard great things. The same group did Kings of War at the Barbican last year – Henry V, Henry VI andRichard III – which I’d really liked (some thoughts here). It was only on for three nights this time, and I’m glad I got to see it.
It was an outstanding evening – the quickest, spontaneous standing ovation I’ve been part of. Many highlights, but Hans Kesting’s Antony was excellent, especially in Julius Caesar. Bart Slegers was very good in two supporting roles as Aufidius and Enobarbus.Enobarbus ran outside the theatre at one point, into the service road outside the Barbican – handheld camera followed and the feed came back to the auditorium. I can imagine this works better on a less quiet street. Chris Nietvelt was a powerful Cleopatra; and there were several other excellent performances. Cassius and Octavius were both converted into female roles, which worked very well.The absence of the servant Lucius was an intriguing way into Brutus’ conflicted character; the use of video and music was excellent. Although the audience was encouraged to move about the theatre and join the actors on stage, I mainly stayed in the same place, in part because I had a good seat and I wanted to be able to see as much as possible – live action, video screen, surtitles, news feed – rather than have a restricted view. If I was to see it again, then I’d be more inclined to get closer; and if it was on again tonight, I’d be there.
Peter Kirwan has a much fuller review at The Bardathon – he saw the first run too, so compares the productions a little. Steve Mentz has a good discussion of the version he saw in Brooklyn at The Bookfish. There are mainstream reviews at The Stage and The Guardian.
An interesting piece, challenging some of assumptions about Google Scholar (some of which doubts I share). Of course, deciding which of the alternative ways to count publications and citations is a bit like deciding how to be measured for your coffin.
Many bibliometricians and university administrators remain wary of Google Scholar citation data, preferring “the gold standard” of Web of Science instead. Anne-Wil Harzing, who developed the Publish or Perish software that uses Google Scholar data, here sets out to challenge some of the misconceptions about this data source and explain why it offers a serious alternative to Web of Science. In addition to its flaws having been overstated, Google Scholar’s coverage of high-quality publications is more comprehensive in many areas, including in the social sciences and humanities, books and book chapters, conference proceedings and non-English language publications.
I’ve linked to Raul Pacheco-Vega’s research and writing technique posts several times. He had now got a page which collects these – grouped into categories.
I have blogged a lot about a broad variety of different topics. Many people ask me if I can point them out to specific blog posts in a certain area, and it’s hard for me to remember or to have them handy. To that end, I have decided to create a Resources page. Here, you will find a list of topics, and a series of sub-pages with blog posts in that specific subject area.
For example, if you are looking for resources to help you improve your academic writing (how to conduct literature reviews, how to get out of a writing rut), you may want to check the resources under “Academic Writing”. If you are looking for stuff I have written on how to use social networking sites to improve your teaching, research, to communicate with students, you may want to look under “Social Media”.
Each Resources page is independent, but I have cross-linked them all here. I listed a couple of blog posts under each category, but you can find all the blog posts associated with the topic in its separate page.
Well worth a look – though of course, not everything that works for him will work for all.
For the last several months I’ve been working with Alexander Weisler (a recent MUP graduate from the School of Urban Planning at McGill) on a paper which explores the connection between short-term rentals and gentrification. We use a case study of Airbnb in New York City, based on a lot of number crunching, GIS, and interviews with community organizations and policymakers. The paper is nearly finished, and I’ll upload it here once it’s ready. But in the meantime (and recognizing that it will be a year or more before the paper makes it through peer review and the publishing process), I wanted to provide a quick tour of the arguments and evidence, using the near-final maps I’ve spent the last several weeks making.
The thesis of the paper is that Airbnb is systematically creating a new kind of rent gap. Following Neil Smith’s original argument, we normally think of rent gaps as emerging…
Yesterday I attended one of the best theatrical experiences of my life – Shakespeare’s 
30 years ago 
