Comments on: Methodology Slam

By: Crooked Timber » » Son of “The MLA Meme.”

Crooked Timber » » Son of “The MLA Meme.” — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:56:30 +0000

[...] Since Kaufman is a literature graduate student venturing into the realms of quantitative social science, he is subject to methodology slam, and no doubt rightly so. Contra the Wired report, however, the whole episode was not quite the case of a researcher going, “I have an idea. I will call it ‘the wheel.’ Can such a thing be built? Let me find out.” [...]

By: N Pepperell

N Pepperell — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 10:03:21 +0000

Sorry your post was initially held up – sometimes my spam filter is a bit overzealous.

I actually do take quite seriously the potential for interdisciplinary feedback that can arise from exposing work online. What amused me about this incident was that I suspect that, if Scott had just posted something titled “MLA Blogging Paper: Methodology Proposal”, and had asked for feedback, he might have gotten a few stray comments from the regulars at his blog. Instead, he tries to do something else entirely, and the methodology critiques come pouring in.

As it is, having read bits and pieces about the background for this paper over the past couple of months, my guess would be that the methodological issues with Scott’s experiment are probably not that pivotal for the way he intends to use his data. Obviously Scott can speak for himself, and I’m not across this project in any detail, but my impression was that the claim related more to the hierarchical nature of information transfer across the net – that the net is not as much of a horizontal free-for-all as it’s sometimes presented as being in popular discussion. This is a point that can be established in a variety of ways – I’m sure Scott must be familiar with this – and my sense was that he was just looking for an offhand illustration that would be entertaining to discuss during his presentation. But perhaps I have the wrong idea…

None of this, though, detracts from the basic concept that this kind of online exposure could be enormously useful for interdisciplinary critique – if we can figure out how to get one another to pay attention…

By: Zapaper

Zapaper — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 07:45:02 +0000

Interesting metapost. Perhaps part of the reason for the hostility toward Scott’s project (including mine) is a sense of discipline-poaching—he is basically a humanities person groping for the science-associated prestige of “hard numbers” without actually learning from disciplines that have well-developed methodolgies for how to obtain and work with “hard numbers.” The problem is that his numbers are actually really “soft,” padded by mushy disclaimers and pleas of time and resource limitation, etc. I am not against inter-disciplinary endeavors per se, but I do think it is problematic to undertake them without first understanding what one needs to learn from disciplines in which one is not a specialist.

Actually, I applaud your suggestion that a methodological discussion is very much in order here. But insofar as the average MLA audience member is probably not from the hard sciences, social sciences, or philosophy, I’m not sure that would be quite the right venue to really get to the heart of the problem. As you suggest here, ironically but I’m going to take you at your word, the internet methodology slam should indeed be an online-genre and–why not–expose ivory-tower bound humanities people to the rigor of a much broader review process. Maybe it would help!