Blogging the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper

I'm going to try an experiment.

The Triumvirate has been in mothballs because of me being just too gosh darn busy - and now, as an assignment I must write a paper that is of sufficient quality to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. Naturally, I'm a little stressed out. Also, being that my undergraduate degree was in English, I'm still an English nerd enough to be concerned about the lack of literary drafts and ephemera accessible to scholars who are studying contemporary writers - drafts and notes and diary pages that we have from previous great writers - because of the rise of the personal computer and the internet.

Therefore, I'm going to attempt to solve all three of these concerns at once by blogging the iterative process of writing my paper.

I'm going to journal my process in blog posts at the Triumvirate, along with my questions, false starts, revisions, and frustrations, and attach successive drafts of the paper. However I will not make these drafts visible to anyone but me for the time being. Only after my paper is written, submitted, and judged/graded, will I make the drafts public. This is due to the fact that I don't, at this time, want comments or help. Please, I need to do this alone!

Another reason is that this is really an attempt to archive drafts, and as such, each individual blog post will not really make sense out of context, but only as a part of the whole. Because the whole will be more than the sum of its parts, I considered making the posts private as well, to be unveiled when the drafts are made accessible, but ultimately I decided against that. This is part journal, part archive - and it's also an experiment in a new area of archival theory, the idea that the archivist in our digital age is involved in record-creation, not just in record-keeping, and must manage not only the end of the record's life-cycle, but its beginning.

With personal computers and the internet I hope to recapture what we have largely lost of what the writer creates while working, and hopefully to provide something valuable about the scholarly communication process as well.

Maybe if I get my act together (I want to write another paper for publication, as well as enter as student paper contest through IMLS), I can finish blogging The Extended Phenotype and my Galapagos Diary.

The first post.
The second post.
The third post.

The Amazing Criswell Predicts!

Does anybody remember Plan Nine from Outer Space? That hilarious cult film by Ed Wood which tries so hard to scare its audience, but collapses under its own unintentional hilarity and absurdity? Well, that's precisely what I think about creationists - trying so hard to be someone they're not, trying to look like scientists and making fools of themselves, inspiring laughter (of the wrong kind), yet enabled by breathless, credulous reporters and cable news show talking heads employed by a mass media market that itself is increasingly clueless and oafish in this era of blogs and YouTube.

Plan Nine from Outer Space had as its special guest star the Amazing Criswell, a radio announcer who delivers these gems of wisdom at the beginning of the film:

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.

Man, that's deep! But deeper still is Dembski's crystal balls - I mean, his courageous call for scientific predictions of intelligent design theory!

My friends...

Can your heart stand...

the shocking facts...

of...

quote-miners from outer space?

(Shimmies to Afarensis)

In the meantime, here are my perfectly hum-drum predictions for intelligent design theory and beyond:

1. "Darwinism" predicts that intelligent design will be put out to pasture and that the upcoming gaggle of (truly young instead of faux-young) creationists will continue to start from scratch and cite only contemporary "Darwinists" and each other for their crackpot ideas, just as this group at UD does, with little or no citation of Gish, Henry Morris, Muncaster, Buckna, John Klotz, and all the other "dignitaries" of creationism that few people remember because they make no lasting contribution.

2. The names above will only be remembered by the "Darwinists" in their books and papers for the same reason. (Who remembers Immanuel Velikovsky today?)

3. Creationism will continue to contribute zippity-doo-dah to science.

4. Future creationists will blame "global warming denial" on "Darwinists," just as they do today with eugenics.

The Great Criswell has spoken. Who was that veiled man? Where?

What color is his/her underwear?

UPDATED: If you want to see refrigerator repairmen (they're always men, creationism is a good old boys club) pretending to be scientists, follow this link.

"[Richard] Owen says my book will be forgotten in ten years." -Darwin to J. D. Hooker, 1860.

The Etymology of a Mighty Wind

In the 1990s I was one of many who worked on an ongoing etymological research project at the University of Minnesota, with the goal of compiling sufficient sources to create An Encyclopedic Dictionary of English Etymology, the brainchild of this man, Prof. Anatoly Liberman. The project is still not completed, but in checking up on him I stumbled onto this amusing article, which should give a new meaning to peer-review:

Liberman, A. (1996). Gone with the wind: more thoughts on medieval farting. Scandinavian Studies, 68(1).

Even if Pambarskelfir did not originally mean `farter', this is how the scribe of Morkinskinna and his source seem to have understood it, a circumstance more important than the etymology and early history of pomb. But possibly they understood the nickname correctly. A big fart was associated with great strength. Witches in folktales farted to raise a storm. [I did not know that!] Conversely, the inability to break wind with a loud noise marked one off as a weakling. Porr was so frightened while sitting in a giant's glove, on his way to Utgarda-Lokis's that, according to Odinn's taunt (Harbardzliod 26/8), he dared hniosa ne fisa `neither sneeze nor fart.' The most offensive word is fisa `make a weak fart'; consequently, it was much better to be a fretr `farter' and even a meinfretr `poisonous farter, stinker' than a fiss. German Pimpf `little (inexpenrienced) boy' is someone who cannot produce a good manly Pumpf `fart.' Its English cognate pimp designates a provider of prostitutes (which is a later meaning) and a boy who does menial jobs at a logging camp, carries water and washes dishes; a helper in a mine, etc. The Germanic root *pimp / *pamp / *pump means `swell' and, like pomb, refers to a distended belly: cf. the English verb pamper `stuff with food' overfeed,' hence `overindulge' (Liberman 1992: 71-80). Einarr might once have broken wind while drawing the bow and acquired his nickname Pambarskelfir, `superfarter' as it were, a nickname of which anyone could have been proud. He hardly became a Pambarskelfir a few days before his death, and if, as some scholars think, his bow had been called pomb, this circumstance would have been known to the saga writers.

Too funny. It should be noted that Prof. Liberman starts off his article with a plea for "an exchange of opinions on published materials [that would make] even otherwise unreadable journals worth opening, while SS, a good and solid periodical, would enhance its value by promoting informal dialogue."

(P.S. Note to an absolute fucking moron out there: the Elvis Museum "I've found my calling" post was a joke. As in ha ha. Bye, now.)