the academic process of writing books

[aryanhwy]

I've been thinking about a few things recently, relating to the process by which academics write, and are expected to write, books. (Caveat: What I have to say probably holds greater for the humanities than for the sciences).

First, badgersandjam was commenting on how unreadable many history books are, such that when you find one that is, it is such a relief -- but you do sort of wonder, why can't they all be like that? Wouldn't everyone want the book they write to be something that others will enjoy reading?

And then you read things like this article, "Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy". If nobody can by them, nobody can read them. Wouldn't everyone want the book to write to be something that others will at least read, even if they don't enjoy it?

We're in the process of hiring a new lecturer and two new chairs in my department, and this has involved the scrutiny of a lot of CVs over the summer. In the absence of other indicative marks, books are given significant weighting: Given two candidates with roughly equal educational and teaching profiles, the one who has a book published or forthcoming, but very few articles, generally seemed to trump the one with no book but lots of articles. Yesterday was the job talks for the two chairs, in which candidates were given ~45 min. to talk about their research, past, present, and future. A number of them naturally mentioned how their previous or current work has or will result in books, and I found myself looking at the CV of one and thinking "Gosh. 6 books. That's actually rather a lot. Not so much a lot to write, but a lot to read", and this lead me to another thought:

When was the last time I read a philosophical book, not an article, cover to cover? Of these books, how many did I read within 5 years of their being published? I.e., these books that everyone is writing, and that everyone is putting so much weight on on CVs -- who is reading them? For every 6 books you write, you'd hope that there are at least 12 people out there who read them (two per book, not 12 per book). But where are these people coming from? Certainly not me... I took stock and realized that the only recently-published books in my academic field that I have read cover-to-cover within the last 5 years or so are ones that I have been asked to review (it is, in fact, one reason why I like being invited to review books, because I get a chance to completely read something I want to read, but would otherwise likely not make the time for).

Wondering how typical I was, I went to twitter and asked philosophers, What was the most recent philosophy monograph you've read cover to cover within 5 years of its publication? The answers I've been getting are quite interesting (I've even gotten a few tips for books I may want to read myself!). Someone in the thread responded that, as a student, she mostly reads articles rather than books, which triggered another question: When was the last time you assigned a complete book, pub. in last 5 years, for a course? So far, NO ONE has responded to this one.

Why don't I read books? They're time consuming. They're often too niche for my interests -- they report on the results of someone else's research, rather than providing me with tools or questions that can direct my own research. Articles are more specific and focused, and are often directed at illuminating a particular issue or question, the results of which can then be more easily transferred to another realm. Articles are cheaper, and easier to obtain electronically. (So many books that I would be interested in reading the library doesn't have, and may or may not purchase.)

Should I be reading more books? I don't know.

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I suspect that, in sciences, articles are more critical because of timeliness, but that's just a wild guess. My intersection with humanities books tends to be as a consumer and as an amused bystander to the books-soliciting process at conferences. Publishers give the impression of being desperately hungry for book pitches. I don' t know what percentage of pitches end up as books, but I've had publisher solicit me for book projects that I as in no way qualified to write on the basis of a single conference paper. (This leads me to a sneaking suspicion that, for publishers, the economics derive from mere existence and not from specific content.)

But as one anecdotal example: earlier this year when I was doing research for my Margaret of Parma story, the best and most useful reference work I found was one that had been published in 2013--an incredibly detailed biography of her life. (The other works that appeared to be similarly detailed were in non-English languages, and so less accessible to me.) The story would have been very different and far less true-to-the-facts if I hadn't had it available. On the other hand, the technical editing of the book was very poor -- possibly even non-existent. And the author pretty much erased the evidence for her homoerotic possibilities despite citing the paper that led me to them (and misspelling the name of the author of that paper -- see non-existent editing). It was a minor aspect of a very long and complex life, but still telling.

I can't say I read the entire biography in detail, given that the period of her life that I as interested in fell in the first couple of chapters only, though I did skim over the rest.

I'd have to check to see how many cited works in my dissertation were published within 5 years of my use of them. Definitely some, but I have no idea how many.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting having had my academic training in both the "sciences" and in the "humanities". My logic training at Amsterdam was very much in the mathematics/computer science mode: you publish papers in journals or conference proceedings, because often 5-20 pages is all you need to set out, motivate, and prove your results. There is no narrative, really, so there is no need for an extended setting in which to develop the narrative. On the other hand, philosophy seems to be relatively idiosyncratic among the humanities, with an extremely low citation rate (i.e., in some subjects, it's incumbent upon the author to ensure that s/he engages with all the relevant literature, and reference it appropriately in their paper, while in philosophy it often seems that the fewer things you can get away with citing, the better. I do not understand this mentality and do not follow it). Main-stream philosophy is often functions in what might be called the Dead White Men scheme: A few important people wrote a few important books a long time ago, and everything else since then is "A reply to X on Y's critique of Z's theory of W", or "Against X on Y's..." I have literally seen titles of the form "On [surname] on [surname]." C'mon people. How hard is it to (a) come up with something new or (b) come up with a more telling title?

But one consequence of this is that, regarding books, you may run the risk that the farther away you get from the "source", the more what you are dealing with is derivative or dependent -- that's why I thought it would be interesting to find what current/contemporary books, if any, are being used as course reading (apart from books written to be textbooks, of course). My suspicion is that few are because they are difficult to read as stand alone pieces, requiring knowledge of what has come before, and hence, since what has come before is more fundamental/foundational, why not teach your students that instead?

My dissertation definitely included works published within the last 5 years, but many of them were articles rather than books, and of the books, I almost certainly cherrypicked, reading only relevant chapters, and not cover-to-cover.

(And yes, I think you're absolutely right that many books are solicited that should never have been, and that if they are written they are unlikely to be read. BUT they can be included in bulk packages sold to libraries, so the publisher will make money on them even if no one wants to buy them!)

[tedeisenstein.livejournal.com]

In re derivative and/or dependence: the one great case I've encountered in history was the Great Fealty Debate of about 15-20 years ago. The historians who wrote on the subject all seemed to say pretty much the same thing, which was because they all used the same (re)sources - Mark Bloch and F.L. Ganshof, F.M. Stenton and Carl Stephenson, Joseph Strayer. It wasn't until Susan Reynolds came along and decided that she wanted to, basically, fact-check all of them by going back to the original sources and documents, that some fresh air (if something dating to the 10th and 11th centuries could be considered "fresh") showed up.

I can only wonder how it would work in philosophy where the original sources are all less based in real-world facts than happens with history. (Or so it seems to me, who has a lot more training in history than philosophy....)

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

How would it work in philosophy? First, you'd have a discussion of whether or not there are such things as facts. Regardless of how this question is resolved, it's important to also answer the question of whether or not facts are identical with states-of-affairs (and for this, we should also determine whether or not states-of-affairs exist, and whether they are the same thing or distinct from truth-makers). Suppose you DO manage to establish that facts exist. What, then is their ontology? But you can't answer that until you determine what their epistemology is. And by the time you find yourself sitting in your armchair pondering what the epistemology of facts is, you're a long way away from the real world.