On Mon, 30 Jan 2006, WickedFrau wrote: > Speaking of which...what makes an expert? Someone who is already > published? Someone who has a degree in history, research, costuming, > or? Someone who has access to primary sources?
In my experience, the answer varies with the type of task at hand. Are you making a costume, trying to locate a historic document or artwork, analyzing a fashion trend, writing a textbook, creating a website? Different skills, knowledge, and research methods are useful in different types of cases. I routinely refer "academics" to "nonacademics" (hobbyists, re-enactors, independent scholars) if the latter has the knowledge that the academic lacks, and is doing something that is not being pursued in a formal academic context. It's a question of the finding the best person for the job. In the same way, there is a time when academic credentials or the equivalent are particularly meaningful: not just as a means of asserting that you can be sure this person has put in a certain number of years and produced a certain body of work that has passed inspection by other scholars, but also when you need authors/contributors for a scholarly book or encyclopedia, referees for a scholarly article, or advisors for a graduate student (for example). In such cases, part of what you're looking for is not just knowledge of a topic, but also an understanding of the research process, the academic degree process, or the publishing process. (My "day job" is as an editor. This is like the difference between a professional copyeditor and the friend who reads your manuscript. The friend may have a good eye and make useful suggestions, but s/he won't know the conventions of Chicago style, copyediting marks, or the editing process. Sharon Farmer once drew the distinction between the botanist and the gardener; same sort of thing.) I say "or the equivalent" because in this field (see below) it can be sufficient to prove the value of your work through nontraditional means. I am a prime example. I do not have a doctorate at all, and my graduate work is mostly in fields unrelated to costume (my relevant academic background is in English, with smatterings of social science, paleography, art history, and history). However, after years of working as an independent scholar, I have a long list of conference presentations, academic lecturing experience, a handful of publications in refereed journals, experience organizing and running conference sessions, and a decent enough reputation that I was asked to co-edit an academic journal. Yes, I could go back and get the doctorate at any time, but as my Ph.D-bearing friends say, "You're already doing what we had to earn a doctorate to get the chance to do. Why would you put yourself through the expense and stress?" However, if I wanted to teach at the college level, then I would absolutely need to have an advanced degree. I've found that people are more likely to cross the academic/nonacademic boundaries (and more likely to be accepted when doing so) in costume study as a field than in the more traditional academic fields, such as English/languages, history, economics, etc. That's probably because there is no established academic home for costume study, and very few places to pursue academic degrees. That is, if I were an English scholar, there are plenty of places to study, publish, and teach in that field, so if I chose not to work within that established structure in some way (a degree, or publication in referreed journals) yet still tried to claim I was a scholar in that field, I'd have a lot of trouble convincing people I was legitimate. Costume, though, does not have anywhere near the established avenues. People who pursue costume-related degrees often do so in departments of art history, theater, literature, women's studies, economics, etc. depending on their interest, and establish themselves as scholars in that field with costume as a specialty. Or they may come from outside the academic context, but build experience by doing and presenting research. Costume study also often is interdisciplinary, requiring knowledge from many fields (e.g. archaeology, paleography, art history, economics, social history), which leads to a lot of crossover: > I am reminded of someone who considered "themselves" (grammatically > incorrect, but gender non-specific) an expert, but wrote off Mairead > Dunlevy's book, Dress in Ireland, because she was "just a > ceramics/pottery expert" writing about costume....??? I wonder where that person would have expected to find someone who had more specific credentials, especially in the time that Dunlevy wrote (more than 15 years ago)? Granted, being a ceramics/pottery expert doesn't mean much when it comes to costume, but costume scholars come from all over. It's neither a reason to write someone off, nor a reason to embrace them. It all depends on the quality of the work itself, which might be good or bad. (I certainly have seen plenty of inadequate costume work done by people from other fields who simply don't realize how much else is out there beyond their own specialties, and simply don't realize they are not equipped to speak intelligently about costume. This is a problem that occurs both with academics and with nonacademics.) One of the things my partner Gale Owen-Crocker and I have made a point of doing, both in our conference sessions and in the journal we edit, is to open the avenues of presentation and publication to worthy independent researchers. There have been some years when half our speaker slate at Kalamazoo consists of re-enactors who have "crossed over" to academia, or who are making that crossover for the first time. We set a goal for every volume of our journal to include at least one paper based on reconstruction as a research method -- something that typically comes out of the living history community. We spend a lot of time educating our new speakers and authors, and there are several people on this list who can describe exactly how much they had to adapt when they moved from speaking or writing for fellow re-enactors or costumers, to speaking or writing for an academic audience with a rather different background and set of expectations. We think it's worth the effort to get good work to a broader audience, and to put good researchers into contact with the sources and scholars that can help them. --Robin sometimes called an expert _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
