On Tue, 20 May 2008 14:29:28 -0700, Christopher "Cracnku" Green wrote: >Mike Palij wrote: >>> On Tue, 20 May 2008 06:29:11 -0700, Christopher D. Green wrote: >>> Interesting item in today's /Inside Higher Ed/ about giving the same >>> presentation at more than one conference. >>> http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/20/double >> >> One issue that this article raises is what is the purpose of making >> a presentation? >> >> One answer is that it serves the same purpose as publication, >> that is, to establish priority in producing a research finding. >> If one is presenting the same research results, even somewhat >> modified, what is the scientific justification? > >There are other, broader ways of looking at conference presentations, >I think.
I believe that one could develop a variety of categories into which one would classify conference presentations and the establishment of priority for empirical results is just one category. Each category can be assigned a value according to some scheme. One such scheme might focus on the significance of the scientific contributions of the presentations. Another might be whether the value that a tenure committee might assign to a particular category (e.g., empirical research report vs. presentation of a teaching innovation). Any scheme would, of course, represent some set of values which might be meaningful to one group but not another. Indeed, there may be personal reasons as well. >I have occasionally presented substantially similar papers to >conferences that have quite different audiences. The "justification" >is simply to have the work known in these two different scholarly >communities. (For instance, I gave a paper on a psychologist who >worked with the 1938 Chicago Cubs at both a history of psychology >conference and at a history of baseball conference. The paper was >reworked in order to address the knowledge-bases and expectations >of each audience, but the underlying research was basically the >same.) I believe I've seen the printed version of this paper which one might claim trumps the presentations because that is the more enduring record (what if the presentations never make it into print? Do they still count). But your point is that that same material can be presented to different audiences in two different ways. How should these two seperate presentations be counted? One topic presented twice or two different topics? Consider the following: If one were to publish a book that was popular with the general public, one might be asked to make a large number of presentations on the basis of such a book, each presentation modified either to focus on different issues in the book and/or tailored to the audience being addressed? Is this many different presentations or just one topic dressed up somewhat differently for different occasions? But what is point? Does one have to impress a tenure committee? Does one want to sell books or develop a certain degree of popularity? This again raises questions of values and what is important or what is one trying to achieve. >Conference papers (and publications for that matter) aren't simply >about "presentation" (to the world at large) but about *communication* >to particular communities of scholars. This is certainly one way to think about presentations/publications but I think it is a severely limited one. For example, it doesn't explain why one would make up data and present it to a community of scholars. Clearly, communication plays some role but that's not the most important reason, rather, I think, it is the need to impress someone or a group of people in order to maintain status, income, and funding for the future (of course, getting caught means that one has lost everything but still people do these things). I also think that originality and creativity plays a significant role, which is why plaigiarism is so important to most of us. We could simply rewrite or rearrange other people's writing and submit it as our own if all we were interested in is just communication. But we don't do that. However, if we take our own work, rearrange it and present anew, we seem to have a different situation. Why is that? >> But we're now dealing with the sociology of science (perhaps >> the philosophy of science) instead of science per se. > >You say that as though it doesn't matter. :-) Not at all. But why would psychologists be interested in either the sociology of or the philosophy of science? ;-) >When our scholarly identities were fairly simple (because there >weren't that many associations and journals to go around), the >idea of presenting once and only once made a certain amount >of sense. In recent decades the scholarly scene has become much >more complicated, and (many of) our scholarly identities have >become more complex and multidisciplinary as well. As someone who might be said to have scholarly MPD and have seen the games that academics have played, I would like to say that the internet might have made things simpler. If one simply ones to communicate, one can establish a blog. If one want to make a paper/presentation available to the world, can't one just put it up on an open webpage? With even obscure journals becoming available electronically (admittedly for a fee), isn't more information becoming easier to access? If so, where is the need to make multiple presentations? Doesn't it make more sense to put the material up on a website and give people the web address? Or is there more going on than just the act of communication? -Mike Palij New York University [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
