Old Fashioned ways...(II)

Things have slowed down on this blog since the SBL Annual Meeting and my trip to the US. I really had to take some days off, and when I got back to office, it was a "thousand" things to take care of...

When I finally reached 'the promised land' ( see on my flight problems below), I had some nice days at both San Antonio, and then on Long Island at Thanksgiving,- not to speak about a nine-holes round of playing golf. Thanks brother! For the first time in my life I had the mixed experiences of using a golfcart on the course instead of walking. We don't use that in Norway; we are walkers.... :-)

Getting back home there was a lot of e-mails to skim through, and the BlogLines had a lot of interesting postings to read. I have 31 bloggers on my list, and I am impressed by how many postings some of the bibliobloggers are able to produce.

It was also interesting to discover that some of my comments about How to read a scholarly paper have elicited further comments:
First out were Mark Goodacre, then
David Meadows at RogueClassicism supported me in a passing comment,
then Edward Cook on his blog Ralph the Sacred River expanded on our comments, which then again was followed up by Stephen C. Carlsson on his Hypotyposeis, and expanded even more by Mark Goodacre on his NTGateway Blog. Marks comments on his own experiences when extemporating on his own paper are also valuable here; see here and here.

I am greatful for the responses, and am looking forward to upcoming sessions where presenters will be more aware of the audience getting hold of their main arguments then speedreading through a lagre manuscript, hoping to present all the nuances. I find Mark's and Edward Cooks comments very helpful. Mark's method may be difficult when reading very technical papers, and I know very well of the problem of not knowing how many attendants there will be, but handouts and/or some other visuals are most helpful.

And I fully support these remarks by Mark: The reason for my bringing this up in the first place is the idea that there is something necessarily superior, something more academically appropriate about reading a paper. This is the thing that I am struggling with. What I remain bothered about is the disjunction between the way we all work in our day-to-day lecturing and the way we behave at conferences. What I suspect is that one has simply not caught up with the other. We are in the habit of reading out papers not because we have thought it through and have decided that it is the best way to communicate with other scholars but because it is an academic convention, something we have all inherited, that we assume is the way to do things without question. A hundred years ago, I'd bet you'd hear most of your undergraduate lectures read-out by your lecturers. Under such circumstances, it was natural to read-out conference papers too. But now none of us read out lectures to undergraduates, do we? So this is how I am beginning to see it, with apologies if I am overstating the case. If we are comfortable lecturing ex tempore on a day-by-day basis, over a much longer time period (hour long lectures), on topics that are not always intimately related to our research (we all lecture on stuff we have never written on), to people less patient than scholars (undergraduate students), then surely it is a more straightforward thing to talk for 20-25 minutes to friendly faces on material we know intimately? I could not have said it any better, also when keeping in mind the comments of Ken Litwak added to that posting.