I tell you what - this paper was rough to start. I had ideas floating around, had my outline, had my notes, but nothing really stood out to me in terms of a "so what" for the paper. But after reading your comments and really thinking about the essence of socially optimized research and Moby Dick, I was finally able to finalize my ideas and hopefully I did that successfully.
Sometimes (and maybe most of the time...and I'm sure plenty of you fellow writers can relate to this) I get hung up on the details and semantics behind writing the perfect paper - something that will get me a good grade or stand out to be so impressive it's mind blowing. But that's just not realistic. I heard in an interview once with a writer that "you don't get it right, you get it written." I hear it all the time: just write it. Just do it. After I wrote this paper, something that was academic but perhaps not perfectly formal, I realized that by not holding up on those details (semicolon here or comma, full three lined sentence or short ones, direct quote or paraphrase) I was able to just enjoy writing the paper.
Here is the link to my paper. Feel free to read, respond, and/or argue against my ideas. Hope you guys had fun with your papers too!
Your paper reminded me of a quote from our reading for today (from "The State of the Digital Humanities" by Alan Lui) when you talk about the emphasis placed on scholarly sources.
ReplyDeleteHe says the problem with scale in the digital humanities is that "either a project retains established practices of scholarly quality-control ... in which case no addition of terabytes and petaflops can allow it to scale up past the human bottlenecks ... or a project uses some combination of algorithmic means and crowd sourcing to take the brakes off the terabytes and petaflops, whereupon quality-control no longer meets the standards of scholarship."
You have to wonder where to find that balance between scale and quality.