in my work the last few years I have been playing part-time journalist, talking with people on and off the record, chasing stories through scraped corporate documents, etc. To me that flows naturally with the other parts of my work building software, experimenting with social dynamics and even studying language, but it never escapes me that because my work doesn't fit in any discipline there is no place for it. I've been told to strip the amateur journalism entirely, transform it into qualitative research/ethnography, or just quit academia and do it as straight ahead journalism. but it's the mash of different disciplines and traditions that makes it interesting!
if all we ask from "reforming" or rebuilding #ScholComm is for the owners of the journals to change, but everything else remains intact, we will still be missing so much of what our work could be without their structuring influence. I have chosen to not pursue any of the milestones or metrics that might allow me to get a TT job one day in order to do what, to me, is the most interesting work I could do, and it really sucks that that is the tradeoff. Many academics like to imagine the scientific process as welcoming creativity and new ideas, but those new ideas have to be strongly constrained in form - the revolutionary new idea in my field has to look just like everything else in my field just with different results.
How sick would it be if it was normal to not just have transdisciplinary collaboration look like a linguist in the author list and contributing to the discussion of a traditional Nature systems Neuro paper, but genuinely be able to work across fields and come out with something that we truly don't know what comes out the other side will look like? Prespecifying a paper, much less a project, to fit a journal's specification makes our work boring and I have been in more than a few meetings about potential collaborations that went nowhere because there wouldn't be a venue for it.
Not everyone has to want that, some people just want to do molecular biology only, and thats fine! but for that to be the only way to do things is yet another way that our broken communication systems affect literally everything we do in academia.
I guess, relatedly, if anyone knows of any venue for #SurveillanceGraphs hmu. It's already undergoing a sort of informal public peer review through the annotations, but I would like to have a more systematic process of people checking me on my shit and offering their perspectives. In my mind, it would be great if more processes like that could result in coauthorship if someone wants to contribute, but maybe that's another conversation.
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