philosophysmoker-Mstarz

In comments over here, anonymous 8:56 writes:

Hey Smokers, 

I am beginning the first phase of my dissertation research (the topical), and I was wondering if anyone had any specific tips about how to keep track and organize articles, reading notes, etc. and perhaps any tips on how to go about working through a large body of literature. Do you take notes on every article? If so, how much time do you spend summarizing an article? How many articles/chapters do you read per day?  

Thus far, I have been logging everything in a word document, but it's getting out of control...I really need a better (and hopefully less stressful) system 

I really appreciate any advice.

If there's one thing I've learned from the various discussions of research and writing strategies on this blog and others, it's this: there's no one way. I've got things that work ok for me and various anonymouses have things that work for them, but there's nothing anyone can tell you that will be guaranteed to work. Moreover, the dissertation is a learning experience. You're supposed to struggle with it. I know you know all this, but it bears emphasizing. If you knew what you were doing, it wouldn't be a learning experience to do it.

When I'm in reading/research mode, I generally don't compile a formal bibliography or anything like that. Annotated or otherwise. I make use of a couple of bibliography/PDF organization applications, BibDesk and Mendeley (I don't really like Mendeley; I use it because it's free), and I use keywords to help stay organized. But that's about it.

Then I just sort of read, at whatever pace feels right. I start by taking notes in the document itself, be it a book, JSTOR printout, or PDF document, and I start taking more detailed notes in a separate medium only if I can see that the article (or book or whatever) is going to end up being important. But I don't try to read a certain number of things—articles, pages, whatever—per day. I try to give each thing the attention it deserves; sometimes that means breezing through, and sometimes that means spending a week or more on one article.

When I'm dealing with an important article, book, or chapter, I open a .tex file and take notes in it. Depending on where I am in the project, this might be a separate file devoted just to this one article (or whatever), or it might be section in a larger document. Here, I try to articulate the views and the arguments, how the author defends the premises, how the author responds to criticisms, how the material fits into the larger picture, and my own reactions to the material. At this stage I am meticulous about documentation. I quote passages that support my interpretation and cite page numbers. Always cite page numbers. Always. I think about how the material should be organized—I think about what order things should go in. Often, this is not the order in which it appears in the source text. I find that I end up spending a lot of time moving stuff around—I find that I struggle with organizing the ideas more than almost anything else.

At this stage, the distinction between “taking notes” and “drafting” is pretty thin. A lot of the time, I'm taking notes in the actual document I'm writing. However, I still try to be careful in distinguishing between what we might think of as “notes” and what we might think of as “writing”—that is, the very rough “drafty” stuff and the semi-polished stuff that I'm more-or-less satisfied with. (Of course, everything is subject to revision, but some things are more subject than others.) Here I find LaTeX's percent signs to be very valuable. Drafty stuff gets a percent sign with a [bracketed label] indicating why it's percentaged. When the passage is ready for promotion, I delete the percent sign and a new paragraph is born. This also lets me excise material in a slow, noncommittal way. I find that those percent signs get a lot of use.

So, to get back to 8:56's specific questions: I take notes on every article, but often just in the article itself and not necessarily in a separate medium; the amount of time I spend on an article depends on its importance for my project—although I probably wouldn't spend much time summarizing the article, exactly, but would spend whatever time was necessary to summarize the particular arguments or views or whatever that were pertinent; the number of articles/chapters I read in a day depends on the articles and chapters. I don't try to keep summaries of everything in one document; I don't even try to keep summaries of everything.

A dissertation is obviously a big project, and it's obviously going to be difficult to keep track of all your research. So I wouldn't try to keep track of it all in the same place. I'd carve the material up into manageable bits. It is, obviously, customary to organize one's dissertation into chapters, so I'd start there. Maybe organize into sections or subsections if there's a particular chapter that's getting unwieldy. But I suspect that the kind of annotated bibliography 8:56 alludes to, containing all your research for your dissertation, is going to be more trouble than it's worth and will cause you to spend more time than you should on articles and chapters that aren't central enough to your project to be worth it. And, as 8:56 mentions, it will be hard to keep a document like that organized, and so the document wouldn't even be particularly useful.

Anyways, that's what I think. What do you think?

--Mr. Zero

An anonymous Smoker writes:

How important is course work to SCs? More specifically, does auditing (say) half a dozen courses add any value to one's CV? Does it look bad to a SC if a job candidate specializes in X but hasn't taken a course with a prominent X specialist on X from his or her department? Auditing courses is fun and often helpful for developing one's own ideas, but I'm wondering whether my time is better spent elsewhere.

I could be wrong, by my guess is that auditing courses adds nothing of any value whatsoever to one's CV. At my Ph.D.-granting institution, there were literally no requirements of any kind involved in an audit--you didn't even have to show up. The seminars you actually take for a grade, and for which you must do the reading and the writing and participate in whatever other ways are required, don't count for much of anything on your CV--you wouldn't think that someone was prepared to teach an upper-division undergraduate course on ancient skepticism based on the fact that she'd taken a seminar in grad school (would you?)--and audits are worth even less.

So--and again, I could be wrong--but I would say that auditing a seminar here and there might be good for your personal edification, or good for your dissertation when the topic connects with your research somehow. And some people (and I include myself here) do well with a little added structure in their lives, and having a seminar or two to plan things around can really help them stay organized and on task. But as a line on the CV, I can't see how an audit would be worth anything at all.

--Mr. Zero

Here's what happened: sometime in the somewhat recent past, Mrs. Zero and I somehow ended up with a kid. We named it Junior Zero, which was the obvious thing to do, and things have been going pretty well. He's healthy and super duper cute, and it's been a pretty amazing experience so far. The only real problem we've been having is that taking care of Junior sort of cuts into the time we would ordinarily spend doing other things, such as sleeping, keeping the house clean, staying in shape, reading philosophy papers, writing philosophy papers, keeping up with sports, keeping up with the news, keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances, reading books, reading blogs, approving blog comments, and writing blog posts. Among other things. So that's why I haven't been posting very much lately.

Things do tend to slow down around here in the summer, of course. Even under the best circumstances, there's just less Smokery stuff to write about in the summertime. And then lately whenever I sit down to write a post, I usually don't get very far before some other responsibility presents itself. Sometimes this takes the form of preventing Junior from getting killed or destroying something important, but often it just means spending time with him. (This post, for example, has taken me a week to write. (Also, I don't like to just sit down and quickly dash something off--whenever I do that, I end up saying something stupid.(Which is not to suggest that I successfully avoid saying stupid stuff the rest of the time.))) Maybe this is weird, but I've felt more like spending time with my kid than writing. And then, when I do sit down to write something, my actual philosophy projects have been getting most of my attention.

But I thought I should come out of the woods to let you know that I'm still here, and that the blog hasn't died, and let you know what's going on with me. I'm just a lot busier than I used to be, and I guess the reality is that I'm not going to be posting as regularly as I used to. I think I'll get better as things settle down and I get more accustomed to the new stuff I have to do now. And I expect that I'll post more as job-market season approaches, and as school starts in the fall. And I expect that, at least sometimes, I'll be interested in discussing how one goes about balancing attempts at career advancement with successfully keeping one's children alive.

One thing I can tell you right now is that being a father adds an entirely new dimension to the stress I feel about the job market. I'm worried about all the things I was worried about before, but now, in addition to the length and breadth they always had, the worries have a previously inconceivable depth. I feel like a Flatlander experiencing Spaceland for the first time. Man alive.

Anyways, sorry about the no new posts in a long time, and thanks for hanging with us even though there have been no new posts in a long time.

--Mr. Zero

One of the things that initially attracted me to LaTeX was the allegation that the people who typeset for journals would be able to use my .tex file to do an above-average job of typesetting my papers in a below-average amount of time. But I have found that the people who typeset for the journals I publish in do not want my .tex files. They want word files. When I send them seductively-worded emails offering them my gorgeous and easy-to-typeset .tex file, they tell me that they'd prefer a .doc or a rich text. This is inconvenient.

So I have two questions. 1. Which journals will accept .tex files for typesetting? and 2. Is there a simple/easy/time-unconsuming way to transform a .tex file into a file MS Word can read? Because I wind up just copy-and-pasting the paper from the PDF into a new Word document a paragraph or two at a time, inserting the footnotes by hand, and trying to spot all the places where LaTeX has made a ligature character that Word doesn't recognize. Obviously this is not my most serious problem, but it would still be nice to find a better way.

--Mr. Zero

I was reading this post at the Atlantic over the weekend, in which Alan Jacobs complains about the terrible user-interfaces of scholarly databases:

Librarians want students to specify their search terms, but that rarely happens: "Regardless of the advanced-search capabilities of the database they were querying, 'Students generally treated all search boxes as the equivalent of a Google search box,'" simply clicking into a text field and typing away. Problematic, yes -- but why shouldn't they be able to do that? Why shouldn't the software be able to help them out?

Not long ago I was using a research database to try to get a PDF of an article published in a journal to which my college's library has a digital subscription. I knew the title of the article, the author's name, the title of the journal, and the issue date. I plugged all those in to the appropriate text boxes, clicked "search" . . . and got hundreds of results. But the one that I wanted wasn't on the first several pages.

I sent an email to a reference librarian describing this event, and he wrote back saying, "Oh, see, you should have entered the journal's ISSN." Really? Exact title of article and journal, exact name of author, exact date of publication -- that's not enough?

I guess I think that's somewhat of a fair criticism. Jacobs goes on:

...And a Google search does some things that the research databases don't: for instance, when I'm searching for an article in the enormous JSTOR academic journal database, I don't use their search box, but instead go to Google using the "site" delimiter: site:jstor.org my-search-term. Why? Because if I spell a name wrong Google knows the correct spelling and asks me if I meant that. On JSTOR itself I just get inferior results.

So maybe our greater emphasis shouldn't be on training users to work with bad search tools, but to improve the search tools. Especially since serious research questions aren't as afflicted by spammy SEO as many other queries, by this point in the development of online life we ought to be doing a lot better than we are.

This seems right to me. When I was first in grad school, I spent a lot of time on the Philosopher's Index. But I never really got the hang of it, and if I'm honest, I'll admit that I haven't looked at it in years. I haven't checked to see if my current institution subscribes to it. And I can't remember the last time I tried to use the search utility on JSTOR. With either of them, if I'm looking for something specific, I can never find it; and if I don't have anything specific in mind, I'm not going to find anything I can use.

Jacobs alludes, on behalf of the Index/JSTOR search utilities, to the argument that this is because I don't know how to use them, and that if I understood the logic of these search engines I would get better results. But I guess I don't see that as a criticism of me, and I definitely don't see it as a suggestion of a way to improve myself. I see that as a fairly conclusive criticism of the logic of the search engines. If the search engines employed better logic, it would be possible to use them effectively without having to go out of your way to learn a complicated and unintuitive way of thinking.

The research database I make most use of is Google Scholar, and the two features I find come in handiest are the "Related Articles" and the "Cited By" tools. If you, like Jacobs, know the title of the article and the author's name, your search will be successful. It will work. And if you spell something wrong, it will be Google and help you spell it right. And if you want to see how other people have responded to the article, the "Cited By" results will tell you. You'll have to sift through the results to sort the articles that mention it in passing from those that mention it more prominently, but you'll know. And it helps you to see which articles made a big splash and which ones have had a more modest impact. And then it links you to the paper on JSTOR or Springer or whatever. I'm open to the possibility that I'm being really irresponsible with my research, but I sort of doubt it. Google Scholar works really well. If I'm using it to look for something I find it, and it has helped me discover I-don't-know-how-many papers I would never have found otherwise.

--Mr. Zero

You probably already heard about this, but the APA has agreed to try moving the Eastern APA meeting to the end of the first full week in January for the 2015/16 academic year. I think this is good news, whether or not it ultimately works out. It's good to try new things.

One question I have is, what are they going to do for the 2016/17 academic year? Suppose the first full week in January doesn't work out. Suppose that's a really bad time to have the meeting. Since Eastern APA meetings have to be scheduled years in advance, does that mean we'll be stuck with the early January meeting time until 2018 or 2019? Or are they going to try a range of dates over the next several years? I think they should try a range of dates.

In a related note, our old friend Chris Alen Sula sent me an email last night, saying,

You may have seen the recent APA announcement about the Eastern APA date effective 2015/16. When I looked at the crosstab results at http://www.apaonline.org/APAOnline/Eastern_Division/Eastern_Division_Meeting_Survey_Results.aspx, I noticed there was also data about the question of whether in-person interviews should be a primary function of the Eastern APA meeting, with responses broken out between regular, student, and international members. With that question, more than all the others, I noticed a difference in the pattern of responses among these three groups.

I re-expressed the values as percentages for each group and visualized them [in the chart below]:

This is interesting. It seems that a lot of people don't care whether job interviews are a primary function of the Eastern meeting, but you are significantly more likely to think job interviews should be a primary function if you're not a student. Hmmm.

Many thanks to Dr. Sula.

--Mr. Zero

Tips for cool things to see, restaurants, places to avoid, etc? I've been to Washington before, but it was a long time ago and I didn't have much time to spend. My advice would not be useful to anyone who'd so much as looked at a map of the place. What should people do while they're there?

--Mr. Zero

After years of complaining about it, I'm finally sold on the online application process. Maybe it's just that I'm getting used to it, but it was not at all terrible this year. Easily three fourths of my applications this year were online, so it might also have just been that I was in "online application" mode from the start. It's still pretty obnoxious how you have to fill out the same contact info/references data in every application, but this year my autofill did a better job of filling out the forms for me, so it wasn't as much of a hassle.

Another nice thing about online apps is this: when I prepare paper applications, I am very bad about knowing how many of each document I will need and I always end up having to print out one or two more of a bunch of documents at the last minute. Obviously CVs and writing samples are easy, since everybody wants those, but I never print out enough research statements or syllabuses for business ethics. Online applications make this a non-issue.

Also, online applications are much, much cheaper. Way cheaper. Vastly cheaper.

And it seems like people are getting better about having "upload" slots for each required document. I only had one unexpected occasion to go into Adobe and make a combination PDF of several required documents.

It's also nice not to have to wait around for all the photocopies to copy. Making 30 or 40 copies of your writing sample is time-consuming and annoying. And I always do my copying in the evenings so I don't tie up the copier during the day, so it was nice not having to do very much of that.

But if I may make a suggestion, please put the application process all online or all offline. No more of this "submit these three documents electronically and then these four documents in hard copy" bullshit. That's the worst. Pick one.

--Mr. Zero

I'm at a new school this fall. I really like my students. They seem like a great bunch. Lively, engaged, thoughtful. Their first paper is due in a couple of weeks. The university has made Turnitin available. I've never used it before, although I've caught my share of plagiarized papers over the years. I now have a Turnitin account, but I have misgivings about using it. I guess because I feel like I am essentially accusing my students of being (at least) potential plagiarists even though I currently have no reason to think any of them are or would be plagiarists. It strikes me as being like overzealous airport security -- treat everyone like a potential criminal in order to (presumably) catch the rare miscreant. But at what cost?

For the past few years, Nous and PPR have stopped accepting submissions for about half the year. This is, as they say, because they have such a backlog and their acceptance rate is so minuscule that it doesn't make sense to accept submissions all year. I wonder why they don't start publishing more issues. If they published bi-monthly instead of quarterly, they could accept more articles and have a shorter backlog. And if they have such a backlog, and they get so many submissions, and their acceptance rate is so small, the could do this without reducing the overall quality of the journals. What would be the problem with that?

--Mr. Zero

I am on record as being opposed to multiple choice philosophy tests. But suppose I have been tapped to teach a large introduction to philosophy course that will meet in a humongous lecture hall, and that I won't have any TAs or help with the grading, but I will have 150 students in this one ginormous class. I'm thinking that multiple choice might be the way to go. But I still sort of worry that these things are frowned upon. Suppose I get a nice interview at the APA, and the committee says, "I see you've got a humongous lecture class here. How'd you do it?" If I say, "Multiple choice tests..." will I be fucked? Or will the people be understanding and merciful? I plan to work in some in-class writing, but this wil have to be highly informal. What do the Smokers think?

--Mr. Zero

In the New York Times story about the Synthese hullabaloo, it is mentioned that the philosopher Kelly James Clark of Calvin College wrote to Synthese in May of 2009 to complain about the Forrest article. In a comment on New APPS, Professor Clark has posted the letter in its entirety. It is unbelievably terrible.

[In order to avoid confusion, I have set blockquotes containing material from Clark's letter in boldface type, sections in which Clark quotes material from Forrest's article in italics, and left sections in which Forrest blockquotes someone else plain.]

Clark writes:

[I'm skipping the weird preamble]

Nonetheless, I can't believe that ad hominems (abusive and circumstantial) such as the following have any logical bearing on the author's argument:

What follows is supposed to be an example from the Forrest article of an abusive and circumstantial ad hominem argument:

Although he has been called a legal scholar (Wasley et al. 2006), he is neither a lawyer nor, properly speaking, a constitutional scholar. He lacks the requisite credentials and expertise, holding degrees in philosophy, religious apologetics, and a Master of Juridical Studies (M.J.S.) from the Washington University School of Law (the Discovery Institute financed Beckwith’s research for the M.J.S. with a $9000 fellowship) (Beckwith, n.d.). The M.J.S. “is designed for individuals in career fields who would benefit from limited legal training and do not require a professional degree…. [C]redit earned toward the MJS is not transferable to the JD program. It also does not qualify recipients to practice law” (WA Univ. School of Law 2005–2006, p. 23). Nonetheless, he presents his major pro-ID arguments in two law review articles (Beckwith 2003d,e) and a book, Law, Darwinism, and Public Education (Beckwith 2003b).

Here is what is going on in this much-discussed passage. Forrest points out that Beckwith has been called a legal scholar by Wasley et al., and then argues that because he lacks the relevant credentials Beckwith is, in fact, not to be legitimately regarded as a legal scholar. He's not a lawyer. He does not have a J.D or a license to practice law. He is not presently qualified to obtain such a license. He has a Master of Juridical Studies degree, whatever that is.

A lot of people find this discussion of Beckwith's credentials distasteful, because the focus should be on the quality of his arguments, not the academic degrees he does or does not hold. Although I am generally inclined to agree with this way of thinking about things--whatever problems there may be with, say, Kripke's views, the fact that he does not hold a Ph.D. in philosophy is not one of them--I am not convinced that a discussion of credentials is unwarranted in this particular case. (NB I am also not convinced that they are warranted; see below.)

Allow me to illustrate with a partially fictional example. Richard Dawkins discusses the cosmological argument for the existence of God in The God Delusion, and he has a perfect right to do so in spite of the fact that he has no advanced degree in philosophy and is not a "scholar" of philosophy. These facts about his credentials are not really relevant to assessing the quality of his writing on this topic; what is relevant is the (low) quality of his writings on this topic. But suppose that Dawkins had an MA in philosophy, and that he had been described as a "scholar of philosophy" on that basis. I think that such a thing would be silly and possibly worth remarking upon, especially if Dawkins's activism had public-policy-related consequences. Even more so if a political think-tank had paid his tuition for the philosophy MA. The suggestion by Clark and others that there is literally no possible way that any discussion of Beckwith's credentials could be relevant to any philosophical discussion is clearly false.

On the other hand, the Wasley, et al. 2006 reference is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about Beckwith's tenure denial case, not a partisan attempt to use Beckwith's MJS to lend credibility to his views about the constitutionality of teaching ID as science. If there are places where partisans use Beckwith's MJS to lend credibility to his legal views, it would have been better to cite them instead of Wasley et al. It seems to me that this makes the passage in question less worthy of inclusion. Possibly unworthy of inclusion.

Such character assassination is beneath Synthese.

Having said all that, when I read this last thing, I thought to myself, ''Maybe I don't know what "character assassination" is supposed to be." So I looked it up. Wikipedia says that it's "an attempt to tarnish a person's reputation [that] may involve exaggeration, misleading half-truths, or manipulation of facts to present an untrue picture of the targeted person." Which is good, because that's what I thought it was. (Wikipedia goes on to point out that one of the most serious problems with character assassinations is that it can be difficult or impossible to undo the damage they cause. Once the insinuation is out there, it never fully goes away. You can't get the toothpaste back in the tube. This potential permanence of effect is why it's called a character assassination, instead of a character knuckle sandwich.)

It is obvious that this passage is not a character assassination. Maybe it's weird; maybe it was not worthy of inclusion in the article; maybe it is indicative of a nasty tone that has no place in the pages of Synthese. But it is not a use of exaggeration, misleading half-truths, or manipulation of facts designed to present an untrue picture of Beckwith. It says that Beckwith lacks credentials he in fact lacks.

The idea that Beckwith's good name will be forever unfairly tarnished by the fact that Forrest has accurately pointed out that he isn't a lawyer is absurd; the repeated claim that this represents a character assassination on Beckwith is itself a character assassination on Forrest.

[I'm skipping the discussion of red herrings.]

There are also misleading, and apparently obviously false interpretations of Beckwith's [sic] views:

Spoiler alert: the passage from Forrest that Clark is about to quote as his example of a misleading and "apparently obviously" (whatever that means) false interpretation of "Beckwith's" views does not contain any discussion of Beckwith's views whatsoever.

Dembski's desire to use his faith hegemonically predates his entry into the ID movement. His [that is, Dembski's] article, “Scientopoly: The Game of Scientism,” written for the Fall 1989–Winter 1990 Greek Orthodox journal Epiphany (a special anti-evolution issue), is in total alignment with Epiphany’s purpose:

To proclaim the …Gospel of Jesus in the contemporary world. To promote an … Orthodox Christian world view, based on the Holy Scriptures…as the salvific alternative to godless secularism. To provide the foundation for the restoration of a fully Christian way of life…To preserve the heritage …of traditional Christian culture …To defend the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church …in an age of apostasy. (Epiphany 1989–1990)

Dembski interweaves the same strands here as in his later work: science provides knowledge, but theological knowledge trumps science. Modern science has become a weapon against theology; an example is Darwin’s theory of evolution, although “current evolutionists reject much of Darwin’s original formulation” (Dembski 1989– 1990, p. 112). Science ridicules God and rejects evidence of his activity in the natural order—miracles.

This is a discussion of Dembski, not Beckwith. OMG WTF.

Clark goes on:

I haven't read the Beckwith [sic] article but the title is about scientism not science. So the author's repeated use of the term "science" in her explication surely misrepresents Beckwith's [sic] views.

Read that again. Clark hasn't read the article mentioned in the passage. He hasn't looked closely enough to notice that the article is not even by Beckwith. But he's pretty sure based on the title of the article that Forrest is misrepresenting Beckwith's [sic] views. After all, the title doesn't even mention "science" and clearly indicates that the article is about a totally and entirely different topic. And that topic is something called "scientism."

Apparently it is obvious to Clark that there isn't any relationship between the institution of science and a view called "scientism" (which is the view that the scientific worldview is better than all the others). The author of an article about scientism would apparently obviously have no occasion to identify or discuss the nature of the institution of science. It is so apparently obvious that this would never happen that you don't even have to read the article, or even bother to correctly identify its author, before you write to the editors of Synthese to complain.

Then there's the suggestion of sinister plots, masquerading as logic or, what?, culture criticism:

Such sentiments reflect the alliance of some ID proponents with Christian Reconstructionism
(CR), also called “Theocratic Dominionism,” a far-right form of Christianity with repressive public policy goals.

Should a journal with your explicit aims publish unsubstantiated political alliances?

I checked. Forrest devotes several paragraphs to the substantiation of this political alliance. She connects various of Dembski's (not Beckwith; in this passage, as in the last one, she is discussing Dembski, not Beckwith) views about the proper role of Christianity in public life with those of CR, points out that certain CR honchos are also ID supporters, and that there are financial ties between the two groups. She cites sources.

I could go on, but read the text yourself and see if it lives up to the professed aims of your journal. I can see how this might be published in a rhetoric journal where the goal is to win whatever the cost. But I don't see how it could be published in a philosophy journal that despises sophistry, suggestion and fallacies.

The interesting thing about this passage is that it suggests that the Editors in Chief did not read this article they published and made no attempt to ascertain whether it lives up to the professed aims of the journal they edit they published it. Obviously, this may be true, but if it is true it means that the editors weren't doing their jobs. If this were true, it would be an egregious professional failing on their part. And if I were a recipient of a letter like this I would be deeply insulted by the insinuation.

Sincerely yours,

Kelly James Clark

I hope that when the EiCs received this letter, they threw it straight into the garbage where it belongs. I really hope that this letter did not cause the EiCs to rethink their position on the Forrest piece. I really, really hope that this kind of shit is not what convinced the EiCs to attach the disclaimer.

--Mr. Zero

Job Market Season is about to begin, and I am ready:

• Cover letters; customized across several dimensions. ✓
  
• Writing sample. ✓
  
• Updated CV. ✓
  
• Updated research statement. ✓
  
• Updated teaching statement. ✓
  
• Sample syllabi, updated. ✓
  
• Teaching evaluations, current. ✓
  
• Updated letters of recommendation. ✓
  
• APA membership, renewed. ✓
  
• A vague memory of how I set up a mail-merge last year. ✓
  
• Bowel-shaking earthquakes of doubt and remorse. ✓
  
• 1.75L bottle of Bombay Sapphire; 750ml bottle vermouth; bucket of olives; ice. ✓
  

In addition, I took the time to rewrite my materials in LaTeX; I figured, there's no point in taking the time to learn it without without using to whatever advantage on the job market. Say what you want about the content, my shit looks awesome.

Another thing I spent some time worrying about is the role my dissertation should play in my application materials this time around. Since I've been out for a while now, it seems to me that my dissertation should play a less central role. So now my dissertation is the starting point, but the focus is on what I've accomplished since then.

And although I'm not really excited about it, exactly, I wish the fucking JFP would drop already so I could get on with this fucking thing.

--Mr. Zero

As you might be aware, I decided to give the LaTeX typesetting system a try last month. After a brief trial, I wrote about how I wasn't sure about it, but the ensuing conversation made me think that it was worth giving it a serious try. So I'v been giving it a serious try. Since Anon 7:31 asks for an update, here's an update.

There are things I like about it. I like the way the resulting documents look. I really, really like the way it handles bibliographies. I like using BibDesk to manage my references--I had been using a spreadsheet before, and this is way better. I don't mind the text-editor feel of the text editor. I set the thing to display in the same typeface I set the completed documents in, so it doesn't look particularly ugly.

I have a number of teaching- and research-related projects going right now, and I'm finding that the process of converting an existing document to LaTeX affords a nice opportunity to rethink my way through the paper in a deep and comprehensive way. There is so much nuts-and-bolts-type stuff you have to do in terms of retyping quotation marks and hyphens and reemphasizing and italicizing text that every sentence requires at least a little scrutiny.

Another of my projects is a first draft. So far drafting in LaTeX is not that different from drafting in Word.

I still kind of don't like the footnotes. I find it hard to see where they end, since it's just a relatively small green curly bracket. Using percentage signs, as was suggested in the previous thread, to interrupt the text makes them stand out more, but at the cost of breaking up the paragraph, which should be thought of as a single continuous unit.

It's still slightly weird that you read one document but edit another. Noticing a typo in your reading copy means you must open up another document, edit it, and then convert it to pdf. Of course, you have to do that in order to make a pdf out of a word document, too. But since the TeX documents are laid out in very different ways--one of them has lots of commands and stuff while the other one sort of obeys those commands--finding the place in the TeX file that corresponds to the same place in the PDF can be hard to do.

I also miss one thing about MS Word, and that is the easy insertion of comments into word documents and the way that these comments can be anchored to the editable bits of text they are about. I can do this to PDFs because I have the full version of Adobe Acrobat, but last I checked, the free version of the reader does not support the creation or the reading of this kind of comment. And not everybody has access to the full versions of Adobe. I'm sure that there's some free PDF reader that works almost as well, but not everybody has that, too, neither.

But I guess the main reason I'm likely to stick with LaTeX is that it is not MS Word. I did not and will not buy the "new" '07 and '08 version of Word, and my obsolete and outdated version is becoming more so. But as we transition from "Yeah, the new version is expensive and has a counterintuitive user interface" to "Really? You're still using that????!!?" I'll probably need to stop using Word altogether, or using it only in a very limited capacity.

--Mr. Zero

I have some friends who employ multiple choice tests in their philosophy classes. The primary motivation seems to be that such exams are much easier to grade, and I must admit that sometimes, when I'm about to dive into a pool of poorly organized, poorly thought out, illegible bluebooks, I am tempted to follow suit. For multiple choicers, exam day is no big deal; for bluebooksters, it is very very bad. With four classes, I lose an entire week. One friend got on the multiple choice track by giving exams where half was multiple choice and half was short answer/essay questions, and then noticed that scores were highly correlated with one another. So she cut out the essays. She says, "so why am I busting my balls to grade these fucking essays?" She was getting the same information from the multiple choice questions.

I dabbled in multiple choice once back in grad school, and it seems to me that the drawbacks of multiple choice are decisive. For one thing, they require a heavy upfront investment. It is much more difficult and time-consuming to write a multiple choice exam than it is to write an essay exam. You need at least four possible answers per question, where exactly one is definitely the right answer, and the other three are definitely not right, but they have to be close. I find I don't have the knack for this. I found that I ended up mostly writing questions where there was a trick or which were otherwise unfair.

And the other thing is, and this is more important, I worry that multiple choice tests emphasize the wrong things. While I think it is important for someone with training in philosophy to know, for example, what Descartes did and did not say, and to be capable of picking the thing he didn't say out of a lineup, it's just as important for that person to understand why Descartes said that stuff. And I think this is where philosophical training becomes useful to non-philosophers. Being able to understand what the arguments are, how they work, how their authors defend them, and what their critics think is wrong with them is a fundamental part of a philosophical education. And gaining a sufficiently deep understanding of how arguments and patterns of reasoning work that it is possible to apply the lessons to non-philosophical situations is an important benefit of success in philosophy classes. And it is more difficult to demonstrate this understanding in a multiple choice test, and students who are preparing for a multiple choice test are less likely to thereby develop these skills. I'm not saying it can't be done; I'm saying it has to be a very well-written exam, and it would be very difficult and time-consuming to write such an exam. And I've never seen a multiple choice exam that I thought would be effective at this.

--Mr. Zero

\documentclass{whiny blog post}

\section{Introduction}

I spent some time this weekend thinking about the costs and benefits of switching to LaTeX. It seemed to me that it would make a better post if I got some empirical data concerning LaTeX, and so I downloaded MacTex and attempted to convert a paper. I followed Charles Tanksley's instructions, which were helpful.

\section{Pros}

It's nerdy.

The finished product looks super awesome. And you don't have to think much about how it's going to look; you just write the content and LaTeX automatically makes it look awesome. This is supposed to save you time and stress.

It is alleged to render equations and other symbols nicely. Perhaps I chose my conversion project poorly, but the paper I chose to convert to LaTeX did not contain many weirdo symbols or any equations at all.

Apparently it is easier to manage bibliographies and references. There's a heavy up-front investment, though. Also, question: suppose you have to reformat your bibliography to conform to some journal's idiosyncratic style. Does LaTeX make this easier or harder?

You can make 1 simple formatting change that instantly applies to the whole document.

You are not subject to the whims of the MicroSoft Corporation. Their decisions about the viability of the .doc format are not going to fuck up your shit. Nor is their decision to totally stupidify the user interface for Word.

Edit: In comments, Kevin Klement mentions several other pros:

But there are a lot of other reasons to prefer LaTeX you don't discuss. The maximum portability of plain text formats. The non-proprietaryness. Heck, even the fact that plain text formats are much less likely to be corrupted than encrypted binaries ought to be mentioned.

End Edit

\section{Cons.}

You have to have Word (or something like it) anyways, because your students have word. You have to have something that will read their documents. Plain text editors won't do the job.

Frankly, I just don't see the point about how much time you'll save if you don't have to think about formatting. For one thing, I don't spend that much time thinking about formatting. Titles; paragraph breaks; blockquotes; offset definitions and principles; section headings; I spend almost no time thinking about these things. For another thing, you have to think about them in LaTeX, too, because you have to give a '\section{x}' command in order to get LaTeX to know to put a section heading in. You still have to write the code correctly.

Now, if you have to reformat something for a journal, say, you might save time by applying 1 simple formatting change that instantly applies to the whole document. But you can do that in Word, too, if you've been using your headings right (which is no harder than doing it in LaTex--anyone who could figure out LaTeX could figure out Word). And I bet I could just reformat the section headings by hand one at a time in less time than it would take me to identify the 1 simple change I have to make by doing a google search, finding the relevant information, applying the relevant procedure, testing it to make sure it worked, and then fixing any bugs that might have come up. (For example, I attempted to create subscripted text. I had to find instructions on google, and then implement the code I learned, and then identify and repair several coding errors--I have trouble remembering to hit curly brackets rather than parentheses, though I'm sure this will go away with familiarity. Then, when it still wasn't working, I had to do more googling in order to learn that the original set of instructions left out that I had to be in Math Mode in order for the subscript command to work properly, and that in particular I had to be out of math mode in order for the text after the subscript to look right. In Word, this would have taken at most 1 second, since I have a subscript button on my toolbar and I know the shortcut keystroke that results in subscripted text.)

It seems to me to be easier in Word to make 1 simple formatting change that instantly applies to exactly as much or as little of the document as you want it to.

Although I admit that equations are a problem with Word, regular logical symbols and notations are not. Although it could be easier to navigate, there's an insert symbols menu, and you can program shortcut keys for the ones you use the most.

It is easier to annotate a word document. This makes it easier for someone to comment on a draft, and also for you to connect the comment to the appropriate location in the paper.

And if your friend doesn't annotate your document, the page numbers will still be meaningful if she's looking at your Word document. But there seems to be no inherent connection between the pages in the typeset PDF file that LaTeX creates and the text in the .tex file. In fact, the document you print out does not look at all similar to the document you edit. All of its formatting and pagination characteristics are completely different. This makes it difficult to find and edit individual paragraphs and sentences. Much more difficult than simply going to page 12, paragraph 2, sentence 3, or whatever.

Word's GUI is (somewhat) intuitive and doesn't require you to memorize a bunch of codes. However, the new version of word is substantially crappier. I don't want to be the guy who defends MicroSoft Word or anything, because I have spent a huge amount of time so angry with MicroSoft Word that I wanted to kill the balls off of it. But a lot of the problems with Word that I see people saying contributed to their abandoning it in favor of LaTeX are easily solved and seemed to me to stem from not knowing how to use it.

Although, you can make 1 simple formatting change that instantly applies to the whole document, it is often not particularly easy to know how to make that change. Suppose I don't want my paragraphs to indent, and I want to demarcate paragraph breaks by adding an extra space between them. How?

Footnotes in LaTex are kind of a pain. And although I'm no Kripke, I use a lot of footnotes.

Quotation marks are kind of a pain. And because I'm no Kripke, I use a lot of quotation marks. (Zing!) (Just kidding.)

Word count. As I was writing this, I realized that Word has a pretty sophisticated word count utility. My LaTeX editor has a "statistics" utility that counts words. I hope it counts only the words in what you intend to be the text, and not all the extra formatting junk. I know that Word's does this, and Word's utility allows you to exclude footnotes easily. Does LaTeX's? Also, Word's word count allows you to select blocks of text and get stats on the selection. My LaTex editor doesn't seem to. The word count utility on MS Word seems to be pretty superior.

In conclusion, although there are some cool features here, I don't think there is enough to compel me to switch.

--Mr. Zero

\end{document}

A few months ago, I wrote about how I was having trouble finding time making use of my many opportunities to engage in activities that enhance physical fitness. I am happy to report that these problems are behind me. A couple of months ago, I bought a new bicycle, which has served as a generator of enthusiasm about cycling. Since then, I've been getting up at dawn so I can squeeze a ride in before work. Dawn is a good time for several reasons: 1. I wasn't using that time very well before. 2. I don't have to knock off work early, so I don't feel like I'm gypping myself out of time for writing or course prep. 3. I don't get home late, so it doesn't take away from time in the evening that I want to spend with Mrs. Zero.

It seems to me that I look and feel a lot better lately. It is hard to tell what impact it's had on my writing; I've had one of the busiest end-of-semester/start-of-summer-school transitions I can recall, so I haven't been doing much writing lately. Time will tell, I guess.

--Mr. Zero

As the holiday season approaches, I am reminded of one area of my now year-old life as a visiting assistant professor of philosophy in which I have entirely failed: exercise. In the olden days, when my teaching duties included one class or less, I was a somewhat avid cyclist. Nowadays my bicycle has been repurposed as wall art: I think of it as a sculpture entitled, "A Constant Reminder of How Out of Shape You Are." If I'm not teaching, I feel like I should be doing something that will help me snag a tenure-track position, such as physically applying for jobs or writing kick-ass philosophy papers. And if I'm not doing that, I feel like I ought to be doing something to keep me from becoming divorced. I never, ever feel as though I have time for exercise. As a result, I hardly ever exercise. As a result, what little exercise I manage to fit in is extremely unpleasant. As a result, I get around to it less and less often. As a result, my sculpture gets more and more meaningful. It's a vicious regress.

--Mr. Zero