"Academics have a completely opposite sensibility, maybe excessively so at times." I think that contrast is worth drawing out. When reading academics, I often wish they would do less acknowledging and describing the shoulders they're standing on, and more looking around and talking about what they see.
Yes. It's understandable, because for one peer review has become more a matter of enforcing extreme citational rigor and less a matter of evaluating whether someone's claims meet basic standards of evidentiary validity and relevance, and second, because the more you qualify a statement, the less likely you are to draw an aggravated or aggressive critique. Or so I think people reason.
I'm slowly working through a new book on Byzantium that I think makes the correction to this in all the wrong ways--he makes really sweeping assertions that almost everybody else has been wrong on a particular point and there's no footnote or endnote, and then he has these incredibly detailed and cited analyses of what seem to me to be really specific points. What I'd like is strong argument and strong description with citational 'mini-essays' in the back that situate the main argument in a scholarly or historiographical context.
"Academics have a completely opposite sensibility, maybe excessively so at times." I think that contrast is worth drawing out. When reading academics, I often wish they would do less acknowledging and describing the shoulders they're standing on, and more looking around and talking about what they see.
Yes. It's understandable, because for one peer review has become more a matter of enforcing extreme citational rigor and less a matter of evaluating whether someone's claims meet basic standards of evidentiary validity and relevance, and second, because the more you qualify a statement, the less likely you are to draw an aggravated or aggressive critique. Or so I think people reason.
I'm slowly working through a new book on Byzantium that I think makes the correction to this in all the wrong ways--he makes really sweeping assertions that almost everybody else has been wrong on a particular point and there's no footnote or endnote, and then he has these incredibly detailed and cited analyses of what seem to me to be really specific points. What I'd like is strong argument and strong description with citational 'mini-essays' in the back that situate the main argument in a scholarly or historiographical context.