Monday, November 06, 2006

the burden of young scholars

This article interested me very much, mainly because of its discussion on young scholars and how they (or should I start to say "we"?) are "not really entrusted with much breadth" (Manning, paragraph #51). Now, I am not sure we should be entrusted with too much breadth because our experience is limited. But now I wonder, did my thesis advisor advise me to write my thesis on such a specific topic because that is just the way it is done? Hmmmmm...

And in talking about putting/writing books online, something came to mind. Have I been cheating myself and/or the author by printing out many of these articles and reading them in paper format? I know we have talked about this before, but it was mostly early in the semester. So now that we have progressed 11 or 12 weeks into this class, I figured I would bring it up again. Now, I do often have my computer nearby or on so I can link with the footnotes if I want to. But still, am I somehow defeating the purpose of online books/articles by doing it this way?

Sorry for all the questions this week...

1 Comments:

At 07 November, 2006 11:35, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I felt too like I came away from this article with far more questions than answers. If these e-books are to be successful, especially for the young scholar, first book or dissertation, a broad appeal needs to be targeted from the start. And what I have always been told about a dissertation is almost exactly the opposite...it's supposed to make you the expert on ONE very SPECIFIC topic. I don't know how we, as the next generation of history scholars, will approach our dissertations with two different ideas pulling at us like this.

 

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