The Reading Room

bobble

00:01

Giant's Drink answer has its first draft done :D I'm going to wait a day or so before proofreading.

Bookworm

07:11

0

Q: What does Justice Scalia mean by "Thoreauvian 'you-may-do-what-you-like-so-long-as-it-does-not-injure-someone-else' beau ideal"?

I'm more interested in the literature than law here. I think this means the same thing as "your rights end where mine begin"? Scalia's alluding Henry David Thoreau, but my English is too unproficient to read Thoreau. Why does Scalia allude Thoreau? What's "beau ideal"? An example of an opi...

henry-david-thoreau

Rand al'Thor

08:56

@EddieKal You understand people may be reluctant, after some previous discussions in here, to identify themselves to you as starrers ... however, yes, I was one of the stars on Gareth's message, because I agree with pretty much every part of it.

From my observations here, scholarly answers tend to be well-received, albeit not as well as they deserve (perhaps because some people just go "TL;DR" and don't bother reading or upvoting), and certainly not a target for downvotes, so I too was surprised by your statement.

Perhaps we have different interpretations of "scholarly"? I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that word, so maybe that's where the difference of views lies.

Rand al'Thor

09:09

For that matter, I'm not sure exactly how to define my own interpretation of "scholarly" :-P I suppose I'm thinking of answers which are well researched and probably based on academic publications in literature journals or similar professional criticism. I've written a number of answers based on such resources, and don't remember ever receiving any downvotes on them.

Bookworm

11:44

0

Q: what does " hearing a story was the last stroke of the hoe" mean?

A quote from an ACT text passage: . Thirty years after that day when my grandfather put the stone axhead in my hands, I understood at last why, as I held that stone, my mind had filled with images of tall corn swaying in the wind, images of women dancing as they held the season’s harvest in thei...

meaning

Rand al'Thor

15:55

@bobble Me too: normally view counts here are much lower and Puzzling gets a lot more HNQs. Pern isn't that well-known either.

Congrats on 200 and 250 rep btw :-)

bobble

I'm planning on accepting an answer later today - choosing between Mary's and yours at the moment

Eddie Kal

17:52

@Randal'Thor That's great. Now we just have to wait for another starlet and we can talk in-depth about this. I think there are some issues that constitute a very obvious logical disconnect and we can address them.

@Randal'Thor What discussions? Wait, don't tell me. Let me guess.

@Randal'Thor There is something very important to this discussion about scholarship and a more rounded understanding of the very idea of literature.

It is important to be unbiased, inclusive, evidence-based, text-based, and

Gareth Rees

19:10

I had a look at the 100 most recent answers to see if I can spot the downvoting clique. Here are all the downvoted answers in this sample, together with the reason for the downvotes if someone gives a reason in comments (or my best guess in italics if nothing in the comments makes it clear)

Why not have the Eagles transport Frodo to Mount Doom? — answer uses evidence from fan-fiction, not from canon

Why did Johnson scoff those “who toil at the lower employments of life”? — answer includes no evidence

What happened with the Fem-Ents? — answer consists only of link and short summary

What's with the beyond-casual introduction of “stone-giants” in The Hobbit? — answer includes no evidence

What's the deal with Bilbo being some kind of “burglar”? — fails to answer question, quotes non-answer from text

What's the deal with Bilbo being some kind of “burglar”? — answer includes no evidence

What's the deal with Bilbo being some kind of “burglar”? — honestly no idea what the objection was here

Eddie Kal

@GarethRees Helpful tally. Not where I would look though. Again that speaks volumes about how drastically differently we approach this and how not only our views but our experiences, focuses, and observations diverge.

Gareth Rees

In summary, there seem to be a lot of downvotes on answers to Tolkien questions

Eddie Kal

Because passions run high in Tolkien discussions?

Gareth Rees

Because they attract a lot of voters via HNQ, I think

Eddie Kal

I do wonder about that though.

Why is Tolkien such a Hot Network Quesiton magnet?

Gareth Rees

19:15

Because lots of computer programmers have read Tolkien

Eddie Kal

Mhm, yeah. I think that is also the case with George RR Martin and J K Rowling

Agatha Christie

Gareth Rees

People are much more likely to visit the question via the HNQ link if they recognize the writer or the work. So popular writers will get more hits

2

Eddie Kal

Why do certain works enjoy the kind of popularity that others don't?

What do researchers say about this again?

^ almost sounds like we are getting to the crux of this

Tsundoku

@EddieKal SFF SE has a feed for Tolkien questions on our site, so they get notified immediately. (See their list of feeds.)

Gareth Rees

You can compare the view counts for questions that made HNQ to see this in action — e.g. this Gore Vidal question got 146 views, but the Bilbo question got 8k views

Tsundoku

19:24

People vote more on questions (1) about works they know and (2) that they can imagine they could research or answer. People vote more on answers (1) about works they know and (2) that rely on sources that are online, so they can check them.

Eddie Kal

That's interesting. I am deliberating popularity of literary works in general, not talking about SE popularity, but popularity among a more general readership. So why do certain works become popular? What explains popularity? What is the scholarly explanation of popularity and disparity in popularity?

Gareth Rees

@EddieKal That would make a good question for literature.se

Tsundoku

People don't vote a lot on interpretation answers because checking the plausibility of an interpretation requires a lot more time and effort than just reading the question and the answer. If an answer presents more than one interpretation (since a single interpretation does not necessarily cover every aspect), voting is really low.

@EddieKal I am referring to popularity among SE users. Non-SE users are probably irrelevant to the discussion.

Eddie Kal

@Tsundoku Sure, but as you can see I am trying to focus our discussion the scholarly aspect

Tsundoku

The popular works are often SF and fantasy, and readers of such works (on SE) don't usually read scholarly literature.

Gareth Rees

19:29

Votes from non-users don't show up in the vote counts, though there is a post-feedback tool that provides some information about what they voted on

Eddie Kal

@Tsundoku But that doesn't affect our discussion, because the opposite is true. You can be an SF and fantasy Dasein

Tsundoku

@EddieKal "an SF and fantasy Dasein"?

Eddie Kal

Be a fan who's aware of their own fandom

Being aware of one's own existence, borrowing from you know who

Tsundoku

@EddieKal And what do you mean by "the opposite is true"? The opposite of what?

Eddie Kal

The opposite of this statement: "readers of such works (on SE) don't usually read scholarly literature"

You are saying SF and fantasy fans don't read scholarly literature. What I am saying here is the reverse of that holds. Scholars read SF and fantasy

Tsundoku

19:33

@EddieKal Do you think that is not true on SE? Do you have examples of answers about SF or fantasy works that use scholarly sources?

Eddie Kal

I am not talking about SE

Tsundoku

But the whole context of the discussion was voting behaviour on Lit SE, wasn't it?

Eddie Kal

No, I have repeatedly said it was not

Let's focus on scholarship and how to improve in that regard

Tsundoku

See your earlier comment: Strictly scholarship-centered answers are highly susceptible to downvotes. I thought that was what started this discussion in the first place?

Eddie Kal

yesterday, by Eddie Kal

Sorry I need to wait for our starry friends, starry-eyedly. Otherwise it's going to be a star-crossed discussion.

Let me spell it out

I am not discussing that until we have everyone gathered in a meaningful conversation

This is a separate discussion.

Where I have said:

10 mins ago, by Eddie Kal

@Tsundoku Sure, but as you can see I am trying to focus our discussion the scholarly aspect

@Tsundoku The reason we have to wait to talk about certain problematic user behavior patterns on SE is it concerns a far greater compass than just a few posts.

What we need is a serious discussion and

In this separate discussion what I am hoping to achieve is that since I have you two with me @Tsundoku @GarethRees we could maybe try to see if anything can be done to improve the Lit SE milieu for in-depth scholarship-based Q&A

I hope that is clear now

Tsundoku

19:48

Who do you want to be involved in this discussion? Should we try to schedule some sort of event? (Perhaps in a separate chatroom?)

Eddie Kal

@Tsundoku Don't worry about that discussion. I am just inviting people to share their opinion. Since we are missing one person here, I trust they will come in when the time is right.

As for today's discussion, I was thinking as Gareth said maybe it would be worth asking about popularity studies

But maybe we can thrash it out here. What do we understand about popularity in general? That's what I am pondering over at the moment.

How do we boost the popularity of less popular works, both on this site and on a larger scale? How do we respect and appreciate works from minority writers more? From woman writers, from non-White writers more?

That is what I was hoping to talk about.

And a very important part of that discussion is understand what scholars have said on this topic. It'd be helpful if we could base our discussion on popularity-focused studies.

Tsundoku

Scholars might be able to describe what aspects of a work speak to a specific readership (during a specific time period and in a specific culture) but I'm sceptical about being able to use that information in order to boost the popularity of other works.

Eddie Kal

20:04

I think before resorting to skepticism it behooves us to first read (isn't read our motto on this site?) and understand. Oh I think I need to cue one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite contributors.

Oct 8 at 20:08, by Gareth Rees

There is an entire science of geology that studies this stuff!

Tsundoku

OK, point me to that great science that studies why certain works of literature are popular.

Eddie Kal

I THOUGHT YOU'D NEVER ASK

I am an eager learner myself. I thought this was interesting and informative in the interest of our discusion

Women's fiction is a sign of a sexist book industry

There's a lot more. I am just doing random Google Scholar searches. It appears Google Scholar can't restrict your searches to a discipline or database which negatively limits what I am able to find. I am sure there's a lot more. Takes time to learn and understand. It always does. No one can be expected to understand the issues in a single chat

This one look promising! Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature

Janice Radway is a force to be reckoned with in our understanding of popular literature.

If we were to engage in a serious discussion about this stuff, we need to dispense with the double standards and the colored spectacles.

b_jonas

20:51

@GarethRees That is true not only for HNQ, but for people like me who look at Literature list of questions directly.

b_jonas

21:10

@EddieKal Yes, Google Scholar is a search portal. It's pretty comprehensive, but may be hard to control. These days it's hidden too, as in it no longer appears in the list of searches on top of google search result pages among "all, images, maps, videos, news, shopping, books etc". "https://about.google/products/" does list it though if you scroll down enough.

But at least Scholar is not discontinued like blog search. All they have now is "Put @ in front of a word to search social media" according to "https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433".

There are also always curated thematic archives that have a much more limited scope than Scholar but can be controlled more precisely, like searches among journals of particular publishers and distributors, and stuff like zbmath.org and mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet .

IME, Google Scholar is the most useful when you have a specific publication in mind, such as from a cross-reference, and you want to quickly find out who hosts online copies, whether open or behind a paywall.

Even if you can't directly get a copy of the article from that, you can often find an abstract, which helps decide if you want that publication, and more precise bibliographic data.

Rand al'Thor

21:50

@GarethRees I clicked all your links, and turns out I've downvoted all of those answers except the last one you linked (the +22/-1 answer from Glorfindel). Not that I was the only downvoter on all of them, but at least I'm not in an anti-scholarly-answer conspiracy ;-)

"there seem to be a lot of downvotes on answers to Tolkien questions" may be a misleading conclusion, although technically correct. IMO it's more that Tolkien questions go HNQ and get a lot of up votes, which people may feel more obliged to "correct" if an answer is low-quality. I feel it's more important to downvote a +10 low-quality answer than a zero or negative scoring one.

@Tsundoku Hmm. I agree with both of your (1)s, but not so sure about the (2)s. Maybe for voters in general, but for myself:

A question that I have no idea how to research or answer is more likely to get an upvote, assuming it's somehow interesting, because that's a challenging question which is definitely worth asking. (Sort of a converse of the principle of downvoting for lack of research.) Similarly, an answer which relies on sources I can't easily access is more likely to get an upvote, assuming the sources seem trustable. I suppose this means that I'm more impressed by something I couldn't answer myself ...

@EddieKal In a word (or rather two), topic challenges? Boosting the popularity of less popular works is precisely what they aim to achieve. Personally I'm less interested in the gender or ethnicity of writers and more interested in exploring various cultures from around the world, but of course there's all kinds of diversity to aim for.

Of course you could point out that topic challenges aren't always successful, and some of them get very few questions and contributors. But hey, it's a project in progress. We upgraded the topic challenge system a year ago, which seems to have helped increase the volume of participation.

Tsundoku

22:19

@Randal'Thor I think you are atypical of the general LIt SE community, then. (And in many other regards, you definitely are.)

Tsundoku

22:30

@Randal'Thor I think Eddie Kal is already aware of the topic challenges and wants to look into additional ways of drawing attention to works and authors that aren't popular. After all, we have at most 12 topic challenges per year and not every suggestion eventually gets selected for a topic challenge.

Eddie Kal

23:32

@b_jonas Yeah, that is really unfortunate. I think Google also sees it as one of the lesser products, less successful and less popular.

@b_jonas I have used (or been redirected to) these to mathematics databases. Two bad they both limit direct searches without subscription

1

Q: Merchant of Venice "I'll die for't a women had the ring" (Shakespeare, 5.1, 221)

Portia has the ring but Bassanio believes that he had given the ring to a male. Portia says "I'll die for't a women had the ring"(Shakespeare, 5.1, 221), which is funny as it really is a women who has the ring. I do not think this is a pun, as the line itself is not funny, rather its the situatio...

literature pun

Do we want a "literature" feed from ELL into this room?

Transcript for