ellievsbear
No title available
Game of Thrones Daily
AnasAbdin
h
No title available
sheepfilms
JBB: An Artblog!
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Misplaced Lens Cap
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
almost home
KIROKAZE
trying on a metaphor
blake kathryn
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
we're not kids anymore.
Cosmic Funnies
One Nice Bug Per Day
dirt enthusiast
seen from Malaysia
seen from France
seen from Netherlands
seen from Türkiye
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Japan
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from Denmark
seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from United States
seen from Denmark
seen from Netherlands
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@academicarticlesiveread
frankly love that there is a niche literature side of tumblr where people are just writing full shakespare essays for fun with cited sources, all lowercase sentences, sixteen exclamation points. tags are getting peer reviewed. takes are getting nuanced. best reading you’ve ever heard of the odyssey is suggested in a post by someone with an avengers profile pic with zero punctuation and ended with “screaming crying throwing up.” it’s like role playing academia in an online jungle gym
Introductions to academic papers will be like "everyone knows that the sea is cold (citation), as well as salty (5 different citations). Things live in there (citation) and the environment is important to that (2 citations)"
these tags gave me thesis writing flashbacks
the thing about writing history. Is that you get used to this. And sometimes, some of us get too comfortable and so we're writing shit like
"Murder is bad. In the time period discussed, people sometimes committed murders (2 citations). And most people agreed that murder was bad, but it was widely known that murders still happened."
And your advisor goes, "Did most people agree, though? Was it widely known?"
And you go (sigh.). Okay. And do twelve hours of going back through your readings. And rewrite.
"Murder is bad (4 citations). In this time, people sometimes committed murders (6 citations). People did not all agree that it was bad (2 citations). There was disagreement about exactly how bad (3 citations)."
And you look at your draft. And you go. But. But we all — I mean, the archival sources from the time are in fact QUITE CLEAR about how widely known it was! Like–! I've read hundreds of letters and a third of them mention murder! I've talked to so many historians of this time and place and we ALL talk about the murder thing!
And you look at the twelve goddamned hours of searching you did. And you write several increadingly desperate emails to colleagues. And after another few days, you come to the agonizing realization that, in fact, there are no citations of published work establishing that people knew murders occurred despite them being bad and against the law. And then you spend another week looking up those archival sources. And you rewrite again.
"Murder is bad (6 citations). In this time, people sometimes committed murders (6 citations). People did not all agree that it was bad (2 citations). There was disagreement about exactly how bad (3 citations). While no conclusive study has been done, from communications in this time, we can say that at least a significant number of people knew that murders still occurred (18 citations)."
I currently have exactly this problem.
"Everyone knows that [reaction A] works like this and [reaction B] works like that". Very common way to start a paper or thesis in this field. Everybody knows this, we can carry on with the more interesting stuff about [reaction C].
Huh. These 73 citations all cite each other in a ouroboros and the only original source in the lot is a popular science book which is indeed worth citing, but it's a memoir, which I have read repeatedly, and the author of the memoir just threw this out there as another example of "things everyone just knew in those days".
...I am now doing a PhD on "Hang on just one second, we have no concrete evidence for how [reaction A] or [reaction B] work and even whether they're different at all."
I love seeing my sources cite each other so much. It really makes me feel more like a researcher and like part of a community when I'm reading a paper and I see this person read that too, and also found it worth citing and sharing. This is the stuff that makes me love teaching people about MLA and APA.
Going back to the history for a second: my external examiner for my PhD was determined, for some ungodly reason, for me to prove that the Ancient Egyptians had the concepts of shame, politeness, and “saving face” after embarrassment. But she didn’t want secondary sources, she wanted primary ones.
So I sat there thinking ‘you want me to prove that the Ancient Egyptians knew what shame was, that very human emotion, using their own words in a culture for which we have very few examples of personal/private correspondence or notations that don’t suffer from strict formalities that are present in 98% of non literary texts? Okay then’ and went through hundreds of fragments over weeks to find this:
P.Bologna 1094 3, 5-10
sS m-H n pA xpS n pr-aA a.w.s. Dd n sS pA-wHm r-nty in.tw n=k sS pn n Dd Hna Dd r-nty m ir s iwty HAty=f iw bn n=f sbAy(t) ir sDr.tw iw.tw Hr mtr=k wrS.tw iw.tw Hr sbA=k iw bw sDm=k mtr nb iw i-ir=k pAy=k sxr pA kry Hr sDm mdt in.tw=f Hr kS tw.tw Hr irt sbAyt n mAi tw.tw Hr q-H ssmt Hrw-r=k bw rx.tw qi=k m-Xnw tA-tmm ix rx=k sw
Mahu, Scribe of the Armoury of Pharaoh l.p.h. speaks to the Scribe Pewehem. This letter is brought to you to the following effect: Do not be a senseless man who has no education. One spends the whole night teaching you and passes the whole day instructing you, without your listening to any teaching, but you act after your own fashion. The ape understands words, and it is brought to you from Kush. Lions are trained and Horses tamed: but as for you, one does not discern the like of you within all mankind. Take note of this.
(Caminos, 1954: 13, cf [Redacted], 2016: 59)
I think I sufficiently provided an example of someone (Scribe Mahu) enacting shame and impoliteness onto his student (Scribe Pewehem). 'Prove these humans had the concept of shame' was a wild task that required a wild citation.
Caminos, R., 1954. Late Egyptian Miscellanies. London: OUP. Redacted, C., 2016. My Doctoral Thesis That I Won't Post Publicly But You Can Ask For It. Unpublished.
The real impact of AI at university level that I've watched in real time is how so many students come onto courses now - including Masters level - who straight up don't know how to analyse/evaluate things anymore. They just accept whatever they first read/hear completely uncritically. Every time you point it out you have to coax them into Actually Thinking.
I've spotted a huge decline over the last two years. What's upsetting is how so many of our current third years have declined since their first year. I did a seminar with them the other day, on the topic of the environmental impacts of different diets. One guy told me confidently that there would be no additional agricultural lands if we all went vegetarian.
"Cool," I said. "What's your source for that?"
"I'm sure I read it," he said.
"Fair," said I, "go and look it up. Find an academic source, let's assess it to see if it's robust."
The first thing he did was go to Google, and then read the AI summary.
"That's not a source," I said. "Find me a source."
Five minutes later, he happily tells me that a Guardian article says so, and mentions the World Economic Forum.
"Okay," I said. "Neither of those are academic sources, and the WEF is secondary anyway. Go to Google Scholar, and find a journal article."
Ten minutes later, he tells me he can only find articles that say it's a very complex issue in spite of pop cultural received wisdom, and we don't actually know.
A THIRD YEAR. This man has a dissertation due in THREE MONTHS. This is a skill we taught him in first year, and it's all dribbled out of his ears in the quest for easy summaries from an autocomplete algorithm. And I dearly wish I could say he's an exception, but Jesus Christ, that would be a lie.
I'm currently writing a lecture for the second years for their research methods module, and I normally wouldn't need to do this. But I'm having to re-introduce them to the basic concepts of how to actually analyse findings rather than lazily take whatever they seem to say at face value. I'm trying to find a good paper that had Surprising findings, because I want to show them a research question and a set of results and then get them to speculate and research on why they found something so different, but that's a difficult thing to search for.
Ngh. Yelling at the choir here, I know, but NNNNGH
i think "[sic]" is one of the funniest things of literature. like yeah this guy really wrote it out like that
For the uninitiated, you write [sic]—literally "this" or "so" in latin—to indicate that you haven't altered the wording or spelling. While it can be used to preserve a joke misspelling (aminals) or indicate that you know it looks weird (the Toronto Maple Leafs), it is also the most biting three letters that you can throw at a motherfucker who should know better.
Somebody made an error here and it sure wasn't me (derogatory)
things ppl often get wrong in academia AUs (specifically ones in modern university settings with focus on graduate students & professors):
no one is spending enough time complaining about writing
hierarchy is wrong. your grad student TA is not a professor or faculty and might not even be considered an employee. that 32 year old man is not a full professor no matter how talented he is or how old you think 30+ is, and he should be talking more about "the tenure clock"
grad students only ever taking or TAing classes & never doing research or working on their thesis/dissertation. there are masters programs with no thesis component so i'm sure there are ones that have no research requirement, but you can't get a PhD only taking classes
everyone has too much money. but also if it's set in the US there's an obsession with accumulating student debt for positions that generally you would not have to take out loans for
relationship with academic advisor never sufficiently unhinged
not enough discussion of stats where it's obvious everyone only barely understands what's happening
"what is a sufficiently unhinged student-advisor relationship?"
link to the article
"I got so angry that ISIS was disrupting the research." -> Said on record to a journalist in the actual middle of an interview.
Yeah I think that's a sufficiently unhinged academic.
Queer Your Library
Reminder to request queer books from your libraries!
A reminder of the allegations against Neil Gaiman, as shared by Hire Survivors Hollywood, a non-profit group who support survivors of sexual assault. These survivors aren’t just “the victims”: they have names and stories, and their voices deserve to be heard.
Scarlett, who worked as a nanny for Gaiman’s children, revealed that he sexually assaulted her in 2022 when she was 22 and he was 61, initiating an ongoing non-consensual sexual relationship.
K, who met Gaiman at a book signing in 2003 when she was 18 and he was in his mid-40s, describes a similar pattern of rape and sexual assault after they began a sexual relationship two years later.
Caroline Wallner, who worked on Gaiman’s property, revealed that he coerced her into sex by threatening her job and housing, and that he used explicit images and sexual demands to exert control over her.
Julia Hobsbawm was forced to fight off an assault by him in her London home in 1986.
Claire, who came forward anonymously in a podcast series, shared that Gaiman assaulted her during a book tour in the US in 2013. Gaiman took her to a room on his tour bus, got on top of her, kissed her, and groped her under her dress. In a 2022 phone call recording, Gaiman can be heard apologizing for his behavior, and offering $60,000 as a “tax-free gift” to cover the cost of a decade of therapy.
studying ancient history & archaeology is awesome because you get to follow citations like a little trail of breadcrumbs 😌 and when you reach the end you realize everyone else has been playing the worlds worst game of telephone
I would personally love to hear about the dipylon oenochoe!
well, i’m glad you asked! [opens can of worms]
this is my best friend, the dipylon oinochoe. its a beautiful little wine jug from the late geometric period. 22cm tall. you may know it from such hits as “paper talking about the early greek alphabet,” or “paper talking about the early greek alphabet,” etc etc. i’ve been researching him for a project lately. and i think i’m the only one who understands him now.
anyways it’s one of the oldest longer inscriptions we have from the late 8th/early 7th cent BCE. everyone and their mother wants to translate this little guy. they’re all reading it and going “oh wow! its got a perfect hexameter at the start! ‘whoever of the dancers dances most delicately!’" and then they all go "Wait What Do Those Last Signs Mean.”
there are 24 different interpretations. but thats fine. whatever. beef over the last signs seems normal enough. you see that a lot. personally i think its too broken to really tell for certain (those fractures are a bit unfortunately placed tbh) but i fear i am also just a very skeptical guy when it comes to definitive translations so my take on that should be considered with a grain of salt.
but because im researching this oinochoe, i'm reading all these articles arguing over what it Means and what the Implications Are. and you would think… its 2025… we’ve kinda all agreed “pots aren’t people” for several decades… surely there’s an analysis somewhere that focuses Solely On This Pot’s Context... idk like trying not to focus solely on its inscription for once???
but no. no, this is too much to ask for apparently. everyone’s going “well it must've belonged to a dancer! lets talk about dance competitions and homer and the gymnasium how this is all reflected in this one jug!” someone even dropped this one line theorizing it was “passed around at a party,” like it has just been consistently assigned as belonging to a dancer you cannot escape this idea. i tried to find any different ideas. i could not.
so i’m stuck here going “Where Is The Context” because it seems to be, uh, Not Discussed Anywhere. every article is citing back towards stephanos koumanoudes (the guy who purchased it in 1880) but they are Also saying “yeah it was found in 1871! source: koumanoudes!” But He’s Not The Guy That Excavated It, Guys, Where Is It From? nobody is giving me the answer. my favorite one is culhed, he just says “under obscure circumstances,” which is quite possibly the least helpful way to describe this somehow nebulous provenance. but then culhed offhandedly cites someone else. just in the footnotes, as you do. and that someone is yannis galanakis, my new hero.
now yannis galanakis (2011) does not give a single flying fuck about the dipylon oinochoe. he is here for one thing and one thing only: an unpublished stirrup jar that was bought by a totally different guy. most of his article is just concerned about this stirrup jar, how it was sold with a skull (??), and Who Sold That Skull. but galanakis’ stirrup jar is, coincidentally, from this same excavation in 1871. so in his article, where he’s referencing all these people associated with private excavations northeast of the dipylon gate (around modern-day plateia eleutherias), galanakis casually drops the line “among the finds associated with these excavations are some of the most important examples of late geometric pottery, like the dipylon oinochoe.” this is 1) more than Literally Everyone Else I Have Been Reading has been saying and 2) PROVIDING PRIMARY SOURCES FOR THIS DIG?
and these sources.... these primary sources have never been mentioned in Any Other Publications re: the dipylon oinochoe??? except MAYBE one from 2013 (coulié) thats in french, apparently only available in print, and the nearest copy is a library 2hrs away from me (so i cant actually verify what she says yet). but every other article about the dipylon oinochoe is basically like “yeah, see powell 1988” -> “yeah, see koumanoudes 1880” -> “i bought this from some guy named ioannes, lol” and its just created this Massive Echo Chamber where the provenance is "Koumanoudes" and the context is "Dancer." when... we have... two publications... written by people who were actually involved in this private excavation (which to be clear here was very much illegal at some points, but ioannes palaiologos do not care abt the government saying Stop Excavating Please). these two sources are hirschfeld (1872) and rayet (1888).
the provenance that these 1870s/80s accounts are providing isnt Actually That Detailed, but there are parts that line up pretty well (ie, swords/spears/knives being found in the graves, murex on top, several layers of successive tombs) which are Totally Absent from later articles talking about the purpose of this vessel, of its inscription, and of its owner/transcriber (which i dont think can be determined Anyways [cf Arrington 2024, this is just a Normal Take i think] but like whatever i guess Pots Are People Now, according to Powell 1988+Binek 2017+Osborne 2006). i phrased it in my paper and my presentation as “its like this oinochoe been totally disconnected from its context” and its to the point where its so egregious that someone will, in one article, drop a reference to galanakis’ research on the excavation of 1871 (where he cites two eyewitness accounts) and not. Not Once have they looked into it.
because if they had. and this is the fucking crazy part ok this is where i Lost My Shit For A Solid Week. there is, in hirschfeld 1872, an identical oinochoe (number 48, page 147 in this journal) with the same damn height (22.5cm; powell 1988 says the dipylon oinochoe is about 23cm) and decoration (a grazing deer) and concentric lines its a goddamn identical piece just judging from the description of it (and hirschfeld very unhelpfully did Not include this jug among his plates). deers grazing arent very common in late geometric pottery, its mostly just the dipylon workshop cranking them out AND theres only a few oinochoe attributed to dipylon workshop so This Is Quite Possibly The Same Vessel (or so i thought, we'll get to that). the one problem is that this vessel is just NOT from dipylon??? its from the old military hospital in athens??? which was built south of the acropolis in 1834??? and they found roman mosaics during that construction??? so this mentioned vessel could actually have been found in the 1830s??? and again nobody has said jack fucking shit about this connection, afaik i am the only one who has ever actually sat down with these Implications all lined up in a row, so i had to try and disprove myself on my own like it was 5d chess. i was the “I Want To Believe” meme but if it was about the dipylon oinochoe being from somewhere near dipylon.
and i'm digging through as many sources as i possibly can find to prove there's a mysterious second jug that might be from this hospital area (which, granted, was still a funerary space during the geometric period). i went through all of hirschfeld's references to alexander conze's plates showing pottery shapes, but they just ended up also being oinochoe, which made me lose my mind even more. hirschfeld would be like "yeah this deer was in this position from conze taf VII-2" and you go "ok so whats conze taf vii-2 look like? oh my fucking god its a GRAZING ANIMAL AGAIN." at some point i ended up reading a phd dissertation from the national and kapodistrian univerisity of athens to know more about this military hospital?? and then i switched gears and went searching through coldstream 1968’s list of geometric pottery (it might be outdated now, but it was the only thorough source i could find atp) and went through Every Single Oinochoe from the dipylon workshop and almost every single one was totally different. like they just could not be this mystery oinochoe (in which case, I Would Have Some Really Bad News About The Dipylon Oinochoe).
until i found my second best friend. munich CVA 3 taf 112. who literally nobody except me gives a shit about. its taf description is 2 paragraphs long. its the exact same height as these two aforementioned oinochoe. it has the exact same deer grazing motif. fuck it, its even got an unknown provenance because it was acquired from Some Guy Named Paul in 1907 (who also has connections to people like furtwängler [most unfortunate last name ever], another guy who wrote about the dipylon oinochoe in 1881). so in my quest to achieve some sort of emotional resolution here i possibly found a sister vessel to the dipylon oinochoe??? and maybe even that jug's provenance. who knows. i dont wanna say anything definitive yet. also if anyone has access to paul julius arndt's personal papers and especially his financial records, hit me up, because where the fuck did he get this identical looking jug.
however. most modern scholarship about the dipylon oinochoe does not care about munich cva 3 taf 112 (and its similarities to the dipylon oinochoe), or the few references to the 1871 excavations at palatia eleutherias several blocks northeast of the dipylon gate (and what little context/descriptions they provide of funerary remains), because they do not care about the dipylon oinochoe. they care about the letters inscribed on it, and they want to debate the meanings of those letters in a self-inflicted vacuum devoid of all other evidence beyond 35 legible signs and 11 fragmentary/illegible ones.
this seems to me to be a futile endeavour, especially seeing as everyone just keeps citing each other as to where the vessel came from & who to look at for more information & cutting it all off at koumanoudes (or, slightly better, galanakis). and i cannot for the life of me fathom why they have all stopped at koumanoudes or galanakis, if they're so desperate to find this concept of a person behind the oinochoe, because they could actually gain some possible insight into that person through the few grave descriptions provided. but they're only citing others who are citing others who are going off of koumanoudes' limited description from an article's addendum in 1880. and i'd argue that this sort of circular discussion strangles any attempt to actually examine the Dipylon oinochoe in a meaningful sense.
Op I seriously hope you publish this. This is what scholarship is all about!
Tomorrow is Valentine's Day! Consider this your peer-reviewed reminder. ❤️
should be able to leave kudos on scientific studies. i liked your paper dude keep at it
sorry, Dr. Dude
Dude et. al.
need y'all to know that most academics have publicly searchable email addresses and this not only makes their day but they can put nice emails in their giant packets for applying for jobs or tenure. "hi i read your paper for a class and it was very helpful, im at xyz college and the class is blah with professor blah" is sufficient and ENORMOUSLY helpful
It seems that, once again, when you can't kudos, commenting is the way to go
Needham, Gerald. “Manet, ‘Olympia’ and Pornographic Photography.” Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970, edited by Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin, Newsweek, 1972, pp. 80-89.
Maack, Mary Niles. “Toward a New Model of the Information Professions: Embracing Empowerment.” Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, vol. 38, no. 4, 1997, pp. 283–302. https://doi.org/10.2307/40324190.
professors who have only interacted with other academics for years: “what do you MEAN you don’t know multi-variable calculus yet??”
professors with small kids: “thank you for not putting the lab equipment in your mouths when I turn my back”
Bringing this back to share that one time I slept through part of a zoom meeting with my PhD advisor (who has a toddler) and he told me it was fine, that just meant I was a good sleeper
Professors who work with graduate students: if you finish the multivariate calculus work this week you can put one (1) piece of lab equipment in your mouth
downloading pdfs & epubs in a most wanton & lascivious manner
Skordis, Nicos, et al. "Gender dysphoria in children and adolescents: an overview." Hormones, vol. 19, no. 3, 2020, pp. 267-276. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42000-020-00174-1
my friend posted this on twitter & nobody has ever been more correct
its so much and its dishonest work
There you go
i posted this about my thesis. lmao. girl
