Gaddis can now use "the once-secret information and hindsight that a scholar needs to write true history," Michael Beschloss wrote in the Book Review.
Dickinson's experience, or what we know of it, has been so thoroughly archived, interpreted, and reimagined in every genre (Sewall is exhaustive, and, before him, Jay Leyda, the modernist filmmaker and film historian, produced a monumental chronology, "The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson") that a contemporary scholar needs a good excuse to exhume the picked-over bones.
This week, in a review of "White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson," by Brenda Wineapple, Judith Thurman writes: Dickinson's experience, or what we know of it, has been so thoroughly archived, interpreted, and reimagined in every genre…that a contemporary scholar needs a good excuse to exhume the picked-over bones.
To chronicle the history of the church, the scholar needs to link the fervour of the traumatised survivors of the Black Death to the well-heeled residents of Kensington and Chelsea, showing how, despite theological rows and sectarian divisions, Christianity has survived as a magnificent continuum for more than 2,000 years.
By Jenna Krajeski August 12, 2008 This week, in a review of "White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson," by Brenda Wineapple, Judith Thurman writes: Dickinson's experience, or what we know of it, has been so thoroughly archived, interpreted, and reimagined in every genre…that a contemporary scholar needs a good excuse to exhume the picked-over bones.
In the social sciences, the analysis of news media is done largely by hand and in a hypothesis-driven fashion: the scholar needs to formulate a very specific assumption about the patterns that might be in the data, and then set out to verify if they are present or not.
The demise of the cloistered scholar needn't mean the end of brilliant, rigorous history - it just means we get to shout about it from the rooftops.
Arithmetic, being a compulsory and difficult adventure, is in a class with the campaigning of a conscripted army: adventurously speaking it may have its moments, but neither young soldier nor young scholar need be much deceived.
Despite this commendation, search strategies for CPGs in Google Scholar need to be improved and defined more specifically.
Humanities scholars need to take what feels – right now – like a risk, and engage in more public scholarship.
And, he added, scholars need a classification system that is coherent -- more Library of Congress than eBay.
