Hi, this is David Font-Navarette. In this video, I'll be talking about academic writing in the disciplines with some examples from the humanities. On this slide we see some of the scope and variety within the humanities. Yeah, which includes a pretty broad set of academic disciplines. In my case, I'm an Ethnomusicologist so I study music and culture. My research can include all of the branches of the humanities as well as several branches of the social sciences, especially anthropology. In the practice though, most academic discipline overlap with several others. For example, a historian will need to understand the art and philosophy of a given time that they're studying. A theologian will need to understand musical ritual and cultural history of a religious tradition. What's more, each discipline often encompasses an enormous variety of approaches within it's self. Some specialized areas of my own research overlap with disciplines in the natural sciences even. For example, studying. Looking at the way musicians coordinate various movements and levels of awareness has brought me into contact with neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Here we see some of the most common genres of writing of academic writing within the humanities. Of course, the, the most typical one that we probably think of first is books. On the bottom left of the screen, there is an image of the cover of the very first ethnomusicology book I ever bought. It's Regula Qureshi's book on Sufi Music. Journal articles are also quite common and important the genre of writing. Within academic journals though, we also tend to find reviews often of books. But depending upon the discipline, we might also find reviews of other media. In music journals, music scholarship journals, we'll find films, novels for literature scholars and so on. Academics are also often involved in a variety of other genres that we don't think necessarily of as being primarily academic. For example, there's documentary film and video and there are bibliographies. In other words, collections of citations, of publications on a given subject or specialty. And, of course, for a music scholar like myself, discographies are really important, collections of citations of different types of recordings. You could also find filmographies of different films, videographies and, and the like. Some writing genres that academic writing is also incorporated into where scholars tend to work but isn't necessarily thought of as academic in nature. Journalism academics also write journalistic work. They write criticism of different sorts, and they can write blogs as well. All of this more geared toward the general public. On the left of the screen there, you see a screen capture of a blog by my friend and colleague, Wayne Marshall who's an ethnomusicologist, and has been working on this highly regarded blog, Wayne and Wax, for a number of years now. So, some broad issues regarding academic writing in general, and specifically within the humanities. There are different types of editorial input and feedback. Peer review is, I think, fundamentally important. If you watch the other videos from the disciplinary consultants, I think all of us will speak to that in some way. Peer review, at its most basic level, involves other scholars reviewing academic writing and then offering their feedback and their approval or not. It, it's sort of like an audition and a workshop rolled into one. Peer review's also, also often anonymous. So, the idea being that the work is taken on it's own merits. There are layers of responses and revision involved in most peer review. Sometimes, a peer review for a journal will take years and, and books usually it does take some years between submission and publication. Another set of issues that are really important in the humanities is distinctions between theory and method, and ways that those two ideas interact. Theory at its most basic level we can think of it as large abstract ideas and themes can also think of it as critical examination of assumptions that we make in our writing and in our thinking. Especially in the context of, [unknown] power relationships. And finally, another way to think of theory is, is as ideas about ideas. In other words, more abstract levels of thinking about things. Method can be put a bit more siply, it's what researchers do. So, I think some of what different scholars in the humanities do can be thought of as documentation, offering information, offering data on something but it also often involves quite a bit of interpretation and contextualization. So how to understand a thing in a particular way and how to put it in a given framework I think this is one of the core ideas for most academic writing in the humanities. Finding ways to offer insights, understandings and, and frameworks for human endeavors. Thanks a lot. See you in the next video.
