Monday, June 21, 2021

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Six)

Today I got up at 2:30 in the morning, thus entirely throwing off my sleeping schedule for the foreseeable future. I had an idea to take another look at an "exhibit" source I had quoted and discussed in my draft, and I found that there was a bit more that I could usefully say about that source. I was also able to attach that source to the book I'm currently reading (Chang and Holt). So I knocked out a couple of paragraphs on that before breakfast. 

Since then, between naps, I have been thinking about whether I should bring into this discussion a conference paper that I wrote about 20 years ago. (The only problem is that someone cited my conference paper in his book, so now I'm not sure if I should cite him citing me!) What I have in it would complicate what I'm talking about in the current paper, but it might do so in a useful way. We'll see...

I also did a bit of thinking and writing and assembling of documents for my July conference presentation. I have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to be talking about, but I need to get the presentation organized.

Finally, I came across a thread from Anicca Harriot on Twitter about some citation-related tools that I hadn't seen before. 

  • Connected Papers, which maps out the network of a particular academic work, its academic sources, and the academic publications that cite it
  • Scite, which analyzes how academic works are used in the publications that cite them (uses a slightly different set of terms than "BEAM" [see "exhibit" link above])

I tried two of them on an older article (*sigh* when does an article from 1996 get classified as "older"?) and came up with some interesting results. For the article, Yameng Liu's "To Capture the Essence of Chinese Rhetoric: An Anatomy of a Paradigm in Comparative Rhetoric," I got these results:

  • From Connected Papers, I got this cool map. (Hope the link works!)
  • From Scite, I got some results, but I haven't set up an account yet to see what they actually are. Looks like they could be interesting, though.
Anyway, another couple of tools to play with (and perhaps show to students in my Advanced Writing classes when we're working on literature reviews. (I've had mixed results when showing them the Web of Knowledge; these look like they might be more user-friendly.) I want to go back to Anicca's thread to look at the other tools she's introducing. Always love it when generous scholars share the tools they're using with the rest of us! Thanks, Anicca! You're a blessing!

No comments: