Sharing Scholarship

As I sit on the second floor of the Music and Dramatic Arts building this afternoon, I hear the unfamiliar sound of children's laughter.  For the first time in the 4 weeks that I have worked here I can look out my window into the playground next door and see kids playing. 

Climbing around on the hard plastic of Playskool and driving their very first car I stare out the window and long for the good ole days of packed lunches and polka dot dresses.  Then I stop staring out the window because I imagine that I look a little creepy and I suddenly remember that the good ole days were not necessarily all that great.  

Now don't get me wrong, I loved my pack lunches with notes from my mom. I actually still pack a lunch because I am poor but they are note-less because then I would just be talking to myself.  

What I don't miss however, are the pinched arms, pulled hair, and forced sharing.  Being forced to share my new toys or my most favorite fruit snacks that my mom packed special in my lunch was the pits.  I am all for sharing now, but on my terms. 

I find it very rewarding when I am able to share my knowledge with others.  I enjoy it even more when scholars share their knowledge with me.  There is nothing like the thrill of finding a quote from a scholar that says exactly what I need it to say and helps ground my argument in a paper. The exchange of ideas that happens with today's technology between scholars senior and junior, young and old is really an extraordinary thing. 

Before Al Gore invented the internet, researchers had to get a hold of a hard copy of a book our a journal to scour it for quotes or other sources.  Today, all I have to do is type in a research topic into Google Scholar and bam! 63,500 results in 0.06 seconds. Google likes to show off. Of course not all of the results are useful. I did a search on vintage dance and one of my results was "The Design, Modeling and Optimization of On-chip Inductor and Transformer Circuits" by SS Mohan. In Google Scholar's defense, in the introduction of this article the author does mention how she got through her PhD because of dance and she was a member of the Stanford Vintage Dance group. 

On top of the ability to have thousands of resources at your fingertips, Google Scholar also lists all the other texts that have cited the same source that I am looking at.  If you are not careful however, you might find yourself going down a rabbit hole of sources only to have forgotten what your original query  was.   So why am I talking about Google Scholar again?  Well, with the ability to get in contact with so many sources so quickly once published, quotes from an article can end up anywhere in the world in anyone's work.  Scholars could use my words for good, evil or could completely misrepresent my work and quote me out of context. They can do all of this without ever having to ask my permission. As long as my work is cited properly, their interpretation of it is free game. 

So, as a toddler scholar I am very careful and conscious of how I am representing another author's work. I try and only use it for good or am very careful that I understand their argument before I disagree with it. That academic was very kind to share their toys work with me so I must be very careful to not break it. 

Cheers,

Evleen