Oxford – Page 32 – a sibilant intake of breath

On editing: a noble task and profession

Editing

The academic stages of my life have involved a huge amount of editing. I have read countless essays written by friends, papers submitted to journals, chapters destined for books, scholarship essays, and the like. It seems to me that there are three major types of editing that occur: low level, high level, and contextual.

Low level editing is what I have been doing for the last three hours: the careful reading of someone’s written work, with the major aim of identifying minor errors of spelling and grammar. The remit frequently extends to include the identification of sentences that are particularly unclear or otherwise problematic. Low level editing is distinguished by the fact that large amounts of knowledge about the topic of the work being edited are rarely required. Knowing terms of art can be an asset (those who do not often misunderstand how they are to be used), but I am essentially capable of giving a low level edit to anything written in the social sciences or the humanities.

A high level edit is much more intellectual. Alongside language, argument is evaluated. Contradictory evidence might be brought up; logical flaws might be highlighted. A high level edit usually incorporates a low level edit, but need not do so. A high level edit is rarely effective or comprehensible to the person whose work is being edited without one or more conversations. While a low level edit might get you thanked in a block of names in the acknowledgements section of a book, enough high level edits might get a book dedicated to you. Indeed, I am personally extremely grateful to people who have done high level edits of things I have written over the years: particularly Kate Dillon, Meghan Mathieson, Tristan Laing and Ian Townsend-Gault. Virtually everything important that I’ve written in the last five years has passed an inspection from at least one of them.

Contextual editing is the kind I have done least. It is the process of adapting a written work to fit into a particular place: whether a journal, a book, or somewhere else with specific requirements for length and content. I’ve done a lot of that on the fish paper – as well as when I worked for the international relations and history journals at UBC. Contextual editing has the virtue that it generally takes the quality of text and argument in the original piece as settled. It has the pitfall that it is generally an arduous process of sorting, summary, and re-jigging that is rather less rewarding than either of the other sort of edits.

Anyone who has ever been irked to see a tense or pluralization error in the middle of a huge academic tome might pause to consider the amount of error checking that goes into such things. The essential fact is that the brain that wrote a sentence is often badly placed to pick out any flaws within it; they have long-since been papered over in the mind of the author. With regard to errors in books, I have certainly noticed a great many such things myself. These days, I am likely to angrily correct them with a four-colour pen. I tip my hat to all the friends, spouses, significant others, teachers, and supervisors who have reduced the number of times it takes place. You are true heroes of the intellectual process.

Happy Bastille Day

Thesis reading is progressing reasonably well, amidst all the other tasks in need of completion. I am reading Economics, Ethics, and Environmenal Policy: Contested Choices: a collecton of essays edited by Daniel Bromley and Jouni Paavola. It is somewhat general, but still informative. My intention is to try and sneak a reasonable amount of normative matter into my thesis, in whatever form it ultimately adopts. Sorting that out is my top academic priority at the moment.

The order of business tomorrow is research assistance work. Probably, I will immerse myself in the department with a copy of EndNote and a few of the mysterious coffee/hot chocolate beverages that the machine in the common room dispenses for 30p a piece. More than once, they have helped me bounce a few more notches towards wakefulness before one of the core seminars. Without those two-hour gatherings of classmates and instructors, Tuesday mornings seem rather pointless.

Fish paper publication upcoming

I may be delerious because it’s 6:30am, but this seems pretty unambiguous:

I really enjoyed the piece you wrote on EU policies regarding fishery sustainability off the coast of West Africa. I’d like to work with you to prepare your piece for publication in [the MIT Internatinal Review].

You mentioned on your cover letter that you would be willing to “re-focus it in the most appropriate direction and summarize other sections.” This will probably comprise the bulk of our work together, as your piece was very well written to begin with.

An excellent bit of news by which to start the day. I am off to London.

Thesis development

Talking with Dr. Hurrell about the thesis this evening was rather illuminating. By grappling with the longer set of comments made on my research design essay, we were able to isolate a number of interwoven questions, within the territory staked out for the project. All relate to science and global environmental policy-making, but they approach the topic from different directions and would involve different specific approaches and styles and standards of proof.

Thesis idea chart

The first set deal with the role of ‘science’ as a collection of practices and ideals. If you imagine society as a big oval, science is a little circle embedded inside it. Society as a whole has a certain understanding of science (A). That might include aspects like objectivity, or engaging in certain kinds of behaviour. These understandings establish some of what science and scientists are able to do. Within the discipline itself, there is discussion about the nature of science (B), what makes particular scientific work good or bad, etc. This establishes the bounds of science, as seen from the inside, and establishes standards of practice and rules of inclusion and exclusion. Then, there is the understanding of society by scientists (C). That understanding exists at the same time as awareness about the nature of the material world, but also includes an understanding of politics, economics, and power in general. The outward-looking scientific perspective involves questions like if and how scientists should engage in advocacy, what kind of information they choose to present to society,

The next set of relationships exist between scientists and policy-makers. From the perspective of policy-makers, scientists can:

Raise new issues
Provide information on little-known issues
Develop comprehensive understandings about things in the world
Evaluate the impact policies will have
Provide support for particular decisions
Act in a way that challenges decisions

For a policy-maker, a scientist can be empowering in a number of ways. They can provide paths into and through tricky stretches of expert knowledge. They can offer predictions with various degrees of certainty, ranging from (say) “if you put this block of sodium in your pool, you will get a dramatic explosion” to “if we cut down X hectares of rainforest, Y amount of carbon dioxide will be introduced into the atmosphere.”

The big question, then, is which of these dynamics to study. Again and again, I find the matter of how scientists understand their legitimate policy role to be among the most interesting. This becomes especially true in areas of high uncertainty. The link from “I know what will happen if that buffoon jumps into the pool strapped to that block of sodium” to trying to stop the action is more clear than the one between understanding the atmospheric effects of deforestation and lobbying to curb the latter. Using Stockholm as a ‘strong case’ and Kyoto as a ‘weak case’ of science leading to policy, the general idea would be to examine how scientists engaged with both policy processes, how they saw their role, and what standards of legitimacy they held it to. This approach focuses very much on the scientists, but nonetheless has political saliency. Whether it could be a valid research project is a slightly different matter.

The first big question, then, is whether to go policy-maker centric or scientist centric. I suspect my work would be more distinctive if I took the latter route. I suspect part of the reason why the examiners didn’t like my RDE was because they expected it to take the former route, then were confronted with a bunch of seemingly irrelevant information pertaining to the latter.

I will have a better idea about all of this once I have read another half-dozen books: particularly Haas on epistemic communities. Above all, I can sense from the energy of my discussions with Dr. Hurrell that there are important questions lurking in this terrain, and that it will be possible to tackle a few of them in an interesting and original way.

Already July?

I hit a rich vein of thesis materials today: a thesis on a related topic that is a veritable gold mine of sources. So often am I likely to be making reference over the next year, I had the thing printed and it now resides in one of the curious two-ring binders that are the UKs equivalent of our three-ring sort. Once I finish it tomorrow morning, and perhaps print off a few of the key cited journal articles, I will be in better shape to discuss the thesis plan with Dr. Hurrell tomorrow afternoon.

Tomorrow will also bring the second tutorial that I am teaching for the St. Hugh’s summer school. I got the essay tonight, so it has become another element of the clutch of reading material that I need to get through in the next fifteen hours or so. Little time remains for Sweetness in the Belly – a novel my mother sent me – or “Barn Burning” – a short story that I told Linnea I would read months ago. I also picked up a used copy of Far From the Madding Crowd. For some reason, I absolutely love the sound of that title. Somehow, the sounds and syllables combine magically in a way that has nothing to do with its meaning, which has never been very clear to me anyhow.

For the rest of the summer, I’ve decided to feel guilty about not traveling whenever I am doing thesis work, guilty about not doing thesis work whenever I am not traveling, and absurdly guilty at times when I am doing neither. That way, I will hopefully manage to accomplish the two major goals of the summer in the time that remains before Michaelmas 2006 begins. To anyone who worries that such guilt will keep me from enjoying things in general, they need not be concerned.

PS. Life is full of unbloggable surprises (though I don’t have time to relate them at the moment, anyhow).

Product endorsement: Foosh mints

I feel the time has come to formally register my appreciation for Foosh Power Mints. The reasons for which I like them are numerous:

They don’t dance around the fact that they are caffeinated mints. There are no euphemisms (ie. guarana), and the dosage is clear and comprehensible – 100mg of caffeine per mint.
They actually taste quite good, particularly for a sugar free mint and especially for one so effectively saturated with stimulant.
They cost less than coffee, per unit wakefulness, and do not require boiling water. They can be had in the UK for 2 Pounds per pack of 12 mints.
They can be consumed quickly and easily, without pausing from what you are already doing: whether it be reading, trying to sort out a train timetable, debugging a PHP script, or scaling a frozen waterfall.
Unlike coffee – which tends to make me ravenously hungry – they do not substantially increase my food bill.
Along with caffeine and mint flavour, they also contain some unknown (probably negligible) amount of ginseng and – more usefully – taurine and B vitamins.

For those struggling to slog through reading material, or develop some basic level of awareness in the early morning (for work, travel, or other reasons), Foosh mints are worth a try.

Touristy Oxford summer

Summer Oxford Saturdays are utterly saturated by groups of visitors. Between Church Walk, Wadham, Sainsbury’s, and Church Walk I saw at least twenty such groups – many with matching backpacks, hats, or t-shirts. I suppose that is a mechanism to ensure that the various herds stay distinct, and don’t meld or dissolve during the course of their passage through historic Oxford.

The university must spin an enormous amount of money off the summer trade. Conferences, summer schools, concerts and all manner of means of drawing people here and extracting pounds and pence for the greater wealth and glory of the colleges. I know UBC does the same kind of thing, but I don’t think they will ever be able to manage quite the densities that exist here. That is befitting of an old and famous university located close to one of the world’s major metropolitan centres.

Annoying as it may sometimes be to have to push your way through massive crowds to buy groceries or use a library, it would be terrifically wasteful to leave all this capacity essentially idle over the summer. There are streets, beds, and classrooms to be filled – not to mention brain capacity on the part of scores and scores of tutors and grad students who are generally desperately trying to both complete and avoid their own research.

PS. Canadians would do well to read the special report on Afghanistan in this week’s Economist. With more than 2000 Canadians still serving there – either as part of Operation Enduring Freedom or NATO’s International Security Assistance Force – the situation there should be of considerable interest to us all.

Lecture in the Taylorian

The lecture today on Canada-US security and defence cooperation went well; it could even be a solid demonstration of the preferability of lecturing over research. I did talk overly quickly, burning through my forty-five minute presentation in just over half an hour, but the questions were good and I think I fielded them pretty well. The fear of going overtime can generate unwanted haste. I did manage to avoid a frequent error I’ve made in the past, namely that of getting lost in my own notes. It’s easier to avoid when you really know the material you’re covering, and the notes are for structure, rather than content.

A presentation on a topic like this is always a political act. On that basis, I think I struck the right note. I took the more truthful bits of the ‘staunch and eternal allies’ premise sometimes hammered upon by Canadian politicians under fire from the US and mixed it with some of the more essential elements of the ‘importance of legitimacy and international law’ scolding that with which we tend to fire back. All in all, I think it was reasonably balanced and candid. Wearing my NORAD pin – with Canadian and American flags on it – probably contributed positively to my ability to represent myself as someone who genuinely wants a friendly and constructive relationship between the two countries, and has considerable respect for both.

Lecturing itself was quite enjoyable, despite the associated anxiety. With a bit more practice and confidence, I think that I could get very good at this, indeed.

Reading, writing, walking

With all that is ongoing, it has been a busy day. That said, things now seem to be on track for tomorrow’s lecture. Monday, I will be teaching another seminar and meeting with Dr. Hurrell to discuss the lacklustre result of the research design essay. Tuesday, I am going to London to see the Kandinsky exhibition with Sarah Webster. This is especially welcome, as it will be the first time I’ve seen her since her wedding, back in March.

A postcard from Kelly arrived today. She will be returning from Scotland sometime in the next week, though things are uncertain given all the vagaries that attach themselves to what is simultaneously a research trip and a family holiday. Her safe return is much anticipated.

While retracing a portion of the bike ride I described here a few days ago on foot with Antonia this afternoon, I managed to take some photographs with which I am reasonably pleased . Once you have more than 4000 from a place as small as Oxford, it becomes hard to come up with something good every day. As such, I’ve used a few of them to adorn photos from past days that were lacking images. The general idea is that posts without specific topics (ie. this one) should include photographs at the rate of about one per day. This is to compensate for the fact that I am just summarizing things at you.

Reading in the rain

Between bouts of thesis reading and lecture preparation, I finished the copy of Milan Kundera’s Immortality that I was leant during the Walking Club expedition to The Weald. It is very much like his other Czech books: full of observations about how human beings think, how they interact, and how they continually misunderstand one another. Reading it had become essential not because I really had time, but because I was embarrassed about having borrowed it for such a long time. I am to return it to the mailbox of a certain name at Queen’s College – the owner of which almost certainly does not remember my name.

For the thesis, I am wading through The Skeptical Environmentalist again. It is a long and opinionated book. The difficulty of establishing whether Lomborg’s figures are used well or badly make the wander through the book a somewhat exhausting one. Alongside it, I am reading Clapp and Dauvergne’s Paths to a Green World. The RDE reviewers were critical of me for calling it philosophy – “a book about political economy.” At the same time, the critical part of the book is undeniably philosophical: it lays out four different environmentalist strands, or world views, on the basis of their assumptions and prescriptions.

For Friday’s lecture, I have re-read a couple of short books and articles on security cooperation between Canada and the United States. With only an hour to speak, that probably wasn’t terribly necessary. Far more important, though more difficult to develop, is the general speaking skill that good lecturing requires. In that respect, I miss no longer being part of the UBC debate society. Nowhere now do I have cause to speak for more than a minute or two without interruption: hardly good training for one hour lectures.

PS. Antonia has reminded me that I should re-read Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series, which wasn’t finished when I last read through them. They are an engaging depiction of an alternative version of America, with many fantasy elements and the general good craftsmanship that marks Card’s earlier work.