I've also slowly been trying to correct the bad habits I developed during my undergraduate and PhD studies, where most of the sources we were given were white men. One thing I've noticed is that in many fields, the mainstream perspectives are dominated by white men, and while digging deeper helps a bit, it doesn't fully remedy the problem. Consciously trying to think about what different perspectives might look like, and the key words associated with that, sometimes helps: for example, if I'm mostly getting the same demographic turn up in my searches, I'll try adding, "feminist" or "postcolonial" or "decolonize" to my search. That, and similar approaches, helps me turn up not just a different demographic of writers, but also often very different perspectives. On Fri, 2016-02-26 at 09:42 +0000, Jill Walker Rettberg wrote:
Janet Sternberg’s point that people don’t search carefully and therefore miss key references means we need to think about how to make our research searchable - we need to use the most likely search terms in titles and abstracts of our publications.
The first time I was recommended to do this was in 2014, and the publisher said that deliberate use of likely search terms makes a huge difference in how many people actually find books and book chapters. This is a rather different way of thinking about how to title academic work than we are used to, but one we should definitely be aware of. Of course, we should also teach our students to search better, using related terms and seeing what is referenced by other scholars on the topic.
Also: we should all deliberately make sure to cite women and people of colour in all our work. For the last few years, I have carefully looked at my references as I write, and if there isn’t a pretty even gender balance, I search harder to find women writing about the topic. I use Google Scholar most, but I also ask other women in related areas if they know of other women I should be aware of. I have ALWAYS found more women when I specifically search, and they are usually doing fabulous stuff that has been really helpful to my own work. And often they do not pop up when you first start to explore an area. Not digging deeper means missing out on really valuable work.
Jill
Jill Walker Rettberg Professor of Digital Culture Dept of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies University of Bergen
Blog - http://jilltxt.net Twitter - http://twitter.com/jilltxt My book "Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves" is out on Palgrave as an open access publication - buy it in print or download it for free! http://jilltxt.net/books
On 26 Feb 2016, at 0:00 , Janet Sternberg wrote:
Limited research skills/efforts are often as much to blame as gender bias in failure to cite relevant work. For example, academics and journalists (including women) writing about online harassment rarely cite my 2001 dissertation and 2012 book, "Misbehavior in Cyber Places: The Regulation of Online Conduct in Virtual Communities on the Internet." Researchers who only search for "trolling" or "troll" will likely miss my work on misbehavior because they don't search broader terms like "online conduct.” Just a few decades ago, researchers were encouraged to look for a variety of synonymous terms in order to uncover relevant related work, but nowadays folks tend to search rather specific terms, and if they don't find exact matches, they seem to assume no other relevant research exists. Of course, gender bias continues to be a problem, but it's not the only reason relevant academic work gets neglected.
Janet Sternberg, PhD http://about.me/JanetPhD
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/