Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

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There is a lot more to say about Abbott’s book — his advice on doing mini-analyses is very relevant for long term fieldwork, for instance — but in the end I’ll just conclude by saying that Digital Paper is truly something special. So sometimes we try to make novelty just for its own sake—hence the worry about trendiness, which is just false up-to-the-minute-ness.

When he decides to check out every thesis written in the University of Chicago library school, you gasp at his audacity. But serious scholars, who want their work to stand the test of time, will appreciate Abbott’s unique, forthright approach and relish every page of Digital Paper . But he’s also produced practical pieces about how students and professors develop ideas, and how to have new ones.

I thought, ‘wow that’s brilliant’, but then I sadly also thought ‘he can do that because he’s Andrew Abbott’.

Abbott has twice chaired the University of Chicago’s Library Board and played a central role in planning the university’s Joe and Rika Mansueto Library. But groundbreaking work is wonderful because of something that has value in terms of those unwritten, perhaps unknown, and certainly untheorized, rules that govern the enterprise.

It’s true that because of this pattern I do have perhaps a dozen major projects that were never finished despite a lot of effort: a book on education, a huge study of musicians that produced only one published paper and left two other papers sitting idle, a project on occupational therapy that’s still dragging on after more than a decade, etc. But if you ask them to summarize Hobbes’s arguments, they’ll present you with lists of bullet points, because they’ve been taught in classes that Hobbes can be presented as bullet points. Answer a handful of multiple-choice questions to see which statistical method is best for your data. So students, even those with a great deal of training, have simply not contacted as much good prose.

Swift Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, edits the American Journal of Sociology . If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account.

What is going to happen to libraries is that these buildings will be repurposed, the same way most churches are being repurposed these days. To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. I proved this by looking at Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and showed that when the book first came out, about 17% of the references to it had page numbers - so not just Kuhn 1970, but Kuhn 1970, page 26. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

More than a mere how-to manual, Abbott’s guidebook helps teach good habits for acquiring knowledge, the foundation of knowledge worth knowing.When you brute force things, you are always noticing stuff as you go along, even as you are absolutely dying of boredom. He systematizes these memories into usable advice and lays out a multistage plan for successful scholarship that meets very rigorous demands. Without a hint of trendiness, this manual will reliably guide novice scholars into a new world of materials for study and will help their mentors keep up as well. Note：This paper is made by 100% imported wood pulp, paper density and moisture are moderate, good smoothness and enenness, high tensile, adapt to direct printing by Indigo machines. I don’t think Abbott completely sold me on paper files, but he did sell me on project-specific files.