#Abbott clew full#
The chapter is, in sum, a vindication for the obsessive research who lives in a world full of people who don’t care about bibliographic minutiae. Abbott reminds us that our insane desire for thorough and exhaustive knowledge of a topic is one of our most valuable traits - all that stands between the present and a future where the highest quality social scientific information available is Buzzfeed lists of celebrities who look like Otters.
When he unexpectedly finds biographies of great librarians while browsing through the Zs, your heart starts beating faster. When he decides to check out every thesis written in the University of Chicago library school, you gasp at his audacity. In fact, I think if you just assigned the “Library Research Infrastructure” paper and chapter 2 of Digital Paper to students, you’d have a pretty good sense of Abott’s wider project.īut most importantly, the story Abbott tells in chapter 2 is thrilling. Reading the story of how “Library Research” was produced was absolutely fascinating. I had read this paper - which is superb - before reading Digital Paepr. Easily my favorite chapter is the second, which provides an autobiographical account of the research that went into Abbott’s paper “Library Research Infrastructure for Humanistic and Social Scientific Scholarship in the Twentieth Century”. As a result, Digital Paper can help total novices learn their way around a library.īut for seasoned researchers, the book is also (as I said above) life-affirming.
#Abbott clew how to#
Other chapters offer tours through more advanced topics, such as how to read a text (at what speed, and with what sort of focus) and how to write with style. Abbot takes nothing for granted - chapter 3 explains how to find books in the stacks using a call number, and how an academic citation is structured.
You need to read it.ĭigital Paper is organized into 12 chapters. It improved my own ability to do research. It is - yes, I really mean this - life-affirming. It’s an epigrammatic summary of a career’s worth of knowledge.
It’s a pessimistic and slightly misanthropic ode to a quiet world of well-ordered card catalogs destroyed by the garish vulgarity of online databases. It’s an entire theory of how scholars pursue scholarship. It’s a superb ‘how to’ guide about writing a long research paper or thesis. But having read it now, and with a critical (if biased) eye, I can honestly say that every student, professor, and intellectual needs to read it. Andrew Abbott writing a book on how to do research? I was destined to like this book before I opened it up. There’s also an ‘applied’ dimension to his work - he produced the report on the University of Chicago’s library which made the bold move to double down on physical book purchases in what was supposed to be a digital future.Ībbott’s latest book, Digital Paper, continues this focus on the sociology of knowledge production by providing us with a “library methods” book: a ‘how to do fieldwork’ book, but for people who do library research. But he’s also produced practical pieces about how students and professors develop ideas, and how to have new ones. A historical sociologist with strong quantitative skills, he’s produced books on the history of academic disciplines and the dynamics of their formation and professionalization. Abbott is one of the most thoughtful people writing today about what specialist knowledge is, and how we produce it. It was only after moving halfway around the world that I began reading his work. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I occasionally sang with Andrew Abbott in choir - he was the bass in suspenders.
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