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Scholarly method - or as it is more commonly called, scholarship - is the body of principles and practices used by scholars to make their claims about the world as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly public. In its broadest sense, scholarship can be taken to include the scientific method, which is the body of scholarly practice that governs the sciences. This article focuses on scholarship in the narrower sense, covering rational inquiry in areas that are mostly too complex to yet be treated by science. These include history as well as the creations of the human mind in the form of art, music, literature, religion, philosophy, and cultural beliefs. (notice how religion is a creation of the human mind) Image File history File links Information. ...
Scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena and acquiring new knowledge, as well as for correcting and integrating previous knowledge. ...
The title page to The Historians History of the World. ...
This article is about the philosophical concept of Art. ...
For other uses, see Music (disambiguation). ...
Old book bindings at the Merton College library. ...
The philosopher Socrates about to take poison hemlock as ordered by the court. ...
For other uses, see Culture (disambiguation). ...
Scholars At present, scholarship is largely the domain of professional specialists, most of whom work as academics in universities, research institutes, and museums; see Academia. However, there are also scholars who support themselves by writing nonfiction books or other publishable material; for example, the historian Barbara Tuchman was such a scholar, as is Dava Sobel. The military historian John Keegan worked for many years as an academic but is now an independent scholar. Lastly, there are scholars who work at the highest level but are amateurs, supporting themselves with an independent fortune, with day jobs, or by the generosity of others. Such scholars played a far more important role prior to the twentieth century; for examples, see Charles Darwin, Heinrich Schliemann, and Karl Marx. For more on amateur scholarship, see independent scholar. Representation of a university class, 1350s. ...
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Academia is a collective term for the scientific and cultural community engaged in higher education and research, taken as a whole. ...
A historian is an individual who studies history and who writes on history. ...
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (January 30, 1912 _ February 6, 1989) was an American historian and author. ...
Dava Sobel is a writer of popular expositions of scientific topics. ...
Sir John Keegan OBE (born 1934) is a British military historian, lecturer and journalist. ...
For other people of the same surname, and places and things named after Charles Darwin, see Darwin. ...
Portrait of Heinrich Schliemann. ...
Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was a 19th century philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. ...
An independent scholar is anyone who works outside of traditional academia in the pursuit of truth and knowledge. ...
Scholarship often attracts special personalities, particularly in those societies where it is not highly valued by the vernacular culture. Often, scholars are thought of as being cut off from their colloquial culture and intensely absorbed by their topic of study. Nevertheless, the impulse to become a scholar seems to be widespread. Those who teach in universities find that some of their students get "bitten by the bug" of scholarship, and feel impelled to pursue the scholarly impulse despite the dubious prospects for job security that a scholarly career affords.
What is good scholarship? The idea of scholarship is normative: particular individuals are said to be "fine scholars", "sloppy scholars", and so on. Behind such evaluations rests a belief that there are standards for evaluating scholarship that go beyond the preferences or tastes of any one individual. Such standards can be sorted out into three areas: quality of data gathering, adherence to scholarly procedures, and allegiance to scholarly values. In philosophy, normative is usually contrasted with positive, descriptive or explanatory when describing types of theories, beliefs, or statements. ...
Data gathering Scholars value data that is directly connected to observation, for example, data taken from examining a composer's or author's manuscript, the proceedings of parliamentary debates, or diary entries. Such data are called primary sources. Sources that synthesize and interpret information from primary sources are secondary sources, and works that depend on secondary sources are called tertiary sources. Tertiary sources are not without value--sometimes a work of tertiary scholarship is acclaimed for its insight--but scholars trust facts better when they come from lower-level sources. Observation is an activity of a sapient or sentient living being (e. ...
In historical scholarship, a primary source is a document, or other source of information that was created at or near the time being studied, by an authoritative source, usually one with direct personal knowledge of the events being described. ...
In historical scholarship, a Secondary source is a work of history written as a synthetic account, usually based on primary sources and other secondary sources. ...
One "source" of data that scholars generally consider unreliable is a scholar's own memory. This form of data storage often transforms facts into pseudo-facts, which are perhaps more vivid and entertaining, or which fit better with the scholar's own world view; see Urban legend. The process of gradual transformation that occurs when material is stored in human memory, particularly when it is also transmitted by word of mouth, has been documented by scholars in folklore and cultural anthropology. An urban legend or urban myth is similar to a modern folklore consisting of stories often thought to be factual by those circulating them. ...
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To be sure, a scholar who can keep many facts in his or her head at once has a better chance of seizing upon an important new generalization, or of having a useful new idea. But a finished scholarly product is expected to be rechecked against primary and secondary sources.
Techniques in data gathering Many scholars make use of technology to obtain data. For instance, special forms of lighting often serve to reveal otherwise-indecipherable writing on old manuscripts, particularly palimpsests. X-rays and other scanning techniques can reveal paintings that were covered up by later work, or the stages by which a particular painting was created. A palimpsest is a manuscript page, scroll, or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again. ...
In the NATO phonetic alphabet, X-ray represents the letter X. An X-ray picture (radiograph) taken by Röntgen An X-ray is a form of electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength approximately in the range of 5 pm to 10 nanometers (corresponding to frequencies in the range 30 PHz...
Text corpora also involve special methods. In the pre-computer era, many scholars created concordances to important texts, such as the works of Shakespeare. In a concordance, one may look up a particular word and find all the locations where it occurs in the corpus. Concordances are now rendered largely obsolete by computers, which permit a large corpus of text to be searched very rapidly, and also allow for much more flexible searching methods than a concordance would. A number of important on-line text corpora currently exist and are still being expanded, such as the Gutenberg Project and the Perseus Project. Look up corpus in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
This article is about the machine. ...
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Project Gutenberg (PG) was launched by Michael Hart in 1971 in order to provide a library, on what would later become the Internet, of free electronic versions (sometimes called e-texts) of physically existing books. ...
The Perseus Project is a digital library project of Tufts University that assembles digital collections of humanities resources. ...
Interpreting primary data Often, obtaining data from primary sources involves the scholar in issues of interpretation. For example, older English literature dates from a time when spelling was not yet standardized, and sometimes it is not easy to determine what an author meant. The pronunciation of words long ago was often different, making it hard to infer the correct scansion of lines of poetry. In such cases, careful study of parallel material from the same historical period can often shed light on the question. For older pronunciations, consultation of the oldest dictionaries and use of the comparative method can help. Meter (British English spelling: metre) describes the linguistic sound patterns of a verse. ...
For other uses, see Dictionary (disambiguation). ...
The comparative method (in comparative linguistics) is a technique used by linguists to demonstrate genetic relationships between languages. ...
Many older texts, such as the Bible or classical literature, were originally transmitted only in hand-copied form. Special methods have been developed for systematic comparison of the oldest copies, which can help in determining which sources are earliest and in locating interpolations and scribal error; see philology. This Gutenberg Bible is displayed by the United States Library. ...
Bust of Homer. ...
Philology, etymologically, is the love of words. ...
Scholarly procedure Scholarly communities use a number of methods to promulgate scholarship and to verify and improve its quality. For more on this topic, see Academia. Academia is a collective term for the scientific and cultural community engaged in higher education and research, taken as a whole. ...
Publication -
Works of scholarship are often published in scholarly journals. Like magazines, journals are periodical publications, but they differ in important ways. First, they are typically open to submissions from any person (though submissions from individuals plainly lacking knowledge of the field are usually promptly rejected). Second, the mission of the journal is taken to be the dissemination of scholarly findings, rather than the entertainment or personal edification of its readers. (It is not unknown, of course, for one scholar to find another's work to be enjoyable, but this is not the main purpose of publication.) Third, all quality journals carry out peer review, in which a submitted article is sent for examination by (what the editor hopes will be) competent and impartial referees. Ideally, articles that lack scholarly quality will receive negative evaluations from the referees, and the editor of the journal will reject the submission or ask for changes before it is resubmitted (possibly with another round of review). For a detailed account of this process, see Peer review. Academic publishing describes the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. ...
Academic publishing describes the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. ...
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Peer review (known as refereeing in some academic fields) is a scholarly process used in the publication of manuscripts and in the awarding of funding for research. ...
The procedures of peer review are also followed, at least to some extent, when a scholar seeks to publish his or her findings in the form of a book, as a chapter in a jointly-authored book, or in a Web-based electronic journal. For other uses, see Book (disambiguation). ...
Citation Contributions to scholarly venues are expected to provide bibliographic citations to earlier work in the same area. This permits readers to put the claims to a better test by consulting the earlier work. Authors often engage earlier work directly, explaining why they agree or differ from earlier views. Ideally, sources are primary (firsthand), recent, with good ethos, credentials, and citations. A citation or bibliographic citation is a reference to a book, article, web page, or other published item with sufficient detail to identify the item uniquely. ...
Ethos (ἦθος) (plurals: ethe, ethea) is a Greek word originally meaning the place of living that can be translated into English in different ways. ...
In principle, citation implies that there is a community of scholars, working together to expand and improve the scholarly edifice. To be sure, academia contains a number of scholars who pursue their own line, citing others little or not at all. Such scholars work at their own risk: they are often (though not always) considered to be cranks or to have lost the skill or knowledge needed to participate in scholarly debate. Crank is a pejorative term for a person who holds some belief which the vast majority of his contemporaries would consider false, clings to this belief in the face of all counterarguments or evidence presented to him. ...
Some have questioned the authority assumed or conferred by citation, considering it endlessly recursive, the authority of a work resting on its citations, the authority of which in turn rely on their citations.
Personnel Agencies that employ scholars (most notably universities) often attempt to replicate the scholarly process in their personnel evaluations. Thus, in promotion or tenure cases, the scholarly work of the candidate is sent out for additional peer review from other scholars, often anonymous to the candidate. The goal of such procedures is to retain only scholars of proven ability and accomplishment in professional positions, and to reward the better scholars through promotion. See professor. Representation of a university class, 1350s. ...
Look up tenure in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
The meaning of the word professor (Latin: one who claims publicly to be an expert) varies. ...
Scholarly values Scholarship is the product of fallible human beings, and as such is prone to error. Part of the culture of scholarship consists of the effort to increase the chances of arriving at valid conclusions despite human fallibility. The scholarly procedures mentioned above are part of this effort. Less tangibly, many scholarly communities appear to share intellectual values that guide their work. While it is difficult to articulate these values precisely, the following is one attempt. Image File history File links Circle-question-red. ...
- Scholars are honor-bound to seek only the truth, and not pursue some ulterior agenda. For instance, scholarly efforts that are focused on the glorification of the scholar's own nationality or ethnic group are disparaged.
- Scholars should be self-critical, carefully inspecting their own work from a skeptical point of view, to find weaknesses and possible ways of overcoming them. In this task, scholars find it useful to imagine that they were an advocate of a rival point of view, and see how their ideas would be treated under this view. Scholars also give lectures presenting their work to other scholars, in order to get useful feedback and criticism. This often occurs at meetings of scholarly societies.
- A corollary of the last two points is the view that a scholar should spend time in introspection about just what the most likely sources of bias in his or her work are likely to be. Some likely candidates are: national origin, citizenship in a wealthy or powerful nation, male gender in a society that offers special privilege to males, social class, religious belief, sexual orientation, and important previous life experiences. Once these factors are identified, the scholar has a better chance of remaining objective, and perhaps of escaping accusations of bias once the work is finally published.
- Scholars should be scrupulously honest, and never hide data that go against the hypothesis being argued for.
- Lastly, scholars feel that hard work is important. In many cases a quick and haphazard treatment of some area is likely to produce a distorted account. In such cases, it would be better simply leave the work to some other scholar willing to spend the time to do a proper job.
A learned society is a society that exists to promote an academic discipline or group of disciplines. ...
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