[Sca-cooks] Slap me in the face

[Karen Lyons-McGann]

Suey : It comes down to this:

Publish as you will,  and it will find it's own audience and reputation.

If you want a certain sort of respect and readership, you'll need to satisfy
their expectations.  Professional standards, academic standards, amatuer
standards have different expectations and require different levels of skill
as a researcher and writer.  You know what level you are at, I presume,
based on comparing yourself to whoever else is researching/writing on the
subject. You may or may not be fooling yourself (I've met amatuer
researchers who completely overestimate their skills and understanding).
It's not for us to know or judge until we've tried to use your work. Yes,
you kinda asked us to judge your work, but no one here has time to study it
well enough to properly do so.  You showed us the hoopoe, there is a problem
with it, knowing nothing but that, we'd be inclined to doubt the whole
thing. And we could be very wrong.  (and I only know what I've read here.
Spanish foods being not my area of interest, I never looked at your site.)

Like most people on the internet we are users of information.   The members
of this listserv like to think we are the best informed of SCA members with
an interest in medieval cookery and we like to be seen as leaders in our
field within the SCA, and in some cases, beyond.  Therefore this listserv is
a bit of a gateway to a particular audience of SCA members  in that we will
recommend good books/sites/blogs to those who look up to the members of this
listserv they know. (not necessarily the listserv as a whole, but their
local specialist who happens to be here too.)  Despite the high knowledge
and skill levels of some members, we are not an academic review panel or
professional editors.  Just people having fun.  We are not the only
potential audience though.

Citations are good, but your published work need not be cited in the same
detail as for an academic work or work intended for sale *unless* you intend
to impress those who work at that level or those who would pay for the work
if they had to. Of which there are many here. But, you are giving it away
for free.  In English we say, 'buyer beware' and 'you get what you pay
for'.  Users of your blog will have to judge for themselves the value of
this free resource.

Once you've published your work, we will try to make use of it.  If it
proves useful and trustworthy for our purposes, we'll use and recommend it
and those with blogs will link to it to make it more available to SCA
members or other researchers.   Despite the criticism you've received over
the hoopoe question, the work as a whole might end up being quite popular
with listserv members and the larger group we try to lead.  We won't know
until we read it, and we won't read it until we need it because we are here
for our own entertainment and enlightenment.

 If it proves not useful to us, then at the least we won't use it and at the
worst, we'll advise others  not to.  That's not to say other people outside
this listserv or outside the SCA might not find it fabulous.


-------

 So, the question is, who do you hope to impress or assist?  If you want a
good reputation and lots of people at all using and referncing and linking
to your research, then you need to make sure it satisfies their needs. The
design and content of the blog will make a difference in how it is
perceived. Maybe you need  to set it all aside for a while, study some
similiar blogs and websites, and consider what you what to present and how
you want to present it. Which  sites would you be proud if they 'linked' to
you might be a guide to what you include.

Your complete bibliography would be useful to many I beleive.  Just knowing
what is out there to be looked for is a big help to someone new to a
subject.

A website may well be the only thing that some people ever access on the
subject.   Some people haven't the skills or knowledge to sort through
nuances of just how much evidence is proof and what is speculation and what
is irrelevent, they will take as fact even something that included many
warnings as to it's unreliability.  Just because it is written.   Some
people can understand 'informed speculation' and take it for the guess work
it is.  Others see such speculation as being as good as a fact and will tell
others it is so, spreading misinformation. Or they'll carry the speculation
further still and share it as fact.   If you intend the well informed to
trust you, you have to consider not letting the less informed mislead
themselves, and others, while pointing to you as the wise researcher who
told them so.

So, with that in mind:

1.  Publish  what is provable. If it is provable it is useful.  Still,
expect people will write to you or about you to argue the point when their
own research, or lack of research, disagrees. If they disagree publicly
enough and loudly enough, they will damage your reputation.   Keep in mind,
this will happen for information you CAN provide citations for!

2.  The unproven I would continue researching and publish only as it is
proven.

3.  OR you can risk publishing the unproven with the reminder that it is
incomplete or 'traditional knowledge' or 'speculative'  .  With lots of
trustworthy, provable information, you can get away with a limited amount of
unproven information that you admit is unproven.  But at some point, the
amount of unproven stuff cheapens your reputation.  This point varies by
user.  Some tolerate none partly because others beleive everything they read
(as I said above).   In any case, you'll get lots of requests for proof
and  I'm sure you have no more time than this Emilio person to be responding
to people who expect more from you than is already in the blog and they'd
like a prompt response too because who cares if your child is sick or your
computer is down or those notes are now in storage?!  Not to mention that
the ugliness in point 1 will be multiplied if there is actually something
people point to as being unprovable/wrong.

I say, for your own sanity:  If you can prove it, publish it.  If not, save
yourself the trouble and pain of dealing with the results.

Lady Bonne de Traquair