[Air-L] Let's talk about AoIR

[Magdalena O!]

My apologies for being late but I wanted to take in all the lucid and cogent comments first.

I am grateful this discussion was started because when I received my rejection I was quite frustrated. This was not because my co-author and I were rejected but because the first two reviewers commented on similar strengths and weaknesses, and the third reviewer interrogated our "short paper" line by line (often with snide and passive aggressive remarks), but did not get the point the paper was trying to make. This third reviewer also scored us over 40 points less than the others.

This then made me wonder whether there is an accountability to reviewer management? I've never encountered such a review of my work before (whether for a conference or publication).

There were many points made in regard to this topic about wanting to encourage speculative and experimental work that showcases rigour but cannot be confined to "data findings" and "sample methods" etc. Our paper was heavily theoretical and trying to push the discourse of Internet Studies in fairly speculative ways that still had a clear object of inquiry. We may have failed at this, but a snide line by line commentary is not helpful to us, especially as young PhD scholars.

I'm very much on board with Terri's creative writing workshop that she proposed at the end of her keynote last year because some of us definitely struggle with academic writing. Alas I won't be going to Denver but hopefully there will be another opportunity because writing skills are *not* taught at the graduate level and this doesn't make sense to me.

Magda

Magdalena Olszanowski, PhD Student
HASTAC Scholar
Communication Studies
Concordia University
Montreal, QC

On 2013-05-31, at 6:00 PM, air-l-request at listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l-request at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:

Re: Let's talk about AoIR.