[Air-L] The review process for IR15

[Radhika G]

we do open review at ADA: Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology which
I co-edit with Carol Stabile.

http://fembotcollective.org

I can talk to you about how that's going sometime via google hangout if you
like and put you in touch with Carol and the terrific ADA editorial team.

r
___

Radhika Gajjala
http://www.cyberdiva.org


On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 6:32 PM, Jill Walker Rettberg <
Jill.Walker.Rettberg at lle.uib.no> wrote:

> Congratulations and condolences to everyone who's just received
> acceptances and rejections for their IR15 papers and panels. I got one of
> each (hooray for our pre-conference selfie workshop!) - and I was hoping to
> renew the (sorry, I know kind of exhausting) discussions about how an ideal
> review process would look.
>
> First, thank you to the organisers for seeing through a very complicated
> process - and getting the notifications out on time, too! I genuinely
> appreciate that it is a HUGE job organising a conference, and that there
> probably is no perfect system - especially in a radically
> cross-disciplinary conference like this. I'm also program chair for another
> conference next year and obviously would like to make sure that the
> reviewing process for that goes as well as possible.
>
> My main disappointment was that the two papers I was assigned to review
> weren't in my area of expertise. I think I made the mistake of checking
> "digital humanities" among the list of topics and methodologies I could
> review and I got two papers that had that in their keywords but had
> absolutely nothing to do with digital humanities at all. I thought that was
> pretty disappointing, especially since I know many people in the humanities
> didn't get humanities reviewers, and there I was, a humanist reviewing
> statistical and sociological methods. Not optimal at all.
>
> I would prefer an open review process, though I realise traditional blind
> review might be easier (due to familiarity?) and for an open process you'd
> have to find ways to avoid people just voting for their friends or people
> they know of. There are systems for this though, aren't there? And you
> could even still have semi-blind review where authors were anonymised.
>
> If that's not going to happen, at the least I think tracks (perhaps
> especially for the humanities) or, better, allowing reviewers to bid for
> papers they would like to review (based on the titles or perhaps title +
> abstract) would make sense. It's such a waste to use me to review
> statistics and have ethnographers reviewing literary/textual analysis, and
> that can be avoided with bidding. I think Easychair.org allows this. Also
> it's really fun as a reviewer to see the titles of ALL the proposed papers.
> You really get an idea of the field as a whole. I don't see any reason why
> that should be secret.
>
> Anyway, in the interest of openness, and because rejection is part of
> being an academic and one we tend to pretend never happens, I posted my
> rejected proposal and the reviews it received here:
> http://jilltxt.net/?p=3963 along with some thoughts about the process
> both of being a reviewer and of receiving reviews. There are also some
> interesting comments from others in the Facebook thread I posted here
> (because nobody comments on blogs anymore)
> https://www.facebook.com/jill.rettberg/posts/510785413159
>
> I'd really like to hear other peoples' experiences with the process and
> ideas for how to set up an ideal reviewing process for a cross-disciplinary
> conference.
>
> Jill
>
>
> Jill Walker Rettberg
> Professor of Digital Culture
> Dept of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies
> University of Bergen
> Postboks 7800
> 5020 Bergen
>
> + 47 55588431
>
> Blog - http://jilltxt.net
> Twitter - http://twitter.com/jilltxt
>
> My latest book, Blogging (2nd ed), is available from Polity:
> http://www.politybooks.com/book.asp?ref=0745663648
>
>
>
>
>
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