Refereeing/moderation/collaboration

[Loren A. BILLINGS]

Dear colleagues,

I was meaning to bring something up about refereeing at the annual
linguists' powow at AATSEEL.  I'm writing these ideas here because, alas, I
won't be able to make it the States for the meeting.  I also think these
problems might also pertain to some of the other fields.  Additionally,
David Birnbaum specifically requested that such comments be posted here.

I pushed hard for refereeing last year, when I was quite disappointed with
several talks.  What was even more upsetting was that these talks
indirectly forced more than one linguistics session to be held in some time
slots.  This then caused me to have to choose between two talks I *did*
want to attend.  This parallel-scheduling also caused at least one panel I
attended to have less people in the audience than the number of panelists
themselves (cf. Margo Ballou's recent posting on this thread).

These problems aside, however, my other proposal last year in Chicago,
which I repeat now, was that refereeing shouldn't be taken to extremes:
Although I think this step was direly needed, let's not go overboard on
this.  The main rationale for the refereeing (as Charles Gribble just
posted) should be to get people working on these talks *before* Christmas.
This review process is also supposed to remedy (or cull out) abstracts
that--if enough referees agree--would be a waste of the audience's time.
Although I agree with Olga Yokoyama's assertion that blind review increases
the prestige of having a refereed talk in one's _Curriculum vitae_, and the
prestige of the field as a whole, this should not be our primary goal.

A case in point about blind review gone wild (which does *not* refer to the
talk that Catherine Rudin, Christina Kramer and I are preparing for this
year's meeting):  An abstract was submitted this spring to Karen Robblee
(linguistics honcho), who then distributed it to anonymous reviewers.  One
of the reviewers returned a comment to the effect that, despite the
significantly new *descriptive* observations about a particular phenomenon
in one of the three branches of Slavic, since there were no theoretical or
formal proposals (yet) in the abstract it should be rejected.  It is this
"overboard" refereeing that should not be happening, at least not (yet) at
AATSEEL.  My own preference, as a generativist, is that the talks make
concrete proposals about what's going on in the particular language (or in
the human mind).  Nonetheless, I still think that AATSEEL is a perfectly
appropriate place to present good work *in progress*, which my still be in
its beginning stages.  My talk at the Toronto meeting in 1994, for example,
grew into my dissertation the following year.  The talk that Rudin, Kramer
and I are to present this year grew out of talks presented by Rudin in
Toronto (1994), then Rudin and Kramer in San Diego (1995), with a new
author added each year as the picture became clearer what was going on.

As the previous sentence suggests, I think that collaborative work should
also be encouraged.  This is one way for more people to be able to
contribute to AATSEEL (and thereby be able to get travel funding from their
employers), without forcing individuals to turn out yet another talk each
year, just in order to get the dean to approve the plane ticket.  From my
experience, collaboration forces one (actually two or more) to express his
or her ideas to someone else and defend these ideas.  It allows that person
to get feedback, which Margo (and I) also like about the refereeing
process, but much earlier on.  It also allows one with ideas, stemming from
one language area, to see how those same ideas work in the other areas.  My
own work on _li_ (the YES/NO particle) in Russian--presented two years ago
in San Diego, incidentally--got me interested in _li_ in Macedonian and
Bulgarian, where I couldn't have possibly gone it alone were it not for my
Balkanist co-authors.

Karen, I might add, has coordinated the refereeing process admirably.
Considering the newness of this whole thing, many of the start-up problems
have befallen her to solve.  She has, from what I can tell, handled these
with dispatch.


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Loren A. BILLINGS, Ph.D.  (e-mail:  billings at rz.uni-leipzig.de)

Institut fuer Slavistik                Home address:
Universitaet Leipzig
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