Sunday, April 22, 2007

DAWG SLEDDing!

A key premise motivating DAWG work is that the unique skill set honed during participation in intercollegiate policy debate has great potential to drive scholarly knowledge production outside the contest round setting. Surely one of the most unusual (and perhaps valuable) elements of this skill set is the ability to work for long periods of time in groups, often through the night, on common research projects. Through DAWG SLEDDing (Sleepover Leading to Edited Document Dump), we can mobilize this odd element of our skill set to produce awesome research products! To pilot this maneuver, I propose that we try a book review DAWG SLEDDing experiment:
* Participants convene at 8 p.m., bringing a book to be reviewed, copy of a target journal for publication, and a sleeping bag;

* No one leaves until all participants have had their completed book review edited by at least two other DAWG SLEDDers, and all book reviews have been submitted online to respective book review editors in a collective document dump.

Let's use the comment section to organize inaugural DAWG SLEDDing sometime in May! Keep your eyes on books you may want to review and scout out some promising journals to submit to - book review editors are some of the most starved-for-text creatures in all of academia, and many of them relish high-caliber, unsolicited reviews.