Teaching Domesday Book February 17, 2009
Posted by gesta in Academia, Books, Medieval.Tags: Anglo-Norman, David Roffe, Domesday Book, Jonathan Jarrett, Lanfranc, medieval church, teaching
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While Dr Jarrett has been busy listening to seminars on Domesday Book, I’ve been trying to teach the damn thing, again. Hopefully, this was the last time I shall ever have to do so, but Domesday Book is rather like a nasty, slimey something lurking under a stone. Pick up the stone and there it is, flapping its folios at you in a extremely menacing manner, with the remains of students and junior faculty who have tried to make sense of it and failed, scattered round about. (more…)
Journal rankings continued February 5, 2009
Posted by gesta in Uncategorized.Tags: higher education policy, journal rankings
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A recent piece in the Times Higher gives hope for those concerned about the impact of the EHIR’s journal list on research and how it is judged. The Higher reports that the EHIR is scrapping the controversial A-C gradings amid fears that these were being used to rank the research published in them hierarchically rather than assessing the quality of each article. To me, it does seem rather disingenuous (or naive if you are feeling generous) for Michael Worton to state:
We have been saying it until we are blue in the face that this is not about hierarchies but about category difference … (the change) will make everything a lot clearer.
In these days of management culture, targets and quick and easy methods of assessment, if you set out a system of categorising journals, of course people are going to say that an article published in English Historical Review is better than one in Annales de Normandie because for former is in the ‘A’ category and the latter in the ‘C’. Hopefully we can now all get back to publishing our research in the best places for that research.
