March 2021 Research Update

Amici!  It is now April!

This semester feels as though it has slipped by faster than I would have liked (how that is always the case!), but at least this month saw a bit more progress than last month.  The essay I mentioned on Greek and American stasis finally appeared in Foreign Policy (here: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/07/ancient-greece-partisan-stasis-civil-conflict/).  A second (much longer) essay comparing the American and Roman All-Volunteer Forces is at least done (more than two months after I'd have liked it to be) and looks set to appear in The National Interest some time in the hopefully not too distant future.

Towards the very end of last month, I put together an abstract (I'll talk in a second about what an abstract is and what it looks like) as a member of a panel on Roman military history ("What Sort of Wave? New Work on Explaining Roman Military Success") at the annual meeting (in May) of the Society of Military History (the SMH).  That panel is now on the program (https://ww2.eventrebels.com/er/CFP/AgendaAtAGlance.jsp?CFPID=1177&ScreenID=1112&Token=2GSDUHMKD) so if you want to see me talk for about fifteen minutes on mail armor in the Roman Republic (which is to say, essentially the conference presentation form of the article currently still in review), I'll be doing that at the SMH in Norfolk in May.

(As an aside, Michael Taylor's paper in the same panel is partially a response, I believe, to Tony McArthur's recent article in the Journal of Military History (which is the journal of the SMH), "Should Roman Soldiers be Called 'Professional' Prior to Augustus."  A good example of the use of conference papers to enable conversations within fields without the long delays of article publication.)

I also put together an abstract for another panel on ancient military history to hopefully be at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies and the Archaeological Institute of America (SCS/AIA), where I actually hope to advance in a more formal way an argument I first made on ACOUP, namely that the Spartan agoge can be understood through the lens of modern systems of indoctrination-through-trauma used to condition child soldiers in conflicts in the developing world.  This is the other use of conference papers: an opportunity to 'trial balloon' an argument and see what the likely objections are before working on publication.  Assuming our panel makes the program (by no means assured at SCS/AIA, which can be quite competitive, although landing a panel is easier than an individual paper), I can hope to get some useful feedback (positive and negative) to know if that argument is worth pushing forward and with what modifications.  That is part of why I am doing that paper at SCS/AIA, because I suspect it will be on the classical side of the comparison where I am likely to get pushback.

And of course I have still been teaching and unfurling the series on textiles (which is now almost done, although I am rather behind schedule getting the last post finished and ready).  I have this weekend to brush aside another short public-facing essay I agreed to write and then I can turn my focus to that companion chapter I need to write (which I mentioned in this space back in January).

Briefly then, I want to talk about abstracts (since I have been writing a bunch) which are a rather artificial form of writing which cut across all academic disciplines, including the STEM fields.

An abstract is a formal summary of an academic publication or paper and one of the standard genres of academic writing that graduate students generally have to master.  The purpose of an abstract is to quickly relay to a potential reader the exact topic of the paper in question so the reader can assess if it is worth reading further.  Consequently, abstracts tend to get used in two circumstances:

1) At the beginning of an academic article (rarely a book or chapter) describing in a very formal and limited way, the contents of what follows.

2) As part of a proposal, e.g. for a paper to be included in a conference or a book pitch to a publisher.

The abstract is itself an odd genre of writing for one key reason: abstracts are extremely short.  For abstracts leading into an article, word limits of 100, 150 or 200 words are common.  In history, at least, the 300-400 word abstract for a conference paper is a fairly standard length, although I have noticed that classical philology tends to permit longer abstracts (SCS ranges between 500 and 650, year to year, while AIA tends more consistently to be shorter, around 300-400).

As a result, abstracts tend to have a very formal, compressed style, with some standard odd features.  Rather than making the argument, abstracts are supposed to describe the argument, which leads to lots of quite wooden phrasings: "In this paper, I examine..." or "This chapter considers..." or "The paper will discuss..." and so on.  There is kind of an anti-art to putting together the utterly functional prose of an abstract which I suspect is more conspicuous in the humanities where we are (in theory) expected to write with a degree of grace and fluency (whereas academic STEM writing is, in theory, supposed to be unadorned and wholly functional, though writing effectively that way is its own art).  It is always a bit amusing to see the brick-and-mortar abstracts of scholars who write their articles in filigree and lace.

(Though I have found that scholars who write their articles in incomprehensible obscurantist jargon alsowrite abstracts that are incomprehensible obscurantist jargon.  I dislike unnecessarily jargonistic writing - see this tweet, for instance: https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1373996016798740483 - though it is also the case that folks from outside the field may not be able to identify what exactly is obscurantist nonsense from what is just highly technical language.  Narratology and related studies in particular - things that study how words create meaning and how that meaning is understood - tend to produce a lot of difficult to read and jargon-heavy discussion, some of which is deep and valuable, some of which is not.)

I actually have one of my own abstracts up on the blog already here: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/02/miscellanea-scs-aia-conference-2020/

Another example of me doing the form is my abstract for my Historia article on the First Punic War, which goes thusly:

This article reassesses the quality and character of Carthaginian strategy during the First Punic War. It uses the ship count figures contained in Polybius’ account, combined with comparative evidence from the Athenian navy to estimate the relative cost of naval operations for both Carthage and Rome. It shows that, contrary to prevailing scholarly opinion, Carthage’s naval effort was no less extensive than Rome’s. In conclusion, it seeks to explain Carthaginian strategy as a result of limitations imposed by cost and geography. Consequently, the critical scholarly consensus rendered against Carthaginian strategy in this war is to be revised.

The basic concerns in both cases are the same: give the argument ('the scholarly consensus...is to be revised') and the sort of evidence that will be brought to bear on it ('ship count figures...comparative evidence from the Athenian navy').  The great temptation, particularly for abstracts with excessive word limits, is to argue in the abstract (something I think I actually do a bit too much in the SCS/AIA 2020 abstract, honestly).  This is actually part of what I find a bit exhausting in over-long conference abstracts (like the aforementioned 500-word or 650-word ones); they end up being flabby restatements of the entire argument rather than an effective summary.

And those are abstracts.  Because they are very short, but very important, abstracts tend to be edited very carefully, with each word scrutinized.

I want to close out with question for you guys - I was thinking idly (no firm plans) about how I might structure a AMA/Q&A style.  I wonder if it might be reasonable to set a second Patreon tier (maybe at $5 or $10?), where patrons could propose questions which I might briefly answer on the blog (so everyone would read the answers, but only patrons would pick the questions) perhaps every couple of months.

Is there interest in that?  I'd have to note the answers here would probably be fairly brief if I want to be able to write several answers in just a week - essentially the equivalent of 'what would I say if a student walked up after class and asked...'  And also, I suspect the answer to almost every sort of 'have you read <insert sci-fi/fantasy novel>' is likely to be no (there are a lot of novels out there and I have very little novel reading time these days).  But maybe for historical/worldbuilding questions?

Tell me what you think.

Oh, and here is a picture of my (less frequently photographed) cat Percy, being on top of my research plans: