Greg Dember
1 min readJun 29, 2023

--

Well said, and important. It seems that you are calling for both 1) more and 2) "better" citation.

In addition to any other types of diversity that you've suggested paying attention to, an important one is diversity of intellectual community. Within the conventional academic community as the sort of "default" community, interdisciplinary citation ensures that disciplines are paying attention to each other's work and conceptual frameworks. However, I think academics are pretty good at self-managing this kind of thing.

In the wild Internet, however, there is even more danger of isolated, self-curated intellectual communities doing potentially great work that ultimately is much less powerful than it might have been because of ignorance about what is going on outside. To escape from these silos, a great place to start is in the established, conventional academic literature. There you can see whether terms you think you've coined are already being use in another sense, or concepts that you think are original are only partially original, in which case you can emphasize the parts you've generated that seem to be genuinely new while connecting to established work. Or attempting to legitimately refute established work, but in ways that are convincing.

When I say "you" here, of course, I don't mean you, Naomi. I mean, well... you know who! hahaha

--

--

Greg Dember

Human-centric ontological adventures! (a little bit of heart, a little bit of brain) (topics will vary) gregdember.com