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I'm sure we have all had this sentiment, given the increase in garbage emails inviting us to attend bogus conferences and publish in bogus journals. Fed up with this, two authors created a paper that consists primarily of the phrase "Get me off your f_____ mailing list," repeated several hundred times. They submitted it to the journal, International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology , whose editor accepted the paper!! This is hilarious. See the nice discussion on Scolarly Open Access , and don't neglect to read the comments. There is also some discussion on IFL-Science and elsewhere. The discussants at Scholarly Open Access suggest use of the random text generator at Scigen that will create bogus computer science papers, appropriate for bogus conferences and journals. For more humanities-oriented readers, try the Postmodern text generator - every time you access the site, a new postmodern text is generated. Thanks to Julie and Rudy for alerting me to this ho...

Lund, Christian  (2014)  Of What is This a Case? Analytical Movements in Qualitative Social Science Research. Human Organization 73(3):224-234. I just read this article, and it is fantastic. Alison Rautman suggested it: Thanks, Alison! Yeah, maybe its weird to get excited about epistemology, but given the sorry state of argumentation in archaeology , we really need to talk more about epistemology. A good place to begin is with methods of case study analysis. Many, or perhaps most, archaeological studies are examples of case study research. That is, we are analyzing a small number of cases in order to draw conclusions and make general points. In my previous post on case study research , I suggest that archaeologists would do well to pay attention to the methodological literature on case study research in the social sciences. Now, that is a rather large literature, and much of it applies only tangentially to the kinds of data and concepts we use in archaeology. I always suggest...

I am posting from Toronto, where I am attending the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association .  I've been a member of the SSHA for a few years; when I resigned from the American Anthropological Association in protest of their anti-science stance , I joined SSHA. I actually attended my first meeting in the 1980s, and published a paper in their journal, Social Science History, in 1987. But this is the first meeting I've attended since then. This has been an interesting weekend. Professionally, there are some things the SSHA does well at their meeting, much better than the Society for American Archaeology meeting. Their sessions are all two hours in length. Most contain four papers of 20 minutes, plus time for a discussant, as well as time for discussion with the audience. Some of these discussions are run formally, with questions and answers, and some are more of a free-form discussion between presenters and audience. This format produces sessions much more intel...