Suspense and Network Sense

I had mixed feelings about Network Sense. I thought that the idea was fantastic, especially for graduate students as Mueller said that his thin descriptions were directed towards. I see so much use in being enabled to discern discipline-wide patterns that would otherwise be completely incomprehensible. But even so, Mueller spent less time on his thin descriptions and distant reading that I would have liked.

I felt like I was watching an episode of Survivor while I read that book, like I was constantly having suspense built up, having my anticipation of these amazing thin descriptions increased. I found myself thinking, "Yes! You're right, Mueller! There is too much scholarship now for someone to read generally in RCWS. Thin descriptions are so necessary and useful," then instead of receiving those thin descriptions, I found myself reading 30 pages of methods, or 30 pages of theoretical framework, or 30 pages of failed attempts at thin description. I wanted to start skimming the book, but just like an episode of a reality show, I was thinking "No! I can't start skimming now; I'm just about to get to the good part!"

And even when those thin descriptions were delivered, they weren't as impactful as I wanted them to be. I was really quite surprised with how little time Mueller spent on his list of the most highly cited authors. He describes his methods for a while, all the while impressing upon me exactly how incredibly difficult it must have been to "smooth" all that data, but then, when he does present the data, he makes almost no interesting insights with them. He is like "Linda Flower was cited most. That is all." I wanted arguments about authors being more or less popular than we actually believe them to be. Maybe I just missed that info because I wasn't able to read the later chapters as deeply as I would have liked.

I don't really blame Mueller for all of this though; it's pretty obviously my fault. I know he was just trying to make his study more replicable. The problem was that I should have used distance reading on his book better. It is ironic though that a book based on the idea that there is too much scholarship for us to read everything anymore spends such a lengthy amount of time on related stuff and gets to its most important conclusions so slowly.

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