\"Key\" \"Note\" \"Address\"—Inaugural AMS After Dark Humor Panel (2016)

1 Tumbling (and Tweeting) for Tenure: Advice for Assessing Academic Advancement via the Digital Humanities

[TITLE SLIDE]

Good evening. Before I begin, I wish to thank

the AMS After Dark steering committee for inviting me to participate in this prestigious panel.

It’s really quite an honor.

[READ TITLE HERE]

[SLIDE2]

It is oft said that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but

how many words, then, is a gif worth?

[CLICK]

Furthermore, how might the

digital popularity of a gif-based post relate to its scholarly value and significance to the field?

[CLICK]

Questions such as these are of critical importance to today’s tenure

review committees. Through tracing the history of the idiom “a picture is worth a thousand words”—in conjunction with an integrated analysis of graphics interchange format (gif) file frame count averages and median click values of individual posts—this paper aims to ponder long-overdue solutions to the problem of tenure value assessment in post-postmodern escholarship.

2 To begin, it is important to note that digital finesse is clearly an essential skill within the

various fields of music scholarship.

[SLIDE3]

I draw your attention to

example 1, which illustrates the regrettable result when scholarship lacks digital finesse. The diminished clarity of the musical score for this 21st-century work—titled Pixelated Score I Ripped from IMSLP—renders it all but useless in augmentation of one’s scholarship. Effects of low-quality images such as these often include disdainful and confused audiences, perplexed students, and—perhaps worst of all—lack of publication and citation of one’s scholarship. This lack of publication and citation is certainly the most difficult of these obstacles to overcome with respect to academic advancement and promotion. This paper will explore the use of popular online publishing forums—utilizing Tumblr and Twitter platforms as primary and secondary sample mediums, respectively—and their

significance in the attainment of tenure.

[SLIDE4]

I have chosen to focus

primarily on Tumblr because it is a platform with which I am particularly familiar: for nearly four years, I have regularly published my scholarly work on a Tumblr publication called Music Theory Augmented, abbreviated MTA, primarily through gif-based posts such as the one on the screen. If you are not yet familiar with this collection and are interested, you can access it at

musictheoryaugmented.tumblr.com.

[CLICK]

I think I speak for most of us

3

when I say,

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

“Gloria Patri for free and open access!”

Links to my Tumblr posts automatically appear on MTA’s Facebook

and Twitter feeds, and Twitter was the logical choice for a secondary source platform as it afforded a convenient opportunity for alliteration in the title of this presentation. For tenure review committees evaluating today’s scholars—who, like myself, regularly publish scholarly work online—weighing the scope and relevance of these online publications is an everyday necessity. Yet, very little previous work has been done relative to designing a logical method of measuring the worth of these publications. It is with this in mind that I propose a mathematical approach. So, how much prose is a gif worth then? To calculate this, it will first be necessary to determine how much prose a single frame of a gif—also known as a “static image” or

“picture”—is worth.

[SLIDE5]

In Ivan Sergheïevitch Turgenef’s 1862 novel,

Fathers and Children, one character remarks, “A drawing represents to my eyes what demands ten pages of description in a book.” However, not all gifs are drawings.

[SLIDE6]

Some are derived from animated cartoons and other drawn

4 mediums, but many are taken directly from videos and television with more photographic perspectives. Fortunately, Turgenef’s original phrase has since evolved.

[SLIDE7]

A 1913 advertisement, shown in example 3—for the Piqua Auto

House of Piqua, Ohio—begins with the phrase “one look is worth a thousand words.” The ad goes on to encourage customers to visit the store in person to see what they will buy rather than

purchasing products from a catalog.

[SLIDE8]

As you will see in example 4,

nearly a decade later in 1921, Fred R. Barnard, the national advertising manager for the Street Railways Advertising Company, used the same phrase—“one look is worth a thousand words”— in an advertisement that appeared in Printers’ Ink, an American trade magazine, which launched in 1888, changed its title to Marketing/Communications in 1967, and continued publication until 1972. Immediately following this phrase, Barnard attributes the words to a Japanese philosopher.

[SLIDE9]

As shown in example 5, a little over five years later, Barnard

printed another ad in the same magazine. This time, he has changed the phrase to “one picture is worth ten thousand words” and cited it as a Chinese proverb. You’ll find this quotation just below that picture of the tattoo you got in Cancun during spring break 1996. . . . the one they told you translated as “love always,” but that you later found out actually means, “10,000 winds blowing through small hut.” I’d like to thank the many members of the Society for

5 Ethnomusicology who have graciously volunteered their services translating that proverb for me. It seems likely that Barnard’s inconsistent attributions of the slightly differing phrases to Japan and China were attempts to give the sayings gravity for his readers rather than legitimate, evidence-based citations. Furthermore, it would appear that truth in advertising took a backseat

to salesmanship much as it may in some cases today.

[SLIDE10]

To

further this point, if we return to example 4, we will see that Barnard’s earlier advertisement claims that his company’s streetcar advertisements had the potential to reach “ten-billion

passengers per year.”

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

That’s billion, with a B.

Census data from the year prior lists the US population at 106, 021,

537 persons, about 1 percent of ten-billion. There were not even ten-billion people on the planet in 1921; the current global population is the highest it has ever been in recorded history, and we

[CLICK]

still fall significantly short of the ten-billion mark—

somewhere

around 7.4 billion. In sum, the advertising value of this statement was prioritized over accuracy. This, unfortunately, also diminishes the credibility of Barnard’s valuation of a picture at tenthousand words.

6

[SLIDE11]

The more accurate, and commonly accepted, version of

the idiom appears on page 465 of the 1992 Dictionary of American Proverbs, and reads as follows: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” So then, if a picture is worth a thousand words, the number of pictures, the number of static images, the number of frames in a gif should lead us

to the amount of prose a gif is worth.

[SLIDE 12]

Some Tumblr posts

consist of a single static image, such as the one shown in example 6, a melodic reduction of “The sound your stomach makes after you’ve just speed-eaten questionable ethnic food for lunch,” an aria from AMSMT’s well-known opera Afternoon Paper Sessions. Static-image posts comprise

only a small portion of scholarly Tumblr output.

[CLICK]

[SLIDE 13]

Other Tumblr posts use gifs that are animated and must, therefore,

consist of at least two frames. On the other end of the spectrum, the largest gif I was successfully

able to upload to Tumblr was a 160-frame file.

[CLICK]

In essence, then, a

vast majority of animated Tumblr gifs are worth somewhere between 2,000 and 160,000 words.

7

However, 2-frame and 160-frame gifs are both relatively rare;

[CLICK]

most

Tumblr gifs fall within the 10- to 50-frame or 10,000- to 50,000-word range. Academic Tumblr posts typically consist of a single animated gif, so most Tumblr posts are worth 10,000 to 50,000

words.

[CLICK]

Let us then assume that a book contains a minimum of 150

pages and that about 250 words constitute one page. A book then consists of, at minimum,

37,500 words.

[CLICK]

If we divide this minimum of roughly 37,500 words

in a book by the estimated typical minimum of 10,000 words in a Tumblr post, we find that 3.75 Tumblr posts are worth approximately one book. “But what about readership and significance to the field?!” you exclaim. Fret not, distinguished colleagues, as one viral post can receive more views than most hardcopy books— apart from maybe a few standout titles, such as the Bible, the Harry Potter series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal.

[SLIDE14]

Take, for example, MTA’s third anniversary post. To date, this

post has received over 9,700 notes. If we assume that some people both liked and reblogged this post, we can divide that number in half, and it is still comparable to the entire membership of the

8

AMS deciding to read your stupid article.

[SLIDE15]

In addition, this post

received a favorable review in the esteemed e-periodical Classic FM within three months of its original publication.

[SLIDE16]

To conclude, any author of a scholarly e-publication

with 4 or more animated gif posts and at least fifty followers should be immediately promoted.

[SLIDE17]

Thank you very much.