Jeremy Birnholtz on sustainability of reviewing, queer research and being curious

Jeremy Birnholtz is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Communication Studies and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments at Northwestern University in Chicago in the US. He also directs the Social Media Lab. The trigger for this conversation was the recent discussion with John Tang about reviewing and Jeremy continues this discussion, looking at issues around authoring and service asymmetries, the unsustainability of the current review and publication models based on what he calls the perpetual motion machine that pushes researchers to churn out more and more papers. He calls for a greater focus on quality of papers instead of numbers and to identify quality signifiers beyond just publications. We discuss his role as conference chair of the upcoming CSCW conference, which is traditionally about distributed online collaboration, and moving the conference online. Shifting topics, we also talk about his personal coming out and the pivot of his research to explore topics around gender and sexuality. Through all of these discussions, Jeremy’s curiosity and care comes through again and again. Much to ponder on here.

“If you are playing the long game, eventually it [career] does work out.”

“I’ve come to believe that you just need a smaller number of very very good papers to make your contribution and a name for yourself.”

“On search committees, writing tenure letters, it is in our collective interest to not be obsessed with numbers and to focus on the contribution and on the quality of the work.”

“As a junior person it is easy to get caught up in the perpetual motion machine mentally where you are constantly spinning out new papers.”

“We’re smart observant people. If we look around and have these conversations we can come up with a way to fix this. This is a solvable problem but it takes stepping back, noticing and talking about it.”

“There’s something I really enjoy about throwing myself in a situation where all of my assumptions are very likely to be wrong and trying to figure out where to go from there.”

Overview (times approximate):

02:00 Jeremy’s background and career path to date

07:50 Reflecting on reviewing and service challenges

36:35 Shifting to queer research topics

53:00 Values & superpowers

59:09 End

In a little more detail… or download the full transcript here

Background:

02:00 Jeremy gives an overview of his background and career to date.

04:30 Jeremy discusses why he moved from Cornell to Northwestern, right before he was up for tenure, and early career choices and challenges.

“If you are playing the long game, eventually it [career] does work out.”

Reviewing & service:

07:50 We shift to the ongoing discussion around reviewing (building on the conversation with John Tang).

08:20 One issue is the arms race in CV length, the pressure to publish lots of papers, and the volunteer service required, which can put the emphasis on the writing that we must...