Thursday, July 21, 2011
Getting scooped
This week, thanks to Girl Scholar and Nicoleandmaggie, I got introduced to the concept of "getting scooped". I had honestly never heard of the concept before. As I wrote in a comment to Nicoleandmaggie's post, I have abandoned, early on in my career, working on a novel because somebody close to me was working on it too. But that novel is now a central part of my book project. Now Girl Scholar is an historian, and NM work on the social sciences. Is the idea of "getting scooped" common in the literary studies field, or we just repeat ourselves endlessly? Can you give me examples?
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Long ago when communications were different my father got major funding for a project. Then, just as he was starting to do the research, a book came out which basically did the project he had planned. His as planned would have been superfluous so he had to jump ahead and do the project he would have done next.
ReplyDeleteI hate the term "to get scooped" ... as though your idea were your exclusive property just because you had it, and other people were harming you by having similar thoughts to you. People in my graduate program, decades ago now, were always talking about it in some kind of paranoid manner. I think it's a great sign when there's interest in a line of thinking you have, and peoples' actual work on a topic isn't in fact the same.
This having been said I of course am very against the stealing of actual work. I repeat - people who are disappointed because someone else has the same *idea* as they do, are silly. But people who steal other peoples' actual work are the bad ones, and in my experience it's the fulls who do this (and the more famous they are, the more they do it).
ReplyDeleteI agree. I tend to work on very contemporary stuff, so there isn't a lot written about it. I don't know if I work on Cervantes in a fresh way. But I like when I see that there is a community of people working on the same ideas I have. In a sense, they show me that what I have to say is interesting to other people.
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