Viewing Publications Through an Anthropological Lens: Arab Publications on Educational Technology as a Case Study
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Viewing Publications Through an Anthropological Lens: Arab Publications on Educational Technology as a Case Study Abdulrahman Essa Al Lily 1
Received: 15 December 2016 / Accepted: 9 February 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017
Abstract This study asks the philosophical question: is the activity of academic authoring influenced by historical occasions and cultural norms? It uses Arab studies in the field of educational technology to examine this question. The study first generated a list of all the publications since the foundation of this field (i.e. a list of around 4000 academic writings). It then derived descriptive statistics from this list. It then interviewed 27 academics, who were asked to help interpret these statistics. The main finding was that the publishing activity was partially influenced by the wider Arab culture and its history. This suggests that publications (and, perhaps, any other forms of ‘achievement’) can be ‘read’ as records of wider social cultures and historical events, almost in the same way that archaeologists and geologists read landscapes and what remains of ancient societies. Publications should be analysed as ‘inscribed spaces’ on which a certain society ‘writes’ their presence, concerns and matters. Publications should be seen as having their own ‘biographies’ that detail the cultural, social, economic and political features of the milieu in which publications are written. Bearing this implication in mind, it is well worth unearthing the ‘archaeological’ and ‘geological’ dimensions of academic publications. Keywords History . Information . Knowledge . Archaeology . Anthropology . Educational technology . Publication Abdulrahman Al Lily, DPhil (Oxon), has published with the largest academic publishers: Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Sage. He has written for academic magazines (Australasian Science and openDemocracy) and for non-academic magazines (Your Middle East and Vocativ). He maintains academic and social blogs and has blogged for other institutions (Oxford University and Green Prophet). He has pioneered an innovative approach in academic research, called crowd-authoring. For more information, please visit: https://abdulallily.wordpress.com.
* Abdulrahman Essa Al Lily [email protected]
1
Department of Educational Technologies, King Faisal University, Post Box: 346, Al Ahsa 31982, Saudi Arabia
J Knowl Econ
Introduction and Rationales This article is concerned with the activity of academic authoring and publishing. It is informed by the proposition that there is a need to go beyond published works to consider the wider social, cultural, economic and political issues that influenced and were influenced by these publications. The nature and dynamics of publications are shaped (and therefore politicised) by various temporal and spatial factors, thereby varying across time and space (Giddens 1984). At times, this verification is coordinated by authors (i.e. human elements), but at other times, it goes above and beyond human coordination, being inf
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