Friday, August 18, 2017

another little job

I'm (one of) the tech editors for a small regional journal. This USUALLY means proofreading and doing stuff with helping people decide on keywords (though in this era of online journal searches, I suspect keywords are less crucial than they once were).

Well, I got a paper yesterday for them.

It's an "historical" paper. As in, a thesis written years ago and never published (this journal tends to do this, to get information out of the "grey literature" and where people can find it.)

Problem? The species names. I have to check every single one of them to see (a) is it up to date - that is, is it the currently-accepted one and (b) get the "authority" name - that is, the person credited with giving it that name/the species description.

This is a thing. In fact, there are sort of low-grade fights over who has "authority" or who had the first published account and what makes the name valid. (There are international governing bodies that determine if scientific names are valid or not. You can't just slap a name on a new species and call it good - you have to go through the proper body).

In a way, I admit I find it a little laughable. (I'm a field ecologist; I tend to, taxonomically-speaking, be a lumper rather than a splitter, and I've told students "If we don't know what a plant is for sure, it's more important we all call it the same thing than that we necessarily get it right" - oh, if we're going to publish results, we take a piece of it and do our best to key it out in the lab, but I'm not going to waste a half-hour of field time dithering over which species of goldenrod something is)

I kind of griped about it yesterday when I got it - of COURSE it would come right before classes started, and of COURSE it would be a paper with like three hundred species names to check in it.

However....it is the kind of work I can do in little bits, 15 or 20 minutes here or there, as I have time (good office-hours stuff). I have a printout of the paper and I just checkmark things as I have completed them so I know right where I am. And secretly....I kind of like this work. Because it's fiddly but not hard, and it's not super-high-stakes: it's not my paper, and there's another editor who will likely catch it if I happen to miss one.

And I realized: holy cow, if Lisa Simpson grew up to be a botanist, this is what she'd be doing. (She'd be a taxonomist, I think). This is as close to "proofreading" as you get in botany. (And famously, in one of the Treehouse of Horror specials, her skill at proofreading was what earned her a seat on the rocket-ship "Ark" that was going to take people from a doomed Earth to a new home). And granted, I tend to think that in the world the way it is today, that skill would be laughed at and I'd be put on the "B" Ark (the one going to the sun) in order to give my space to yet another pop diva or utility infielder or low-level politician, but it is a skill I do tend to pride myself on slightly.

(And anyway: they gave me a little start-up money for a project, and they are probably publishing a paper of mine, so I feel like I might as well throw a little service their way)

1 comment:

purlewe said...

I do something like that when I tech edit knitting patterns. I also grumble about it when it comes but also secretly love it. I mean you just have to go piece by piece and get it done in chunks. it is oddly satisfying.