If you had to boil down the message of a book, article, or dissertation, how concise could you be? Inspired by “The Five Minute Dissertation” and a friend’s comment about rewriting her paper to meet space limitations for a journal, I’m sponsoring a competition for the best haiku poem summarizing original research. The winner, to be judged by readers in online voting, will receive a $10 gift certificate for the iTunes Store.
Here are the rules:
- Write a haiku poem based on your work (published or not) including research papers, books, articles, theses, dissertations, etc. Your haiku should be in the form of 17 syllables broken into three lines of five, seven, and five syllables.
- Post your haiku in the comments section along with the original title of the work you’re basing it on. Multiple submissions are encouraged!
- Submissions must be received by Wednesday, February 21 to be part of the contest. (Update: there has been a deluge of great entries coming from Crooked Timber readers who learned of the contest just recently. Since I won’t have a chance to start the voting until later on Thursday anyway, I’m going to be fairly liberal with the cut off. So keep ‘em coming in!)
Voting will begin on Thursday, February 22 and the winner will be announced on Monday, February 26. UPDATE: Voting for round one is now open through Monday, February 26. UPDATE: Voting on the overall winner has begun and will continue through Wednesday, February 28. The winner will be announced on Thursday, March 1. UPDATE: The contest is now over. Thanks for your interest. You can read the winning entry here.
Now, just to get the ball rolling, here are a few examples I thought up for my dissertation, tentatively titled Sermons of the State: Religious Regulation and Islamic Sermons in Turkey:
Islamic sermons
Def words to your imama
Written by the stateThese Turkish sermons
Are they missives of the state?
Some are, some are notOfficial clerics
Sheltered by their expertise
Not quite secular
Enough of me…it’s time for you to come up with your own haikus and put them in the comments!
64 comments ↓
[…] at Jim Gibbon’s blog (via our dear homeslice C-Mac) there’s a marvellous competition for grad students: “If you had to boil down the message of a book, article, or dissertation, how […]
Entry #1
dixie chicks blacklist
krugman blames clear channel (jerks)
nope, it was rednecks
“Elites, Masses, and Media Blacklists: The Dixie Chicks Controversy.” 2004. Social Forces 83: 61-78.
Entry #2
how can you spot bribes?
diffusion curve goes convex
radio’s corrupt
“Modeling Diffusion of Many Innovations via Multilevel Diffusion Curves: Payola in Pop Music Radio.” 2006. California Center for Population Research, Working Paper # 051-06.
here’s one for the CACPS paper Nicole’s presenting on our behalf next week.
Entry #3
to get an oscar
stick with scorcese, leo
it’s the team, not you
“I’d Like to Thank the Academy, Complementary Productivity and Social Networks.” 2006. California Center for Population Research, Working Paper #035-06.
A very auspicious beginning to the contest, Gabe! Those are great!
The grammaticalisation of discourse markers in relative clauses
Words like “so, you know”
glue onto pronouns; grammar
from faded meaning.
Towards a diachronic typology of relative clauses
The more I research
this, the more certain I feel
that Lehmann was right.
alternatively:
The relative clause:
parasite, steals its form from
other constructions.
Ooh, ooh! I have an even better one for my thesis:
Towards a diachronic typology of relative clauses
From the bruised syntax
of mangled constructions, rise
these zombie clauses.
[…] Jim Gibbon’s challenge today - three years of your life in 17 syllables. Ready? Go. […]
Hmmm, I am not, at this moment going to write an haiku but I have in my dissertation written about this mega/meta-haiku, which well, is simply stunning so here it is to share:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeC.....-haiku.txt
and an explanation of why he wrote it:
http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/haiku.html
And I guess even if the author could join this contest (he is not an academic so I guess he can’t) he would not want to win an itunes certificate given the politics of DRM which is what the poem is about
Do enjoy.
Oh fun! Here’s mine based on my masters’ thesis and continuing saga of my PhD:
Buckminsterfullerene on KBr studied by High Resolution NC-AFM: Molecular nucleation and growth on an insulator
C60 islands.
molecules do not like salt;
strange shapes resulting.
Biella, that’s incredible. Wow. I can’t imagine how long that took to write!
Just to clarify, I’m using the word “academic” not to describe the people who should submit poems, but the kind of work–basically, “research”–that the haiku should be based on. That guy would definitely be welcome to enter the contest.
From my trackback above:
- Paper two in my dissertation is “Rural Malawian Congregational Leaders’ HIV-Related Discourse Networks” -
What say you of AIDS,
Rural religious leaders?
“As my neighbors do.”
- Paper three is “Damned if you Do, Damned if you Don’t: Religious Affiliation and HIV Risk Network Structure” -
How God protects me?
Fewer Sex Partners - No dice.
Still not safe from AIDS.
- Let’s try the whole thing - “Religion Networks and HIV in Rural Malawi”
Stop with “Me and God”.
“My risk” / AIDS dogma. Let’s think
more relational.
Ok I will let him know. Thanks! It is pretty darn wild(ly) amazing!
Biella
[…] you an academic? Or do you write about things academic ? Well if you answered yes then do join this contest and I guess you should do it for the love of haiku writing and not the prize because, well 10 bucks […]
Please read my thesis.
Someone, please read my thesis.
Anyone? Please? Sigh.
San Juan de la Cruz
Says the best way to know God
Is to not know him.
(from a book chapter I’ve submitted, called “Seeing, Knowing and Understanding: Paradoxes of Religious Thought in Selected Works of San Juan de la Cruz”)
Cervantes says he
Did not write the Quijote.
If not, then who did?
(very tentative title for my doctoral dissertation: “Notions of Authors and Authority in Selected Works by Cervantes”)
Why video stores?
‘Twas mediators who made
films not just for screens.
“From Betamax to Blockbuster,” Cornell University (S&TS), 2004.
File hides in JPEG.
Eve can’t know; the oppressed speak,
Not just al Qaeda
“Odd-even histogram-preserving JPEG steganography” (Master’s thesis, forthcoming)
Wow. You are all so intellectual! And now for something completely different: Haiku from an art student. Interior Architecture student, preparing for grad project jury presentation in June. Topic: Adaptive Reuse and Sustainable Design. Concept: Weaving a Balance.
Adaptive Reuse
Preserve the Vernacular
Frank Lloyd Would be Proud
Aye, Preservation
Code Officials Search for Flaws
Bain of Existence
William McDonough
Sustainable Design Rules
New Corporate Greed
Entry #1
Women opting out?
Professionals, managers -
more work and work more.
Percheski, Christine. “Opting Out? Cohort Differences in Professional Women’s Employment Rates from 1960 to 2000.” Under Review.
Entry #2
Married, unmarried
which new dads work more? All else
equal, no difference.
Percheski, Christine and Chris Wildeman. “Transitions to fatherhood among men in marital, cohabiting, and non-residential relationships: Variations in employment trajectories.” Working paper.
“The Construction of the reader in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Fielding’s Tom Jones; the relation of reader address, irony, and innuendo to narrative structure in the mid-18th Century novel.”
Cambridge MPhil Dissertation
Both Fielding and Sterne
often address their readers.
Why do they do this?
Wield your mind better:
offload thinking, and improve
metacognition.
(far from anything published yet, but it’d likely be something like: “Exceeding Cognitive Limitations: Metacognition and Offloading onto the Environment.”)
People use concepts
when learning and explaining.
How do we do that?
whispers in your head:
slips of the tongue may precede
articulation.
Inner speech slips exhibit lexical bias, but not the phonemic similarity effect. (in press) Cognition.
The newest take on
Chinese metahistory
start date: years BC
Equations, models,
approximations to code -
Convergence error
“In theory, in practice.” From a computational chemist.
General description of my digital human modeling research…
Simulate Humans
Model Both Mind and Body
Cog. Sci. Not A.I.
Attention’s limits:
How much can you remember?
I’ll look at your brain.
Discrimination
Keeps black students to themselves.
Campus cops guilty.
From “Social Energy and Segregation in the University Context.”
Black kid at black school:
Odds are thrice he will apply
to black colleges.
From Valerie Lewis and William Carbonaro. “High School Classrooms and Black Students’ College Applications”
Poverty: harder?
Easier? But where and why?
Are cities the key?
From the empirical paper that has yet to be.
There exist problems
intractable to decide
yet easy to check
The paper hasn’t been written yet (well, you could say it’s a long-term project), but it is ostensibly to be titled “On an open problem of Cook“.
Automatic Discovery of Paraphrases
Find another way
to say what you and I say.
Make the machine learn.
Close relationships.
Transference can cause hang-ups.
The unconscious rules.
Based on: Brumbaugh, C. C., & Fraley, R. C. (in press). The transference of attachment patterns: How parental and romantic relationships influence feelings toward novel people. Personal Relationships.
i wrote this haiku about the event that led to my dissertation research.
in a closed, private,
and silent hospital room,
Rain holds her mother
CoFeB,
Thin Mg, Thin MgO,
CoFeB
(TMR paper, in preparation)
Peaks in the spectrum!
Is that spin transfer I see?
No! Blasted cellphone!
(Paper, in preparation, on GHz noise in TMR junctions)
There is disagreement in my field where a certain protein localizes in the cell. It is keeping me from getting my paper published: Intracellular EBV LMP2b reorganizes surface proteins.
The fucking protein
is intracellular, you
moron with glasses.
Yep, don’t like him very much.
Also:
LMP2b
shuts down B cell signaling
in lymphocyte cells.
Additionally, on my major area of research
Hark! The virus works!
Won’t take me another year
to get me out. Yeah!
marsupial bot
kangaroolike behavior
now simulated
Based on: Enabling Complex Behavior by Simulating Marsupial Actions, Tech Report 06-027, University of Minnesota Computer Science
Fun!
I am an expert.
I am man, you are woman.
I exaggerate.
Hargittai, E & S. Shafer. 2006. “Differences in Actual and Perceived Online Skills: The Role of Gender.” Social Science Quarterly. 87(2):432-448. June.
(I have to add that it’s actually not possible to tell from the findings whether men overestimate or women underestimate their skills, but perhaps that amount of artistic freedom for the haiku is allowed.)
RSS, widgets,
Don’t know one from the other.
Average Web users.
Hargittai, E. 2007. “Wikis and Widgets: Differences in Young Adults’ Uses of the Internet” Paper to be presented at the 2007 ICA meetings.
[…] school pal Jim Gibbon launched an academic haiku contest a week ago. I only noticed it today (Wednesday),which happens to be the deadline for submissions. […]
Even spanning trees
Add one to Hall’s condition;
Matroids show it’s true.
(D. G. Hoffman and M. Walsh, Bipartite graphs with even spanning trees. Australasian Journal of Combinatorics 35 (2006), p.3-6.)
Lots to say about
Fractional domination,
Believe it or not
(R. Rubalcaba and M. Walsh, Minimum fractional dominating functions and maximum fractional packing functions. Submitted.)
No poetry contest is complete without some astrophysics!
Supernovae Flame
Miles-per-second fire
Slows down when bended
Thermonuclear
Alchemy, carbon to iron,
Feels magnetic fields.
(“The Response of Model and Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flames to Curvature and Stretch”, http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0306176, and “The Linear Instability of Astrophysical Flames in Magnetic Fields”, http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0312135)
Waves crashing, cold spray,
Churning the hot rain inwards,
On ember of star.
(“On Heavy Element Enrichment in Classical Novae”, http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0307126)
Great Lakes resources
protected by a Compact
from adverse impacts
Broadly worded text
combined with public pressure
may keep water there
Business interests
dissatisfied with the term
may try to block it
Title: The Cumulative Adverse Impact Standard in the
Great Lakes Charter Annex Implementing Agreements, just submitted as a seminar paper, will revise for publication later in the year.
can’t spot the forest
from space, look in rain or sun?
check both: there it is!
Mapping South Asian dry dipterocarp forest using dual season imagery
http://www.hughstimson.org/res.....est_si.ppt
What they say about science editing: you’re not done when you’ve added everything you can in, you’re done when you’ve taken everything you can out. I though I was done. I was wrong.
Counterarguments:
Let them sleep, like dogs? Oh, no:
Refute them at once.
O’Keefe, D. J. (1999). How to handle opposing arguments in persuasive messages: A meta-analytic review of the effects of one-sided and two-sided messages. Communication Yearbook, 22, 209-249.
Victorians preach
Way too many long sermons
On evil Papists.
(”Anti-Catholic Sermons in Britain, 1820-1900,” chapter for A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century)
The Queen beheaded
Henry’s eye wanders (again!)
This is a romance?
(”How to Do Things with Anne Boleyn,” article on Anne Boleyn in the twentieth-century historical romance)
BACs with LoxP sites
are what I spend all day with.
Something Recombine!
(”LMP2a/b-Knockout EBV lacks the ability to transform B-lymphocytes in vitro”. In progress?)
Procrastination:
my idea of what a prof.
with tenure does here.
(why I should have picked another program)
O Religious Right,
Why do you shout at the gays?
Activists adjust.
Forthcoming. Fighting the Right: How the Religious Right Changed Lesbian and Gay Activism University of Minnesota Press.
Robert Burnings: Gin
a thesis metathesis
coming through awry.
“Dialectical transformations of transformed dialects,” a paper I may write some day.
Do academic haiku cycles count?
You live in research
Original now for whom?
I walk to the street
Robert’s burning gin:
A thesis — metathesis –
Coming through awry.
hardly an improvement
Ears against the ground
Shake the earth and listen close
Echoes share secrets
-seismic imaging
awoken by brawl
two cats fight, the others flee
claws out on my chest
summer dawn
the heat, pervasive
clutch my lungs
death arrives
by temperature
to melt brains
stumble into tub
turn on faucet, the wrong one
head scalded again
try to towel back
but wrench it, now pain is where
no water should be
fast forward
my day is rather
dull, you see
sit down to compose
works of astounding genius
read Kotsko instead
write one good sentence
erase it now, a senseless
git is what I am
inhale slow and deep
inspiration, it will speak
to someone else now
do not yell at me
what right have you, to scold me
for accuracy
I am just haiku
don’t blame me for shortcomings
not my fault you’re dumb
to take it outside
you want to take it outside
screaming, you will bleed
poems like me can fight
beat the likes of you, crippled
but with pretensions
yes I like my dawns
and frogs, and dawn upon frogs
and snow on fields too
not on fields of frogs
have you ever read haiku
dumb ass, you dumb ass
do you like me now
all up in your grill, you cry
but Mom hates weaklings
bested by a poem
Scott curls in a ball, pussy
willow, he bends like
Scott best give up now
if he knows what’s good, for him
death, I bring with look
see that pony there
I kill it now, for pleasure
and laugh when it dies
I look like a poem
but sting like an enraged bee
you die, for honey
death pangs, they suit you
worthless, all your work has been
give up, already
Two doctoral dissertations:
Chlorite, iodide.
What makes such oscillations?
Perturb, gauge response.
[Experiments and theory toward the determination of bifurcation features and the deduction of the mechanism of the oscillatory chlorite-iodide reaction, 1993]
A mature science
has no need for causal talk?
Chemists shout, ” ‘Fraid not!”
[Underlying Stories: The Structure of Causal Talk in Chemistry and in Everyday Life, 2001]
We often forget
It’s what we do that brings spring
among gold and sticks
This is on some writing I am doing on citizenship in new democracies.
Dissertation on global justice
new global order -
suddenly, obligations.
how did this happen?!
I do hope I’m not too late: I just heard about this. Let’s see…
Yamaguchi no
Hawai deimin ga
Obon kaeri
I suppose you’d like it in English? Let’s see if I can translate it and maintain the Haiku form:
Obon dances bring
Yamaguchi emigrants
back from Hawai’i
[Obon is the a Japanese festival honoring ancestors, a time when families come together. Yamaguchi prefecture was a significant source of Japanese migration to Hawai’i]
Sorry, I forgot to include the citation: “International Labor Migrants Return to Meiji-Era Yamaguchi and Hiroshima: Economic and Social Effects” (under review).
[…] Burstein, who’s usually more inclined to blog in script than in verse, comes word of an Academic Haiku Contest: summarize your research in a mere seventeen syllables! Unfortunately, the contest is ending […]
Want consent to give
just laws legitimacy
Kant say pigs can’t fly
Book title “Global Natural Duties of Justice”
careful scientist
watches the computers crash
all subjects depart
http://www.ljean.com/files/MTW06camp.pdf
OK, I did run it again and publish…
Online, you trust who?
Are your friends wise, trustworthy?
Social browsing works.
http://www.ljean.com/NetTrust/
Postmodernity?
Overaccumulation?
To much time or space?
On David Harvey
Epsilon-Delta
the limit as x nears y
Joys of basic math!
On basic (higher-level) math
alice’s plaintext
proxy and delegatee
fear for collusion
–On Unidirectional Proxy Re-encryption Schemes
Where literacy
and democracy abound,
there conquest will fail.
Dissertation: Pyrrhic Peace: Governance Costs and the Utility of War
[…] Jack Balkin thinks the haiku is the “academic soundbite of our times.” He takes up Jim Gibbon’s challenge in the academic haiku contest to summarize one’s latest academic work (article, dissertation, […]
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