Totally agree. A big part of these constraints are simply procedural: how can a large group of scholars come together and share their work in an efficient way? There has to be a cut-off and someone will complain regardless of where you put that cut-off. I like the emerging community of project pages where updates and progress are regularly posted and discussed.

This is, of course, the style of peer-reviewed CS conference publications — in fact, like many other similar venues, ACL has an 8-page limit so you can’t even do an in-depth analysis. The question of how large a project has to be before it’s publishable isn’t just about the humanities. It comes up in many other areas related to CS — for example, when comparing statistics versus machine learning — the latter usually proceeds via peer-reviewed CS conference publishing, whereas the former is usually in a more traditional journal context. (I think you’re saying that humanities is more like the journal style.) I decided to do a CS PhD in part because I talked to multiple people in related areas (statistics and economics) who basically seemed jealous of the CS publishing style, and thought it brought about real benefits in terms of faster experimentation and more innovation.

The great frustration I have about this style is that these size papers naturally have less content in them than a giant journal article or book, and that to understand them you have to be pretty familiar with the context of other work they build upon. Ideally, it’s better to follow up with more work or a longer journal publication. But I do think it’s basically much better research culture than when you have to wait for years to get one article published, and it’s part of why I’m participating in it in the first place.

I appreciate that you took the time to comment on the LL post. I think it’s important for humanities and engineers to have a constructive dialogue. I am sympathetic to both sides (having lived in both worlds), but I suspect this is a case of “talking past each other.” Engineering has a culture of publishing proof-of-concept papers based on small or unbalanced data sets, just to get the ball rolling (as you point out). But this is virtually unheard of in the humanities.

You mention that you believe “it’s most useful to publish part of the work early and get scholarly feedback, instead of waiting for years before trying to write a “perfect” paper.” While I agree with the interactive feedback notion underlying your point, I have to tell you that you come across as a bit smug and arrogant by saying it in this way. You are certainly not showing much respect to the traditions within humanities by adding the snide remark about a “perfect paper.” Humanities is its own academic culture, with it’s own traditions of what counts as publishable. Simply declaring your own academic traditions as preferable is not particularly respectful.

I also agree that the UT Austin team’s response posted on Language Log was somewhat condescending and disrespectful of you and your team at CMU as well (and some of the LL commenters called them out on it as well). This is a clash of academic cultures.

FWIW, I think you’re doing really interesting work that’s worth continuing. I look forward to seeing what you publish next.