Naomi Wolf Learns On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

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chaos
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Naomi Wolf Learns On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

#1 Post by chaos » Fri May 24, 2019 6:46 pm

When Matthew Sweet points out that the term "death recorded" does not mean executed Naomi Wolf responds by saying "Well that's really an important thing to investigate." Bahhahahaha
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/ ... ssion=true

WHOOPS 1:51 P.M.
Here’s an Actual Nightmare: Naomi Wolf Learning On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong
By Yelena Dzhanova


In the pantheon of nightmares, somewhere between “falling into an endless pit” and “back at high school but naked” is “going on national radio and learning, on-air, that the book you wrote and is to be published in two weeks is premised on a misunderstanding.” Naomi Wolf, unfortunately, is living that nightmare.

When she went on BBC radio on Thursday, Wolf, the author of Vagina and the forthcoming Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, probably expected to discuss the historical revelations she’d uncovered her book. But during the interview, broadcaster Matthew Sweet read to Wolf the definition of “death recorded,” a 19th-century English legal term. “Death recorded” means that a convict was pardoned for his crimes rather than given the death sentence.

Wolf thought the term meant execution.

There’s a shocking silence on-air after Sweet says he doesn’t think Wolf is right about the executions Outrages delves into. Sweet looks at the case of Thomas Silver, who, Wolf wrote in her book, “was actually executed for committing sodomy. The boy was indicted for unnatural offense, guilty, death recorded.” Silver, as Sweet points out, was not executed.

“What is your understanding of what ‘death recorded’ means?” Wolf asked him on-air, mere moments after he had already explained to her how Old Bailey, London’s main criminal court up until 1913, defined it. Sweet pulled up his own research — news reports and prison records — showing the date that Thomas Silver was discharged.

Death recorded, he says, “was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon.” And then the blow: “I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually happened.”

Before Sweet delivered the punch, Wolf was audibly ready to speak about the “several dozen” similar executions she noted in her book, many of which rely on her completely wrong understanding of the term “death recorded.” But there is no historical evidence that shows anyone was ever executed for sodomy during the Victorian era, Sweet said on Twitter. Which means … much of the premise of Wolf’s entire book is just false.

Wolf cited on Twitter historical findings from a peer-reviewed article written by A.D. Harvey, a historian who’s been labeled a hoaxer. (He deceived the public into thinking that Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky met once and created several online personas and an entire fake community of academics.)

The book hits U.S. stands on June 18, according to the Amazon listing. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt spokesperson offered this statement: “While HMH employs professional editors, copyeditors, and proofreaders for each book project, we rely ultimately on authors for the integrity of their research and fact-checking. Despite this unfortunate error we believe the overall thesis of the book Outrages still holds. We are discussing corrections with the author.”

To her absolute credit, Wolf is taking this on the chin. On Twitter, Wolf and Sweet appear cordial. There’s a tweet from Sweet that indicates Wolf is going to look into her research and make necessary corrections. And a thread in which Wolf thanks Sweet for correcting her and promises to review “all of the sodomy convictions on Twitter in real time so people can see for themselves what the sentences were and what became of each of these people.”

Outrages has already been released in the U.K. under Virago Press, a division of Hachette Book Group that publishes feminist works and supports women authors. Virago hasn’t returned a request for comment.
Last edited by chaos on Fri May 24, 2019 7:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Naomi Wolf Learns On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

#2 Post by chaos » Fri May 24, 2019 6:52 pm


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Re: Naomi Wolf Learns On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

#3 Post by Larry B. » Sat May 25, 2019 4:09 am

Fascinating.

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Re: Naomi Wolf Learns On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

#4 Post by SR » Sat May 25, 2019 6:06 am

Not so Sweet. And this is ALL on NW. How Amee Vanderpool attempts to shift the blame to the publisher is bizarre. Authors are 100% responsible for content. Editors assist with all things encompassing stylization.

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Re: Naomi Wolf Learns On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

#5 Post by chaos » Sat May 25, 2019 7:45 am

SR wrote:
Sat May 25, 2019 6:06 am
Not so Sweet. And this is ALL on NW. How Amee Vanderpool attempts to shift the blame to the publisher is bizarre. Authors are 100% responsible for content. Editors assist with all things encompassing stylization.
I didn't see it as a shift in blame. There are several categories and levels of editors depending on the area of work. Non-fiction book editors have a few more responsibilities such as data and fact verification (among other things). Although they don't need to be experts in a particular subject, some fact checking could have revealed actual dates of death (hence discovering the discrepancies in the "death recorded" dates, hence possibly discovering the correct meaning of the phrase "death recorded"). Reputable publishing houses will not simply publish any non fiction piece given to them by an author once they have proofread it. They take it a step further. This is such an embarrassment and will hurt the credibility and reputation of the publisher. Naomi Wolf dropped the ball, but so did a few other people.

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Re: Naomi Wolf Learns On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

#6 Post by Larry B. » Sat May 25, 2019 8:24 pm

chaos wrote: Non-fiction book editors have a few more responsibilities such as data and fact verification (among other things)
Do you have first hand experience in this, or is this something you’re assuming?

I’m asking because I’ve worked as an editor, and I’ve had work edited as well, and no editor has ever even suggested that they’ll do fact checking.

What usually happens is that as you’re editing, maybe you’ll come across something odd (e.g., an event is mentioned to have happened in 1934 and then is mentioned to have happened in 1943. In this case, you’d check). Recently, I was editing something and the date of death of a person was missing, so I did some digging, found something reliable, sent the info to the authoe, he said “let’s include it”, and we included it.

But I’d find it very uncommon if editors were in charge of doing fact-checking.

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Re: Naomi Wolf Learns On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

#7 Post by chaos » Sat May 25, 2019 10:58 pm

I've been talking about this all day. The copy editing process at academic presses is, or rather, use to be more rigorous. Larry, both you and SR are right; fact-checking falls primarily on the authors (and is usually stipulated in their contracts).

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Re: Naomi Wolf Learns On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

#8 Post by Larry B. » Sun May 26, 2019 6:59 am

I see! Yeah, I would expect editors from academic journals to do at least some fact-checking, which I’d assume would be a bit easier considering they’re experts in the subject and thus would be able to detect something fishy far easier than your run-of-the-mill editor.

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Re: Naomi Wolf Learns On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

#9 Post by Hype » Sun May 26, 2019 9:13 am

chaos wrote:
Sat May 25, 2019 10:58 pm
I've been talking about this all day. The copy editing process at academic presses is, or rather, use to be more rigorous. Larry, both you and SR are right; fact-checking falls primarily on the authors (and is usually stipulated in their contracts).
It's not the editors who do this, but the reviewers.

When you act as a reviewer for an academic book, they ask you explicitly to tell them if there is anything in the book that you think is factually inaccurate or wrong. Obviously authors are expected to be as rigorous and factually accurate as possible, but academic research is not done by machines. The NW case is particularly egregious for obvious reasons, but there are all kinds of ways an author can lose track of various threads in the course of producing a manuscript. Especially, as in this case, one based on a dissertation. That's why the peer review process is so important. Even if we say that Wolf is ultimately responsible, there's always also a collective responsibility of the discipline to have caught her mistake before it makes it to print.

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Re: Naomi Wolf Learns On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

#10 Post by chaos » Sun May 26, 2019 9:53 am

In the old days some book editors acted as gatekeepers. :oldtimer:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/fe ... vey-answer

5. On production issues

In the world of academic books, copy-editing has changed and much of this work is now outsourced by publishers. But while there are some horror stories, input from true professionals can improve your work.

Barbara Graziosi: “I experienced in-house copy-editing with my first book, and it was excellent. Indeed, awe-inspiring. Old-school copy-editors at Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press were important figures in the academy: they genuinely improved books and saved authors from embarrassing errors of fact and travesties of style.
The whole process is becoming less and less rigorous, extending to academic journals:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleeta ... 4ad295768a

...The Editor-in-Chief of one of the world’s most prestigious and storied scientific journals recently casually informed me that his journal now astoundingly accepts citations to non-peer-reviewed personal web pages and blog posts as primary citations supporting key arguments in papers published in that journal. You read that correctly. One of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals now permits non-peer-reviewed content from personal web pages and blogs to be cited as primary evidence supporting a claim in a paper published in that journal. Even just a few years ago such a move would have been unheard of, with most reputable journals requiring that citations be almost exclusively to peer-reviewed academic journals to ensure that the body of evidence supporting scholarly discourse was as peer-reviewed and fact checked as possible. When top journals allow an unverified and non-peer-reviewed blog post to be plucked from the open web and used as a primary citation supporting a claim, that dilutes all academic literature.

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Re: Naomi Wolf Learns On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

#11 Post by Hype » Sun May 26, 2019 5:04 pm

It depends on the press and the journal. Editorial processes, especially in academia, are not standardized, for good reason. There are standards, but these standards allow for wide interpretive freedom. There are journals that are triple-blind (editors, section-editors, and reviewers do not know the identities of the submitters), but many are more or less blinded only at the peer-review stage, or if you're lucky through an editorial manager program that may allow blinding for the editors themselves. The degree of rigor required from reviewers is highly editor-dependent, and in many cases if it seems that it has become less stringent recently, this is probably for a few understandable reasons: peer-review is almost always unpaid (or severely underpaid) labour; there are far more people working in academia now than there ever have been; and there is far more work being done in far more specialized ways than ever before. All of these things conspire to make peer review exceptionally difficult to keep at a high standard. Many journals take many months, if not years, simply to find reviewers and hear back from them. In the case of books, this is, of course, even more onerous, since the task of reviewing a book takes at least a few hours (say, 4-6 hours of reading and at least that many for annotating/writing the report) of concentrated effort.

We can blame the process and the author in this case, but also admit that it's not a sign that the process is somehow worse these days; it has always been like this.

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