Small stages - on the importance of minor publications

I like small stages 

- Mark Knopfler 

In 2000, I watched an interview with Mark Knopfler on a Norwegian talkshow. I had recently become aware of his music, as the single 'What it is' from his second solo album Sailing to Philadelphia had been doing very well in the charts, leading to the music video to be broadcast from time to time. Following the interview, Mark Knopfler was set to perform one of the songs from the album - 'Baloney again', if memory serves - and the host said apologetically that the stage was rather small. "Good," the musician said, "I like small stages". The humility in that remark, coming from one of the most famous guitarists of the twentieth century, struck me with a very subtle force, and I took this message to heart. 

I was reminded of this quotation following a lecture at the local museum. The speaker was a fellow medievalist and gave a splendid presentation on medieval stone crosses in the fjords, and a lot of locals had showed up . In the course of the event, I came into contact with two of the locals who talked about my latest piece in the local parish magazine, one expressing how pleased she was to read it and the other mentioning to my mother that she was now going home to read it. The piece in question was a two-page article on one of the medieval churches in the municipality and what we knew about the medieval priests who served there. 

 

In rural Norway, parish magazines are common, and these are conduits for interviews, essays, puzzle pages for children, reports from recent church related events, and historical pieces. In the past few years, I have written four such pieces, all on local medieval church history, and people from my native village have often responded very kindly and positively to these short texts. This weekend, however, I received such kind remarks from people from a neighbouring village, and in rural Norwegian terms this is much more impressive and unexpected than to be supported of one's own people. In short, the kind words carried an extra weight. 

The kindness of these comments were good reminders how these short pieces are important, and that like Mark Knopfler I know how to value and treasure small stages. In academic terms, these pieces are essentially worthless: they are short, are not peer-reviewed, and do not appear in scientific publications. At best, they can represent outreach on a CV or in an application. Even so, these texts have a very receptive audience, and they are part of the duty of outreach and dissemination which I consider to be a crucial part of academic life - a debt we owe to wider society, regardless of whether they amount to any publication points in the grand scheme of academic things. 

I have always been adamant that such minor publications are important, and this weekend I was reminded yet again that they are well worth the time required to research, write, and above all edit, one's professionally accumulated knowledge into a distilled yet accurate account of the topic at hand. In other words, it was a reminder that academic work does, after all, have value independent of academia.