The due date for this assignment has been moved back to Tuesday, May 13, at the start of class.

It seems like some of you are having a hard time finding a book review from a magazine or newspaper that has much in the way of criticism of Shirky’s book. It’s often the case that book reviews in publications aimed for a mass audience tend to just give an overview of the book and not much in the way of criticism. But if you dig enough, you should find one eventually.

Regarding book reviews in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, keep in mind that book reviews there are not usually peer-reviewed (and that’s find for this assignment). The main articles in a scholarly journal are peer reviewed because they are trying to present the findings of some original research conducted by the article’s author. It makes sense that you’d want a community of experts to review articles like that. In a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, though, there are usually other kinds of articles that are only looked at by the editor of the journal (and probably a copyeditor who is checking grammar and spelling). These kinds of articles tend to be short–from a single paragraph in length to several pages at most–and typically are things like:

• editorials
• news announcements about a conference of scholars & researchers
• book reviews

The reasons why I want you to find a book review in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal are:

• so I know that you are able to identify a peer-reviewed scholarly journal
• so that you can find a review of Shirky that was written by someone who is more likely to be an expert on the topic than someone who wrote a review for a newspaper or magazine
• so that you can find a book review that will take more of an academic approach to Shirky’s book (a magazine or newspaper is written for a mass audience and may offer a more superficial reading or review)