[ROCK MUSIC] DAVE BEER: So it sort of captured people's imaginations, the idea of comparing those things. But there is a bit of a tradition of that in the social sciences, of trying to think about how you can use things from outside of the discipline that you work in, and outside of academia, to inspire, to help you to think through problems and questions about the world. So I think it's in keeping with some of those ideas and some of those traditions, trying to think about how we can create new opportunities by learning from things like music. [THEME MUSIC] CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta and this is Lost in the Stacks, The Research Library Rock'n'Roll Radio Show. I'm Charlie in the studio with-- its a crowd. Wendy, , Fred, and Matt, who you've not heard from before. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Our show today is called "Academic Writing as Music," which we should put on a Lost in the Stacks T-shirt, right? CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, I mean, Lost in the Stacks is all over my CV. WENDY HAGENMAIER: This episode is inspired by a short article written by Professor Dave Beer of the University of York, called "Imagining Academic Writing as Music." FRED RASCOE: He compared the creative process of making and releasing pop music with the creative process of writing and publishing scholarly communication, which is right up our alley here at Lost in the Stacks. So we had to get Professor Beer on the radio. CHARLIE BENNETT: If you, our listeners, want to join this conversation, the hashtag for the show is #LITS397 for Lost in the Stacks, Episode 397. How many until 400, Fred? FRED RASCOE: Who knows. Reruns run amok. CHARLIE BENNETT: Ooh. Feel free to tweet your thoughts, questions, or the name of your favorite album that ought to be a monograph with that hashtag. FRED RASCOE: And our songs today are about that creative spark, doing things differently, and comparisons. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK, I'm going to ask you another question, Fred. If you had to describe our first song in terms of academic writing, being a scholarly communications librarian yourself, how would you do that? FRED RASCOE: OK Well, I think our first track would be like a faculty member's passion project in a really obscure niche area of academia that they only explored because they already had tenure. CHARLIE BENNETT: Ah, the safety net of academics. FRED RASCOE: So this is The Clash with a track from the bold triple LP Sandinista! that they got to make because London Calling was so successful. It's an abrupt and unexpected stylistic shift from their earlier work. CHARLIE BENNETT: You're practically a music critic. FRED RASCOE: And this track, appropriately enough, is called "If Music Could Talk." And you're hearing it right here on Lost in the Stacks. [THE CLASH, "IF MUSIC COULD TALK"] (SINGING) Make sure! CHARLIE BENNETT: That was "If Music Could Talk" by The Clash. There was a saxophone in that. It confused me, Fred. This is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is called "Academic Writing as Music." Our guest is Professor Dave Beer of the University of York, the author of a blog post entitled "Imagining Academic Writing as Music" on the website medium. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Professor Beer is the author of, among many publications, the books Punk Sociology and Metric Power. His newest book, The Data Gaze, will be published this year. FRED RASCOE: And a note on the sound quality, Charlie interviewed Professor Beer through the internet, so there are some digital artifacts, such as echoes that appear briefly throughout the interview. CHARLIE BENNETT: I did my best with the edit, folks. I began the conversation with Professor Beer by asking if he was a musician himself. He confessed that he played guitar in bands, but not as well as he would have liked. DAVE BEER: I think I couldn't really work out way to make music I thought was any good. My ability wasn't there. CHARLIE BENNETT: What's the kind of music that really you wish you could have been making? DAVE BEER: Well, that varies quite a bit from day to day. I just sort of thought, well-- it was punk music when I was young. But I was thinking, it's was difficult to think what's not been done without just copying something. So I quite like it when music does something a little bit interesting, or if it's very beautiful as well. So when I was young, I liked-- so I liked the Sex Pistols and The Clash, and I like The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. They were some of my favorite bands from the time, but I've also always liked sort of soul music and ska, rocksteady music, and hip hop kind of mixed in as well. Yeah, so probably over the last few years I've always gone back To the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Super Furry Animals. They seem to have dominated the listening. I think they share a kind of creativity that-- quite interesting. I'd like to have made something as good as that. That's what I wasn't capable of doing. CHARLIE BENNETT: And that creative desire, that seems to be in the Medium post in your discussion of it. You wanted to compare academic writing to music to trigger something creative. Is that a good read of the thing? DAVE BEER: Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, it's kind of-- for a long time, I thought about how I could learn from music, because I couldn't be a musician. I sort of thought, if I treat my own writing as equivalent to music, then that gives me kind of inspiration. So you can also then take a kind of creative impulse from musician, put it into the writing so you can start to imagine the writing as a similar kind of creative activity to making music. And what I found is that writing, that gives me a bit of-- inspires me a bit. It gives me a bit of energy and motivation, because I think, well, I'm doing something similar to these musicians I like. And it also gives you creative ideas, ways of doing things, styles, tones, formats, structures, and just little ideas that you can import across, I think, from music into writing to stimulate that kind of creative impulse and to try to think about problems in different ways. CHARLIE BENNETT: Let me see if I can phrase this question properly. Do you think that academic writing resists that kind of creativity? Or do you think that it requires it? DAVE BEER: For me, it requires it, because I'd find it hard to motivate myself to write if I didn't feel I was doing something that was of that kind of creative nature. I don't think it necessarily requires it, no. But I think there's a kind of relationship with conventions as well. So one of the things the kind of creativity can do is to help you to think around conventions, or playfully about conventions, to open up new areas without following what's already there. So it's kind of breaking with convention, breaking with what's already there, is one of the things I think music can help us to do. So I don't necessarily think academic writing needs that creativity, but for me, it helps me to motivate myself to do it, and also helps me to try to think about what the areas are that might be explored, or how conventions might be broken or played with a little bit. CHARLIE BENNETT: Sometimes "academic" is used as a pejorative adjective to dry or hard to understand, or even unpleasant, something that doesn't have joy. DAVE BEER: Music can be all those things as well. CHARLIE BENNETT: [LAUGHS] Right. Do you want to call someone out right now, or should we just let that go by? Do you think that-- has that been your experience of academic writing? DAVE BEER: Little bit, yeah. But I don't think academics should be under pressure to do things that are amazing and dazzling. I think it's important for knowledge that people can work in the way that they need to work in order to communicate the ideas. And so for me, it's kind of-- I try to think about how I can impart some of that kind of creative impulse of music into writing. I don't think people necessarily need to feel under pressure to do it. But I think if you look across academic writing, there's lots of very exciting, interesting things done. And particularly in the current moment, there's some amazing, really eye-catching, really engaging books written by academics that are really transformative and really engaging to a wider audience, and are written in really creative and exciting ways that can draw people in. I mean, I'm reading Adam Tooze's book called Crashed at the moment, and this is like-- it's a big 700-word book, bud it's published by Allen Lane, Penguin. And it's targeted really at a broad possible audience and is very readable. So I think there's lots of ways that academics are writing that break with that negative idea about what academic writing is, the more pejorative idea. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. What is academic writing for? What are you as an academic, as a scholar, what are you doing with your writing? And then what's it supposed to do for its audience, or its intended audience? DAVE BEER: Yeah, I think in the first stage, it's about developing ideas. So you're sort of using the writing as a way of developing and thinking through problems and trying to develop ideas that create then insights into the way the world works. So a lot of the questions I try to deal with are about how the world is being-- and how people's lives are being transformed by technologies and media of different types. A lot of the work I've done is about that. So the aim, really, is to use the writing to think through how that world is being changed, and then to help shed light on that for the people to use. And sometimes that might be-- there's lots of different audiences you might write for. Sometimes it's written for other academics and for students as a way of building up a body of knowledge. And then other times, you might be writing for-- just to be part of public dialogue on an issue, or to really change the way that a government policy might be orientated, or policy makers, or just to shape the think tanks and the like. So academics have quite a lot of different types of audiences, you see. And I think it's worth us reflecting on how you write for those different types of audiences. The writing is about creating ideas and then disseminating those so they might change the way people think about things, or they might shed light on things that we don't notice, or that we perhaps have misconceptions about. WENDY HAGENMAIER: We'll have more about academic writing as music after a music set. ABBY: File this set under BF408.P48 [SUPER FURRY ANIMALS, "NORTHERN LITES"] [THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN, "MY LITTLE UNDERGROUND"] FRED RASCOE: You just heard "My Little Underground" by Jesus and Mary Chain. Before that was "Northern Lites" by Super Furry Animals. Those songs were about unique places to find inspiration. [THEME MUSIC] CHARLIE BENNETT: Today on Lost in the Stacks, we're talking about academic writing as music. Now I'm going to read the original tweet that Professor Beer posted in September of 2017, that he then expanded into a post on Medium. "Academic writing as music. Journal article equals single, book equals LP or EP, blog post equals demo, edited book or journal equals mixtape, and book chapters equal B-sides and rarities." I asked him to expand on each of those comparisons, starting with the journal article as a single. DAVE BEER: So it's trying to think of it as a track. So it's a standalone item that you could listen to, or in this case, read from start to finish and get a strong sense of what the point of that thing is. So in a way, you've got a 3-minute pop song. The academic journal article is nearly always about 7,000 words in length, sometimes 8,000-- 7 to 8,000 words in length. So I thought, these are individual tracks that work through, so they're kind of honed really to quite an extensive amount. A producer is involved in the shape of editors and reviewers that help you to refine the paper and develop the paper so that it's complete, and it's as polished as possible. I thought there's a similarity in the way that these-- the form these things take. There's complete standalone items that are produced and developed and released on their own into the world. CHARLIE BENNETT: So you're talking a lot about the production of them. Did you think about being a listener also? Were you trying to make the comparison of how you consumed these two items, an academic journal article versus a single? DAVE BEER: You consume in a similar way, in that you often come across an individual song like a single and listen to it as a standalone thing. Similarly, with journal articles, you tend to stumble on those when you're looking into a particular issue, or they might come to you through our new media channels. So you might be found by an algorithm and targeted with a particular journal article on Google Scholar in the way you might be on Spotify. And so there's a similarity in the way in discovery, in the nature of the discovery of these things, I think. And so you might be searching around for genres that you like, and you might still come across a single, or you might have a list of what's just been released. And the same thing happens, you get email alerts, what's just been released, what are the new journal articles that are out. Or you might be searching around a genre, a particular type of-- or topic or field, and you might come across a journal article. So there are the similarities that emerge, I think, from them being these complete standalone items that you release into the world. And I suppose the journals are a bit like labels. CHARLIE BENNETT: Right. The sampler. DAVE BEER: You want to be on a good label, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want to be on a major label, does it? So you could put out-- so we're all looking for what's the equivalent of Sub Pop journal, D-Mic journal, or what's the equivalent of Rough Trade or something like that? CHARLIE BENNETT: When you're looking to where you want to publish, do you think of, this is the group of people that I want to be attached to? DAVE BEER: Yeah, slightly differently. I probably think what's a group of people I'd like to get exposure to the things I'm writing. So what's the audience I'd like for this piece, is often I'd think of it. And journals tend to have an audience. People that you can imagine would have the email alerts for that journal or that might follow them on Twitter or something like that. You can then think about-- you can imagine that your article is then reaching a particular audience. So people tend to orientate themselves towards particular academic journals that fit with the type of outlook they've got or the type of work they do. CHARLIE BENNETT: What's the trick to then start thinking about a book as a whole record? Because books are not just collections of journal articles. There's something else. So what was the thing that made that connection for you? DAVE BEER: As you say, they're not. And sometimes, the singles, the journal articles, find their ways into the books, and you might have one or two of the singles in there alongside the album tracks. They can come together a little bit like an album in that way, with sometimes with the singles on there. Really at the heart of that was me trying to think I'd like to be doing something equivalent to some of those bands and singers that I like. So to do that, I imagine that the book I'm writing is a record. And sometimes I'll even have a specific record in mind that I want it to be a bit like. And then the book cover becomes like the album cover. So I really like the idea of thinking about what goes on the book cover. And then also the way your composing the tracks. I often imagine with albums that you can imagine the band, or the singer or whatever, sitting around trying to work out the order of the tracks. And structuring the books a little bit like that, because you want to take people through the narrative, through the chapters in some way that feels right. So I suppose its composition's a bit similar as well, in that regard. CHARLIE BENNETT: What are you doing when you blog? DAVE BEER: Blogging is kind of-- I see that as a really crucial part of what I do, because it's that thing that allows you to write for different spaces and experiment with writing. And it's kind of blog post, kind of website article, magazine articles, those sorts of things all together there. And I think it's because you're testing out ideas. And so it's a little bit like testing out a song with the demo to see what it sounds like and playing around with it. And the blog posts give you that kind of space where you can be a bit more playful. You can try out an idea. You can test it out, see what it sounds like and then decide whether it's something to develop or off the back of an album, kind of finding a little bit of something that you didn't develop on the album, and just putting that out a kind of demo version. So it's a space for trying out ideas, I suppose, in short form, and also in quite rough form, underdeveloped, not without all the kind of argumentation, but in short form. CHARLIE BENNETT: And it seems like maybe a blog post can sometimes be, I just had this thought. I have to get it out so I can let it rest and not be worried by it. DAVE BEER: Yeah, and you're not sure if it's worth going any further than that with. You just want to get the idea together, get it out, start thinking it through, think about whether or not it needs to go any further. And that, yeah, you're getting the ideas out. CHARLIE BENNETT: So then we come to the edited book or journal mixtape. You're the editor of a ongoing journal, right? DAVE BEER: Yeah, so I co-edit a journal called Theory, Culture & Society, which is across the social sciences and humanities. Lots of different things are covered in the journal. CHARLIE BENNETT: So this metaphor is coming from the idea of being the person putting together the mixtape instead of sort of-- DAVE BEER: Exactly. CHARLIE BENNETT: --the mixtape. So I think probably you and I are maybe around the same age because people don't really talk about mixtapes anymore if they're too young. DAVE BEER: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: Can you talk a little bit about how absolutely wonderful a mixtape is? DAVE BEER: Yeah, I can. I can. I definitely can, and that's why I put it in that post. Well, you can buy those mixtapes, can't you? You can get-- sometimes record labels used to put their own mixtapes, that kind of thing. But it was before the playlist, really. I suppose that's the kind of remediation of the mixtape. It was getting a C90 tape cassette and working out what order to put songs to give to somebody, or to listen to in your car, or something like that. And so you'd have 90 minutes of tape, pick picking records, CDs, whatever, that you'd-- tracks, and putting them into some sort of order. And then I don't know if you used to do this as well, but writing them in the paper sleeve. CHARLIE BENNETT: Of course. Yeah. DAVE BEER: The tracks, so that if you're-- particularly you're giving it to somebody and they might not what the song was. CHARLIE BENNETT: These mixtapes were usually giving them-- not usually, often giving them to someone who we really want to like us. DAVE BEER: Yeah. Yeah. And it was like an embodiment of our identity expressed through the mixtape, I suppose. But there's research on this sort of thing. So there's research about how music collections are a part of the communication of identity. And the mixtape was an extension of that, I suppose. CHARLIE BENNETT: There's sort of just that joy of making a mixtape. DAVE BEER: There is. CHARLIE BENNETT: But then how did you connect that to-- or how do you connect that to being an editor? Which parts are the same and which parts are different? DAVE BEER: Well, because it's the act of-- it's curating and compilation central to that particular activity. So the similarity is in that area. What tends to be different is that people are producing-- usually producing new content for you. You commission as well, which is the commissioning new content, new articles, new chapters, or whatever, depending on whether it's-- what sort of publication it is. So there's a difference there in that you actually actively getting materials produced to put into your mixtape. But the act of curating and compiling, and trying to put things in a nice order, and trying to get a nice mix of things that you think is good, that's the kind of similarity in that. [GUITAR MUSIC] FRED RASCOE: You are listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we'll be back with more from Professor Dave Beer on the left side of the hour. [MELLOW MUSIC] RACHEL ROSENFELD: This is Rachel Rosenfeld coming to you from Hollywood, California, where I am the Archival Acquisitions Processor for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library. And you are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK in Atlanta. CHARLIE BENNETT: Our show today is called "Academic Writing as Music." And since we're talking about mix tapes, I want to read from Bas Jansen's Tape Cassettes and Former Selves, How Mix Tapes Mediate Memories," from the book Sound Souvenirs. "A mixtape ties together reminders of many heterogeneous elements of a past life world, which include music, technology, and social relations. Those elements of the mixtaper's past environment may not be on par with such overarching conditions as Rakur's corporeal and terrestrial condition, being on Earth in a body, but they nonetheless play their part in structuring the listener's experience. It follows that the mixtape should be ideally suited for triggering memories in the listener of what it was like to be him or herself at the particular place and time the tape mix brings the listener back to. File this set under PE1408.C273. [HAPPY MONDAYS, "DENNIS AND LOIS"] [SAM & DAVE, "CAN'T YOU FIND ANOTHER WAY OF DOING IT"] Baby can't you, can't you find another way of doing it, baby? Can't you. MATTHEW: You just heard "Can't You Find Another Way of Doing It?" by Sam & Dave. Before that was "Dennis and Lois" by the Happy Mondays. Those were songs about making changes for the better. [THEME MUSIC] WENDY HAGENMAIER: Our show today is called "Academic Writing as Music." Our guest is Professor Dave Beer of the University of York. In the last segment, we were unpacking his tweet that compared types of academic writing with types of music formats. The last piece of the tweet was, quote, "book chapters equal B-sides and rarities." Charlie asked Professor Beer to expand on that concept. DAVE BEER: There was two elements to this. One is that when your writing in a chapter for an edited book, you don't approach it in the same way you would approach the journal article single, because you can use it as a space of experimentation, because it's often not peer reviewed, and certainly not to the same extent as a journal article. It's often reviewed by the editors. And there's a space there that you can use to do things that are a little bit more unusual, or perhaps ideas that wouldn't work as journal articles, so wouldn't work as singles. They're not instant, they're not eye catching, they've not got that same sort of property. So at the production side, there's a little bit of similarity there because it gives you a different sort of space to work in, where you are doing the things that aren't your main idea, but you complement those main ideas. So it felt to me a bit like-- I've always thought that writing a book chapter for somebody else's editor book is a bit like doing a B-side. But also, the edited book is a form that doesn't necessarily circulate all that widely. So there is an element of it being a kind of rarity as well, kind of B-side rarity in that not that many people will get a copy of that book. So it feels a bit like those sorts of tracks that people end up having to put together on their own compilation and put out as their B-sides and rarities. CHARLIE BENNETT: The book of essays, 1978 to 2012, kind of-- DAVE BEER: Yeah, B-sides and rare-- yeah, exactly. Yeah, that happens for a reason. It's because no one can get hold of them. I mean, to back to Jesus and Mary Chain, there's an amazing compilation of The Power of Negative Thinking, it's called, which gathers together all their B-sides. And it's an amazing kind of creative journey across all these different things. And some of it just doesn't work. But then there's gems in amongst it, so they're having to compile those things that are more difficult to get hold of. CHARLIE BENNETT: So academic writing as music, it lifts up the idea that your scholarship is creative, it's personal. It's something that you're trying to get people to connect to. DAVE BEER: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: And then the other thing, which I think is maybe even more important, is what you just said about The Jesus and Mary Chain. Some of the ideas don't work, but it's OK. So academic writing as a music, say, career or as a collection of songs that some are hits and some are not, it sort of says, I am going to attempt things that aren't perfect. I am going to attempt things that maybe are dead ends, but need to be done. And I don't know that that's everyone's idea of what scholarship is. So let's start with the second first. Can you talk a little bit more about that, sort of the ideas that don't work feel. DAVE BEER: Yeah, well I suppose that's where that sort of ecology of academic publishing that I've pointed to in the tweet is quite useful because you can try out ideas in some of these domains and it's OK. It's kind of a safer space to try out ideas. So the blog post is a good example of that where you can try things out. It doesn't matter if it kind of falls flat. But I mean, I suppose my view on it is a bit like with music. You need to have a space in which you can test things out and they can go wrong, and it shouldn't matter. So even if one of your singles doesn't work, isn't good, doesn't quite hit the notes that you wanted to hit or whatever, or hit the audience you wanted to hit, that should be OK, because you need-- with creativity you need to have-- you need to limit the fear of failure, I think, for it to work. I'm very conscious I'm saying this, and I've just bought a book called Against Creativity, which is what-- by Oli Mould that's just come out. So I'm going to read that and find out why I'm getting all this wrong. But you need that kind of space you can fail. So yeah, I think they got-- there should be imperfections in academic work. There should occasionally be rough edges. Stuff should sometimes be a bit raw. And if things are overly polished, there's nothing for anybody to get hold of-- too slippery. Whereas if things are a bit rough around the edges, and aren't definitive and have got a few flaws and a few issues, then that gives people something to grab onto that they can then respond to, and they can criticize and they can critique, and they can develop, and that they can apply or they can reject. So those rough edges can be quite useful. I actually think being part of academic dialogue and debate often means leaving yourself open a little bit to potential criticism and not being too safe with what you're doing, and perhaps having a bit some rough edges and a few potential problems that people can then respond to because then you really get into some dialogue. CHARLIE BENNETT: Now, that leads very nicely into the other point I wanted to talk about, which is that academics are very personal. And I don't mean the people, I mean the field, the process. This is you being presented out in your writing. You were talking about not being afraid to have some rough edges, which I think sometimes means not being afraid to have yourself existing in the writing. DAVE BEER: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: So how personal is your research? DAVE BEER: Yeah. It's intimate, even when that intimacy is removed from the final product in some cases. Though, some people will seek to remove that kind of intimate connection they have with their work because they want an objectivity to the work that they're producing. They wanted to be objective, and I can fully understand that. But I think always, there's a kind of intimacy to the type of work that we're doing. I think you're always going to have some sort of connection with the topic, something's that led you there. And there's often something personal, perhaps, that's led you into that environment. Not directly, but you've got to think it's interesting or important. There's a kind of politics to research because you've got to have found that thing to be an important thing to research, or that it needs revelations making about it, or it needs discussion. So there's always some element of the self in research. We tend, as academics, to write in ways where the self is limited in our accounts of the things that we're covering. But I think that's where some of those other formats lets you write about things in perhaps a less formal and a more personal way, and a more personal, informal tone can come across in the writing. Because a broader audience, I think, prefers the personal, prefers versus the informal to be in there in order for it to capture their imagination and to engage with it. So I think it's-- with academic writing, we perhaps aim to make it a bit more objective. But if you wanted people to read it for fun, or to read it to just find things out, you sometimes need to allow that more personal, slightly rawer informal kind of tone to come to the fore, I think. CHARLIE BENNETT: I've been speaking to Professor Dave Beer today about academic writing as music. Thank you so much for joining us on the show. DAVE BEER: Oh, no. My pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me. ABBY: File this set under AG105.A75. [LORD TANAMO, "TALLER THAN YOU ARE"] [THE STONE ROSES, "MERSEY PARADISE"] Mersey paradise. MATTHEW: You just heard "Mersey Paradise" by The Stone Roses. Before that was "Taller Than You Are" by Lord Tanamo. Those were songs about comparisons of environments and of values. [THEME MUSIC] CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's show is called "Academic Writing as Music," a concept that our guest, Professor Dave Beer, has tweeted and blogged about. That is to say, he did a little tuning up, and then he recorded a demo track. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Academic writing is scholarly and rigorous, of course, but it is also creative and personal. Finding inspiration in other forms of self-expression can improve the process and then the discourse. FRED RASCOE: And so you can find out more about Professor Beer and his research at his website, davidbeer.net. CHARLIE BENNETT: Professor Beer and I talked for a very long time, and I had to cut a lot of that out for time. So I think I'm going to throw the whole unexpurgated interview up on the podcast feed, which you can find at Apple Podcasts and all those other places. OK, enough self-promotion. Roll the credits. [LIVELY MUSIC] WENDY HAGENMAIER: Lost In the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, produced by Ameet Doshi, Charlie Bennett, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Fred Rascoe. FRED RASCOE: Abby was our engineer today, and the show was brought to you in part by one of the occasional nice things that can happen on Twitter-- very occasional. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Legal counsel and a box of truly stunning mix tapes from 1997 were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. CHARLIE BENNETT: Special thanks to Dave for being on the show, to all the people who responded to that tweet and kept the conversation going. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Find us online at lostinthestacks.org, and you can subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and plenty of other places we don't know about. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week on Lost in the Stacks, we dig into the vault and play an episode called "The 404," and that is not an area code. FRED RASCOE: It is time for our last song today. And it also seems like a good time to reveal that today's artists and music genres were all mentioned by our guest during the interview. Perhaps you caught that. So we're going to finish up with another one. CHARLIE BENNETT: He's into really good music, so I'm looking forward to this one. FRED RASCOE: I think this is a good one, too. CHARLIE BENNETT: What'd you get? What'd you get? FRED RASCOE: Well, I got a good one. I tied it to today's theme, of course, because as Professor Beer said, if an academic journal article is analogous to a-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Single. FRED RASCOE: --single, right, and a book is like-- CHARLIE BENNETT: An LP. FRED RASCOE: --an LP, OK. So what's the publisher? CHARLIE BENNETT: The label. FRED RASCOE: And I think publishers are liked by academics just about as much as artists like most big labels. CHARLIE BENNETT: Sarcasm. FRED RASCOE: Yeah, that might be a little sarcastic. So let's close with an angry antipaean to a major label. This is "EMI" by-- CHARLIE BENNETT: EMI! FRED RASCOE: --by the Sex Pistols. Unlimited supply right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everyone. [SEX PISTOLS, "EMI"]