Abstracts and Their Mysterious In-Betweens: Attuning to the Lacuna of Scholarly Communications

Abstract

Reorganizing our library during the pandemic, James secretly placed Jasmine’s copy of The Hundreds by his copy of Exercises in Style, the latter offering 99 different narrations of the same story. In our accidentally large archive of abstracts for which we never wrote papers, we had a collection of constrained writings, all iterations of our shared research narrative. Many of these were unsubmitted responses to calls for papers (CFPs), conferences we were not able to attend, or papers we never got around to writing. We share the following sample of 24 abstracts here as an invitation, should anyone wish to develop these ideas. Furthermore, abstracts themselves constitute a genre of scholarly communications, the art of which might be developed to make research more accessible, abstracts themselves being situated in front of paywalls. Ultimately, this project led to the 25th abstract and introduction to our podcast, the Researchers’ Cardbox.