openness in scholarship – not just about peer review, or journal prices
April 27th, 2008 § 1 Comment
and because it’s in Nature Precedings, I can link to it here. John Wilbanks, VP of Science Commons, argues that open access means more than keeping journal costs down, but that access to information is an essential condition for innovation and the creation of new knowledge.
He’s talking about access broadly too – talking about it on a legal/cultural/intellectual property level and on a technological/information organization level -
That’s the power of what we might call a “knowledge web,” built on a knowledge infrastructure. Just to be clear, here’s what I mean by a knowledge web: it’s when today’s web has enough power to work as well for science as it currently works for culture. That means databases are integrated as easily as web documents, and it means that powerful search engines let scientists ask complex research questions and have some comfort that they’re seeing all the relevant public information in the answers. A knowledge web is when journal articles have hyperlinks inside them, not just citations, letting systems like Google do their job properly.
A knowledge web is predicated on access, and not control, of knowledge.
What he’s not talking about is libraries -
But this knowledge web, where all of the literature and databases are cross-linked and searchable from a single interface like Google, isn’t going to happen by accident. Unlike when we built past information network, we don’t have the luxury of building the knowledge web before anyone knows it’s valuable.
We have to build this web together. It’s going to require commercial publishers…. It’s going to require hackers…. It’s going to require funders…. It’s going to take users, like the pharmaceutical companies and the academics. It’s going to take all of us to build a knowledge web, a web that truly supports the kind of complex queries required to get valuable answers out of the deluge of information.
I don’t think he just forgot libraries, nor do I think that he’s unaware of what libraries do. He just talked at MIT libraries last month about these very topics, after all. Does it matter that he didn’t specifically include libraries? I’m really not sure. At the very least, it’s important to remember I think that libraries can’t do this thing alone either. That the partners he mentions are essential.
But I just happened to read this the day after I read this at Dorothea Salo’s blog and maybe it connects? She doesn’t think most librarians are very engaged with the issues of open access. She might be right – it doesn’t feel like that from where I’m sitting, but where I’m sitting could definitely be atypical. So I’m wondering what others think. But most of all I’m hoping others read this article. I found it accessible, thought-provoking and even a little inspiring. Three of my favorite things.
Everyone should read this post on bias
April 25th, 2008 § 4 Comments
Not this post on bias — this post on bias.
I’m having one of those days (actually two of those days in a row now) where everything I read is interesting and I want to talk about it more. So much so that I’m a little overwhelmed and end up not talking about anything. It takes something like this post from New Kid on the Hallway that seems to reach into my brain and pull out something that’s been bugging me and talk about it just like I wanted someone to talk about it.
This is my favorite part:
When you say that a historical author has a “bias,” you’re saying they incline a certain way. They lean in a certain direction. And that’s fine, as far as it goes.
The thing is, you inevitably declare that the author is “biased” as if this is all you have to say on the subject – as if discovering “bias” is some form of analysis.
I hate to tell you this, but it’s really not.
A billion times yes. It’s not. And the post rocks more because she goes on to talk about why it’s not as well as what the appropriate kind of analysis would look like.
The idea that the “checklist” approach to teaching website evaluation doesn’t work isn’t an original thought. But this issue in particular is the reason why checklists for website evaluation keep me up at night. This is why throwing in a “please tell my students about evaluating websites” as one part of a one-shot library session (or really, even as the only part of a one-shot library session) doesn’t work for me. Or why “let’s teach everything students need to know about evaluating information in one generic tutorial or handout” doesn’t work for me. Or really, why the very idea of teaching evaluation of resources as a separate skill distinct from the other thinking and learning students do – no matter how contextual and complex the methods used are — will never work for me.
Evaluating is near the top of Bloom’s taxonomy for a reason – this is hard stuff. This is the big leagues where cognition and learning are concerned. And if we try to teach it like it’s easy – like discovering something like bias (or any of the other things on the checklist) is the end of the story, no more thinking required, we’re teaching the wrong lesson. That kind of evaluation might help people filter out the truly bad stuff – but I think that most students today know full well that there is truly bad stuff out there and they already know how to identify it. Because identifying the truly bad stuff is really not that hard.
But those skills don’t help them at all when it comes to distinguishing the good from the great, or when they’re faced with a bevy of plausible interpretations. And if those skills become their evaluation habits – those habits will hurt them when they need to do real evaluation to solve really complex problems.
Digital content for free! (semi-free) (or something)
April 23rd, 2008 § 2 Comments
So, from Encyclopedia Britannica there’s now Webshare – making it easy for “web publishers” (which means – bloggers?) to access premium encyclopedia content, and to share that content with users. From the project site:
a limited program that enables people who regularly publish content on the Internet—bloggers, webmasters, and writers for the Web—to obtain free subscriptions to Britannica Online, which includes the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and thousands of additional articles as well as access to other reference databases, links to valuable Web sites selected by our editors, and more.
It looks like I can search the online site for free, and I can use links or widgets to share the information I find with others – even if that information would normally have a price tag. Now, one reason for this is clear – as Kathryn Greenhill has already explained - Britannica wants more links because more links = more better in a Google-dominated world.
And clearly, Britannica needs to be more relevant – the realities of online writing are that you’ll pick what’s good and linkable over what’s great and not. Jason Griffey at Pattern Recognition looks at Webshare in this light, and makes a strong argument that the project doesn’t go far enough down the open and sharing road.
So this is interesting, as a model for digital content sharing, but I’m also interested in how well the site works as an online reference source. And in particular as an online reference source that can support an process-based model of research, based on broad exploration. A few years ago now – I think it was probably 2005 – we were revising a set of information literacy assignments that are embedded in OSU’s beginning composition course. These assignments were, and are, intended to introduce just such a research model.
For a variety of reasons we decided that a lot of students needed to explore their topics in reference-type sources. At the time, we had access to the online Britannica in my library and we thought “maybe we’ll send them to Wikipedia and to the published encyclopedia.” After a few test searches using our students’ keywords we realized that this plan was doomed to fail. The oddest and most specific searches were successful in Wikipedia, but even common terms like “biodiesel” were unsuccessful in Britannica. More than that, the hypertext-rich articles in Wikipedia encouraged further and broader exploration, while the traditional entries in Britannica were clearly intended to stand alone.
I describe this whole process in more detail in a chapter in this book, and (with Sara Jameson) in this article, but the upshot is that we decided to send the students to Wikipedia alone, and we haven’t turned back from that plan.
So have things gotten better since 2005?
I searched on “biodiesel” which is my default sample search, which is a very popular argument paper topic among OSU undergraduates, and which yielded exactly no results in the online Britannica 3 years ago. This time, we did a little better. There seems to be a topic on biodiesel, but while it looks like there should be an associated article, the interface just churned and churned without loading one. When it finally stopped, there was a notation indicating that biodiesel is a fuel, which isn’t much, but it is an improvement over last time. There is also a note saying that this topic is “being discussed” on four external websites: Biodieselnow, the National Biodiesel Board, Willie Nelson’s Biodiesel, and a biography of Rudolf Diesel. There are also links to pages on Rudolf Diesel and Willie Nelson.
So – better, yes, but not especially good. A student could do some exploration of this topic here, but there’s nothing to give them a sense of the discourse, to suggest entry points and keywords into that discourse – no article to help make them better searchers on the topic and only a limited range of places to look further.
And even beyond this, I’d like to extend Jason Griffey’s conclusion a bit -
In all, this is the right direction for Britannica to be going if they hope to ever be relevant in the 21st century, but they haven’t gone far enough. You need some serious added value at this point to compete.
I think his suggestions are spot-on, and I could see using Britannica for things as he describes it. But for this particular assignment — even if all these suggestions came to pass I’m not sure any source created in a non-dynamic way could add the value I’m looking for. As I’ve worked with students on this assignment, I’ve come to think that the very things that can make Wikipedia scary to some educators also make it an ideal resource to illustrate some of the important epistemological themes in academic writing: the idea that knowledge is something constructed, or the idea that some problems are “wicked problems” with a whole lot of plausible solutions.
That’s a serious value-add for me that is only possible because of the community of people who co-create Wikipedia and because of the transparency inherent in their creation process.
More news meta…
April 21st, 2008 § 3 Comments
…still thinking about last week’s conversation about the corporate media and what that means for information literacy instruction and the broader idea of library users as informed citizens. A couple of things have come across my screen that seem to fit into this conversation.
First, continuing the theme of cool and awesome visualizations is Muckety, with the tagline “exploring the paths of power and influence.” The site is a simple blog like presentation of news stories, focusing on the connections between people, corporate entities, topics and more. But the stories are accompanied by these interactive maps that let you explore those connections on your own. I like how easy and responsive it is – do a search, choose a result and generate a map around that result. The visualizations seem to be based on an in-house database, so it’s not as easy as it could be to follow the sources and explore the relationships further.
The first thing I thought of was using this tool to look at some of the corporate relationships I talked about last week – someone’s already done it. And that’s great because the resulting map is a bit chaotic and crazy and probably took forever to put together -
And in a nice bit of synchonicity – today’s top story on Muckety is the other thing I was going to talk about here. Jason Mittell and Barbara Fister both talked about this yesterday and got me thinking about the connections between all of these conversations. Barbara got a comment when she cross-posted the story on ACRLog that suggested the commenter saw the story as an attack on the Bush administration and nothing more.
I think the commenter was primed to see things that way and wouldn’t have been open to any other interpretation, but I also think Mittell’s JustTV post raises another important issue that has particular significance for us when we’re trying to think about the question of how to teach information literacy – the kind of information literacy that supports informed citizenry and lifelong learning:
The biggest gap in Barstow’s article is an explanation for why the media allows its “experts” to hold forth unchecked, whether due to conflicts of interest, ethical lapses, or demonstrated ineptitude for actually displaying expertise. The end of the article tries to address this, but the networks stonewall Barstow in a range of ways, from ABC saying it’s the responsibility of analysts to report their own conflicts of interest, to Fox’s outright refusal to participate in the article. Of course looking too closely at these issues would force the Times to justify why it publishes its own discredited “expert,” William Kristol, despite nearly every claim he’s made for the last 7 years having been proven wrong.
So yay for the Times for pulling back the curtain – but to some extent this little glimpse just shows how much more pushing at the curtain still needs to be done.
What I haven’t had time to say about the Cult of the Amateur
April 14th, 2008 § 4 Comments
was said pretty well yesterday at Daily Kos.
Keen tends to claim that the participatory web is destroying traditional media at great cost to our culture. I’ve always thought that the mainstream media has done a great deal to destroy itself. And I don’t think I can say it better than this:
The media — newspapers, radio, and television — is not made up of reporters running on a sparkling field of journalistic integrity. Those reporters are instead embedded in a machine intended to do the one thing that Mr. Keen sets as the mark of professionalism — make money. And the way the media has chosen to make money over the last few decades is, perversely, by devaluing their own product.
I’m not just annoyed by Keen in interviews and panels. I think his completely uncritical acceptance of the traditional corporate media as a guarantor of quality is destructive to the very discourse he claims to embrace. “Debate” about the participatory web that is sparked by arguments like Keen’s tends to look like this:
Andew Keen: But the problem is that gatekeepers — the agents, editors, recording engineers — these are the very engineers of talent. Web 2.0′s distintermediated media unstitches the ecosystem that has historically nurtured talent. Web 2.0 misunderstands and romanticizes talent. It’s not about the individual — it’s about the media ecosystem. Writers are only as good as their agents and editors. Movie directors are only as good as their studios and producers. These professional intermediaries are the arbiters of good taste and critical judgment.
David Weinberger: Actually, I’d suggested you take a look at the Top 40 songs. Of course you’re within your rights to cite the New York Times best-sellers list instead, but that’s indicative of the problem with your method. Are you seriously maintaining that pop culture off line is represented by six good books on the New York Times hardcover non-fiction list? Why do you find it so awkward to acknowledge the obvious point that the gatekeepers of commercial publishing and production — the producers of TV shows, magazines, pop music, movies, books — are usually driven not by high cultural standards, but by the need to reach a broad audience? Do I need to remind you that “The Secret” is likely ultimately to outsell all six of those worthy books combined?
Weinberger, or whoever is engaging with Keen-ish arguments can sit there taking home-run swings at Keen’s blind approval of the “media ecosystem” — making the earth-shattering argument that the mainstream media wants to reach a broad audience and make money. I want to see what Weinberger says when really pushed about the limits and value of the participatory web. Keen, regrettably given how much attention the media gives him, never provides that push.
And in libraries, the same thing goes on when Michael Gorman writes on these topics – because he has the same kind of un-critical acceptance of traditional scholarly methods as Keen does of mainstream media producers. We need serious discussion about the implications of the read/write web for scholarly knowledge production, and that can only happen if we turn the same critical eye on traditional practices as we do on the new. But as long as one can engage with Gorman by saying “peer review isn’t perfect” – that real discussion doesn’t have to happen.
(For an example of what I mean by “real discussion” – the March issue of First Monday is a good start)
(And let me say that I have a lot more sympathy for Gorman than anyone who would make the claim that movie studios these days, minor subsidiaries of corporate conglomerations as they are, have a clearer picture of quality than directors)
I haven’t read the comments on this piece – I don’t usually see Daily Kos because there’s too much discussion there and I know I won’t resist the comment threads even though I can’t keep up – so thanks to Copyfight for the pointer.
Intellectuals are scary.
April 11th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
This is more of a pointing something out post than an in-depth analysis post. I don’t know that I have much to say about this article in yesterday’s L.A. Times, that Jon Wiener didn’t already say in The Nation yesterday evening. But I can’t stop being bothered by it.
No matter how many times I read the article (and I’ve skimmed it a lot of times because I found it hard to really focus – I kept getting annoyed) it seems that the subtext is that being in the same place where ideas are is bad and dangerous. Voluntarily being in a place where there are ideas that challenge your beliefs means you are not to be trusted. And really, that subtext is so close to the surface that it might as well be text. I mean, the article is framed so that the point is the reactions of “Palestinian leaders” but it reads a lot more like “look what Barack Obama did.”
I would probably just be rolling my eyes about the corporate media and thinking about something else, though, if it hadn’t been for the comment thread on the Nation post. There aren’t many comments (at least not now) but there’s a small thread there that seems to be drawing parallels between going to a lecture and… drinking. And not just going to a lecture – going to a lecture by EDWARD SAID.
I don’t care what you think of Orientalism – this is a person whose work has had massive reverberations across a lot of disciplines. His ideas, his work shape how we talk about things, how we think about things. Even those who disagree with those ideas are working within a discourse he played a major role in defining. Said is one of those people who is so important that even if you disagree with every single thing he has ever said ever you should want to understand his thinking because understanding his thinking means understanding something about everyone else’s.
(I’m focusing on Said because that was Wiener’s focus, even if it wasn’t the L.A. Times’, and it was the comments on the Wiener piece that really got me thinking. And because I don’t know Khalidi’s work. I know he has an endowed chair at Columbia and he was at Chicago before that – so some smart people think his ideas are worth notice. I’m certain that many people hate those ideas. And I’m certain that many people love them. But the point isn’t what either of these intellectuals profess, write, argue or believe – it’s whether someone’s willingness to engage with those ideas alone tells us more about what that person believes than the things they profess, write, or argue themselves.)
And that’s why I can’t stop thinking about this story – how did we get to the place where a Presidential candidate attending a lecture by a leading public intellectual is a bad thing? Have we always been in this place? American anti-intellectualism is a well-established theme, but I don’t think we’ve always been here.
I think it has something to do with what Jon Stewart was talking about here, when he got Crossfire booted off CNN:
Because part of what’s going on in this article is the idea that if you believe X you can’t listen to or engage with Y and if you say you believe A and then you talk to someone who believes B - you’re shifty. Which I think is entirely connected to the difference between Crossfire debate and what Stewart meant by “debate.” That goes beyond anti-intellectualism.
Though anti-intellectualism is in play as well. Which is why all of this does have to do with the same ideas that keep coming up on this blog – how to help students understand academic ideas and engage with them. How to help students learn from new ideas and new information. How to help them see the connections between ideas – how one thinker influences another, and another. How some questions have more than two answers, and how they can fit themselves within that complicated discourse. It’s important stuff. Because stuff like this in the L.A. Times – that’s what scares me.
what do comics and documentary filmmaking have to do with libraries?
April 7th, 2008 § 2 Comments
Nothing, really? Except maybe…
I spent the weekend working on a project Shaun is just starting – a documentary that takes a geographic look at why Portland has become such a central place for comics creators and publishers. He’s had to push his production schedule way up because the Stumptown Comics Fest, which has been in September, moved to April. So he doesn’t have the student crew he is planning to have yet (if you know a talented student filmmaker at OSU or WOU who would like some independent study credit – email me) and none of his volunteer crew was available on short notice to spend the weekend in Portland.
So it was just him and me filming 24-Hour-Comics-Day. That really means it was just him, with me to do the stuff that required more than 2 hands – holding the mike was a big part of my day. The 24 hours in question extended from 10 am Saturday morning to 10 am Sunday morning, and the artists and writers who participated spent this time around a table at Cosmic Monkey comics in northeast Portland. Their task was to produce a 24-page comic in 24 hours from start to finish.
Around 20 people signed up for the event, about 20 showed up and about 20 were there much of the time — but as Leigh Walton (who liveblogged the whole event – check it out) said, they weren’t always the same 20 people. When we walked back in on Sunday morning there weren’t 20 people there, but there were more than 10 and some of the people who were gone were gone because they were done already.
(No, we didn’t stay the whole night. The camera did.)
The people there ranged from first-timers who may or may not have ever put together a comic of this length, to established names like Jim Valentino (creator of Normalman), Neal Skorpen (doing his fifth 24 hour event) and David Chelsea (participating in his TENTH 24 hour event). And people were doing the event for all kinds of reasons – which is one of the more interesting things about these timed, creative contests I think.
When we do things like the 48 hour film project or the IDC, it’s usually to see how good of a film we can make in that period of time, yes. And when we talk to people about how we’ve just done a short film in 2 days or a documentary in 5, that marathon-like aspect of it is what people focus on — the idea that you do these things like people run a marathon, to see if you CAN do these things. If you have what it takes, the strength, the speed the stamina, or whatever. And there’s a “best time” variation on that — even if you know you CAN create a comic in 24 hours or make a movie in 48, there’s still – how good of a thing can you make in that time?
But with these creative contests – there are so many more reasons why people do these things. When we do the film contests part of it is pulling a community together in our smallish part of the state that’s interested in this kind of creativity – the Willamette Valley Film Collective idea. And that community aspect also came through loud and clear this past weekend — Shaun was thinking about how doing film as his scholarship is interesting because unlike writing books or articles, you can’t make a movie all by yourself. At the very least, you need your wife to hold the mike. And the artists and writers in the room were on the opposite side of things – what they do, they do by themselves a lot and having the chance to do it in a room with other people was part of the draw.
But another reason why people do these things – has nothing to do with marathons at all. Some people sign up for NaNoWriMo, 48 Hour Film, Script Frenzy, International Documentary Challenge or Madison’s Mercury Theater Blitz not to see if they can create a play or novel or movie in that time period – but to see if they can create a play or comic or movie or novel at all. Whether because they need the deadline, or the community of people doing the same thing fuels the competitive drive, or because they haven’t been able to manage doing it a little at a time and they need the excuse to just drop everything and put some sustained effort towards creating — they think “this is how I can finally get it done.”
So what has this to do with libraries? Well, probably nothing. But after I went to Picture Poetry to read the live blog of the event, I stuck around a bit reading Leigh Walton’s posts about Portland and comics and publishing — and I was struck by this older entry which starts off with the observation that “the distribution and retail network for comics is broken like whoa.”
The post itself is mainly a long excerpt from another person who is explaining why he shops online for comics instead of supporting his local shops — and if you read it, doesn’t it sound a lot like people talking about libraries? I mean, there’s the overwhelming difference that if you choose between an online shop and a brick and mortar shop you’re choosing where to spend your money, while if you choose Amazon over your library you’re choosing TO spend money — but other than that, a lot of what they’re saying sounds exactly like what we say in libraries — even down to the “let’s put a coffee shop in to be more welcoming.”
Which gets me thinking about the community aspect of things – and the role that the community plays in supporting people who just want to see if they can do stuff, produce stuff, create stuff, and more that the 24 hour comics drawpocalypse represented. In other words, I think I’m saying if we’re just a place to consume information, whether that information takes the form of comic books or academic books, I’m not sure we can compete with the Amazons and what have you. I mean, I’d rather do the consuming part at home on my couch, all things being equal. But all things aren’t equal, because we’re about more than consumption. One of the reasons that people get out and go to their local yarn store is for Stitch and Bitch night, one of the reasons people go out to the comic store is to draw a comic in 24 hours — libraries are also spaces where people don’t just consume, but also create, and create together with other creators — how can we build more into that aspect of what we are.
Scholarship on the participatory web – a quick take on the OAH
April 3rd, 2008 § Leave a Comment
I don’t know that I have anything really insightful to say about this example of scholarship on the read/write web, but when I clicked over to HNN’s Highlights from the 2008 OAH Convention this morning I didn’t have high expectations.
(For non-historians, OAH = Organization of American Historians. This is one of the two main US-based scholarly associations in history. The OAH is for any scholar who studies American History. The other one, the American Historical Association, is for any American historian, no matter what they study. Both organizations have made some great uses of the emerging web to promote scholarly communication.).
I like the idea of following conferences I can’t attend via blogs, but in practice I rarely find that it works for me. Liveblogs of conference sessions are usually similar to class-notes type writing, more reporting than analysis and idiosyncratic reporting at that. And I definitely get why – no one has time to write an account of what was said and an analysis of what it means at the same time. And at best, liveblogged analysis can’t go past gut, immediate reactions — ideas that might develop and change with time for reflection. But the analytical, more personalized “what I thought was good, bad and important” writing — that takes time. I know that even when I want to write up a conference later, I don’t get to it before the next conference comes along.
Which is why I enjoyed this coverage so much. Rick Shenkman, HNN editor, reported on the sessions he saw, placed the arguments in context, and told us what he thought of the sessions, the speakers, the reactions/discussions and the papers. It reads like one person’s account, but that’s one of the things I liked best about it – it didn’t have that blandness of objectivity. Best of all, almost every session and talk discussed is supplemented with a YouTube video from the session itself. So one guy’s analysis, and the opportunity to see for yourself.
Here’s Manning Marable:
Which is why this is the kind of coverage I think could be really useful for students new to the discipline to really get a sense of what goes on in a discipline, in a scholarly community. The videos alone, even if the quality was better than YouTube, wouldn’t do that — non-experts need the context and the analysis. The context and analysis wouldn’t be enough either — too much one person’s view. If there was a better discussion in the comments, that’d be ideal, but that doesn’t seem to be happening yet. Maybe next year.
