iScience (Part 1): Me me me
This is the first part in a series of posts in which I’ll think aloud about the future of academic research and the role that social software could (should?) play in it. My central idea is that research should become more transparently collaborative and that publicly funded projects and initiatives should focus on enabling individual researchers instead of institutions. Too often, what is described by the term e-science* is the development of unwieldy and byzantine systems that seek to anticipate and solve a huge array of problems, many of which have already been solved elsewhere. Because we tend to conceptualize software as tools - objects that can be used to perform certain tasks - we tend to believe that more functions equate to a better product. This view is problematic because it ignores the situation of data in a networked environment, where the user is free to use a variety of different web-based services in combination and can thus effectively create his own system. I want to begin by looking at how we can use social software as an information management tool.
* I’m not talking about scientific grid computing here (the original meaning of e-science), but about more general tools for areas such as academic publishing, information and knowledge management, teaching which are also often described as e-science applications.
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A while ago, I looked at the slides for a presentation on something pretty and colorful that either started with “e” or ended with “2.0″. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what exactly it was about, as all those fancy products and services eventually become a blur in my oversaturated cortex. But it wasn’t really the presentation as such that I found interesting. Going through the slides, I came across this memorable quote from a Japanese student that caught my attention:
When you lose your cell phone, you lose a part of your brain.
The quote got me thinking. What service or device equates to part of my brain for me (apart from my cell phone)?
The answer? iGoogle.
I’ve been using the service for only a few months now, but in conjunction with a handful of other products (many of which are integrated into my iGoogle page via widgets) it has become the single place where my email, appointments and bookmarks live together. Beyond that, I also use it to store ideas that spontaneously pop into my head. I keep a virtual scratchpad for notes. I have a to-do list with prioritized items. I have access to my calendar, email, feeds, bookmarks and documents when I log in, no matter where I am. Other services such as My Yahoo! do the same thing. They allow you to build a personal information ecology that’s always at your fingertips.
Right, so what’s so special about this?
First, there’s the fact that iGoogle allows you to tie different informational strands together in a personalized environment. We have enough neat applications and more than enough sources of information. The problem is that they all live in different places and that they usually don’t talk to each other. A lot of people have already pointed this out, but it’s something that can’t really be said often enough: we have to stop thinking that we need better, bigger tools with more functions when what we really need is better integration of existing “little” tools into personalized informational mosaics.
The second advantage is that your personal informational bundle is accessible everywhere you go, as long and there’s a computer with an Internet connection available.
Thirdly (and this tends to be overlooked), you can’t ever really lose a piece of information that you create or maintain online. I lose paper notes all the time and a hard drive can die unexpectedly. Sure, you can counter the former problem by being better organized than I am and the latter one by keeping backups, but information on the Web is virtually indestructible.
Fourth, you can share everything. I’ve been using Google Documents for quite a while without sharing any of my files, but recently we were brainstorming for a collaborative project and the document sharing feature turned out to be very useful. And sharing bookmarks on del.icio.us has vast potential for groups of collaborators.
The catch is that what’s presented in iGoogle is not just information, it’s my information. I can arrange it around myself in a pattern that makes sense to me in the same way that I arrange furniture in my office. It’s a pattern that can change over time and that only has to appeal to me - it’s optimized for my personal informational needs. This kind of individualized coherence makes certain things possible. Think about it like this: when all your colleagues have their offices in the same hallway as you do, you can easily drop in for a chat or to discuss an idea that just popped into your head. Now think about how most research tools work. Are they part of a pattern, a pattern that can be rearranged by the user? Generally the answer is no.
We tend to associate the whole Web 2.0 shebang with tuned-in, social-media-creating adolescent hipsters who supposedly do nothing all day long but to “share and remix” content, but when you think about it “share and remix” is what researchers have been doing for hundreds of years, albeit with different tools. The free dissemination of human expression is what characterizes social media, we are told. Wait, isn’t that what science is all about? Of course science is hardly just about expressing oneself. Among other things we have peer review, academic titles and scholarly societies to assure that what is published under the label “research” is not just opinion. And you can argue that disseminating an article on solar physics via arXiv.org is not the same thing as uploading a video of the mentos and coke experiment to YouTube. But thinking critically that’s a difference in scope and culture, as in how we value the article vs. how we value the clip, what you can do with different forms of content and who can pass an authoritative judgment on uses and forms.
The practices of academic research have arguably never been more with the times than today. Collaboration, openness and sharing information are core values of academic communities. But many argue that while the scientific ethos may be more en vogue than ever (think about the origins of Free Software in academia) we are still lacking the right tools for science 2.0.
Is that really true? I want to take a little time and look at what networked research tools we have and why, by and large, we are not using them.
The second part of this essay will present and discuss a number of tools for web-based research and collaboration.
