Employee blogging: personal or work-related?
That’s the title of a great presentation that Lilia Efimova held via Skype at ECSCW07 in Limerick. Be sure to look at the slides if you’re interested in the subject.
Corporate Blogging and CSR
Business for Social Responsibility have devoted the current issue of their e-zine Leading Perspectives to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and emerging technologies (blogs, Second Life etc) . You can get the PDF here.
Thanks to my colleague Carolina Grünschloß for letting me know about this. Carolina is writing her PhD thesis in economics about CSR strategies of western companies in Japan, so if you’re interested in exchanging ideas don’t hesitate to get in touch with her.
BSR is also organizing a conference in San Francisco in October that you may find interesting.
Back from Birmingham
Phew, what a month! I’m certainly not complaining - July was terrifically productive and interesting, with two conferences on very different subjects (Open Access Publishing and Corpus Linguistics). But the consequence was a pretty uneven blogging schedule, with much activity two weeks ago followed by a long silence.
Anyway, I’m picking up the reins again this week. But let me start by linking to the presentation I held at Birmingham.
I really enjoyed the colloquium and learned a lot from the other participants, especially because of the diverse disciplinary set-up (Linguistics, Information Retrieval, Computer Sciences, …). As Serge Sharoff pointed out, we were all very much talking about the same thing, even though our approaches may be different. Thanks once more to the organizers, Serge and Marina Santini, for their effort!
eLanguage presentation at PKP 2007
After a whoppin’ 14 hours of sleep (preceded by an equally whoppin’ 28 hours awake - talk about the no-nonsense approach to jetlag!) I am now back on the ground in Germany. Just in case you’re curious about what’s next on the menu here at CorpBlawg: I plan to write something about blogging and text composition towards the end of the week, inspired by this interesting piece that Jakob Nielsen recently published on his site.
But before I do that I want to briefly point you to this post about the presentation that I held last week at PKP Vancouver. There’s excellent coverage of all presentations held at the conference and I really think that it’s a great idea to blog such an event - a perfect fit, since it was about scholarly publishing and open access to knowledge. While I’m at it, here are the slides for the presentation.
Day 2 of the PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference
As the second day of the conference is winding down, I’m happy that I have this blog to document the great presentations I’ve seen today. Michael Geist is answering questions right now - someone has brought up the Rufus Pollock paper on “optimal copyright duration” and Michael has pointed out how immensely long copyright periods are and how strange that is, for example in regards to software.
Before Michael, I heard a very interesting talk by Gregg Gordon of the Social Science Research Network. Gregg addressed many of the issues I’m also interested in, namely how the landscape of knowledge dissemination is changing in the long term, how trust and reputation are essential in (digital) publishing and how scarcity as a paradigm in scholarly publishing is being replaced by abundance (or even overabundance, some might argue).
Earlier this morning Anita Palepu presented Open Medicine, an open access medical journal that was initiated partly as a reaction to the interference with editorial freedom that Anita had previously witnessed. Highlighting that point - that Open Access is not just about bringing down subscription costs for libraries or a convenient way to increase your impact as a scholar, but that it’s the ideal way to prevent conflicts of interest that are virtually everywhere in a $500 million advertising market was an extremely relevant contribution.
People are filing out of Harbour Centre and soon most of us will be back at our desks, working on projects that will hopefully contribute to furthering access to knowledge for everyone, to bringing down the barriers. I really liked something that John Willinsky said in that context. We all have the right - the human right - to know.
Making that possible is definitely something worth working on.
Note that I’ll write a more complete summary of my messy conference notes in the course of the next few days.
Day 1 of the PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference
(I wrote this earlier today but only had a chance to post it now.)
I’m sitting in the lobby of Harbour Centre, looking through panorama windows at the Pacific and enjoying what must be my fourth cup of coffee today (jet lag further aggravates my already serious caffeine addiction). After arriving on Tuesday I had the chance to walk around in the sun for several hours and see lovely Vancouver. I also heard a series of very exciting talks, notably John Wilinsky of the Public Knowledge Initiative and Anurag Acharya, lead engineer for Google Scholar. I also had the opportunity to throw questions at them while they were literally gasping for air from being hounded by equally curious individuals. I’ll post a summary later, but for now I want to point to the excellent live blog coverage over at the PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference Blog (or PKPSPCB, as pros call it). If I’m lucky they might even post a summary of my talk. No rush with that though, as I’m sure they have their collective hands more than full right now.
Canadian excursion!
I just wanted to post a quick reminder that I’m in lovely Vancouver from tomorrow till Sunday to speak at the PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference (my abstract is here). Do say hello if you’re there. Among others, I’m looking forward to meeting Dean Giustini, who blogs about Google Scholar and academic search (especially medical) at UBC. If the wireless access at Harbour Centre works I should even be able to blog from there.
Osnabrück, Vancouver, Birmingham and other things
Note: this post is largely about my conference travel plans for the next two months and a few academic issues. I promise to publish something more clearly corporate-blogging-related very soon.
As already mentioned in the last post, I was at the University of Osnabrück last month to present something related to methodology in corpus linguistics. My basic claim was that there are merits to using blogs as corpus data, because it allows us to effectively analyze the language use of countless individuals. This adds a level of granularity when making generalizations about “language as such” - what may be frequent in one speaker’s use may be non-existent in another’s. Anyway, you can have a look at the presentation slides if you like:
Turning to the future, I’m excited about my first trip to Canada next month. I am presenting at the 2007 PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference in Vancouver and the title of the talk is “eLanguage.net: Shifting the paradigm in linguistics from academic publishing to scholarly communication”. It’s a hot topic for me, as I’m the lead developer for eLanguage, the Linguistic Society of America’s platform for open access, peer-reviewed electronic journals (see my previous post). We hope to expand out talk into an article for a special issue of First Monday, to be published after the conference.Finally, I’m also presenting at the Corpus Linguistics 2007 in Birmingham (U.K., not U.S.). My presentation is part of the colloquium Towards a Reference Corpus of Web Genres, which will be mainly concerned with computational approaches to automatically classifying types of web pages according to their linguistic (and other) content. Read my abstract here (and yeah - of course it’ll be about my corporate blog collection).
I’ll be in Vancouver from the 10th to the 15th of July and in Birmingham on the 26th and 27th, also July. Be sure to say hello if you’re there and have the burning desire to talk about corporate blogging, linguistics, or the new Modest Mouse album.
As you can see, the work of the poorly paid PhD student is never done. Not that other people don’t get a whole lot more blogging done, despite a schedule that is far busier than mine for sure…
