Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to give a presentation on new forms of scholarly publishing, Open Access and Open Research at a virtual meeting organized by Catalina Danis of IBM’s Social Computing Group. It was great, although preciously little time for discussion remained, due to a slightly overambitious (i.e. too voluminous) presentation on my part. Thankfully, the session next week will be used for discussion and I am very much looking forward to that. Once more, a big thanks to Catalina for inviting me and to everyone who attended.
Edit: if this looks strange, please reload the page. For reasons I cannot fathom slideshare’s embeds manage to blow up the page unless I manually adjust the source code…
As you can probably tell by the long pauses in between posts, I am still not quite back to my normal blogging routine, but thankfully things are picking up little by little. Last week I held two presentations, one at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (concerned with the eLanguage project) and another at the University of Paderborn (about using the Web for linguistic research). Oh, and I can announce with some degree of pride that I have published my first peer-reviewed article (in First Monday, together with Peter Reimer) which is also related to eLanguage.
I’ve been wrestling with several papers and the associated deadlines during the last few days, but all is well and under control now. On Wednesday I visited the Max Planck Digital Library - the Porsche of German public library & information services shops - to do a presentation on institutional blogging.
A few interesting questions were raised after the talk, such as how wikis and blogs relate to one another in an organizational context and how researchers use blogs. I think it depends on the organization and the task, but both blogs and wikis can (and should) certainly be used side by side. At least in my mind, wikis are a little more information-centric, whereas blogs are more person-centric. Coherence and connectedness are essential in a wiki, whereas the structure in a blog is chronological and hard-coded. One item comes after the other and basically there is no assumption that there has to be a coherent structure at all, other than then one that is naturally imposed by time. This may mean more individual freedom to some and too little structure to others - it all depends on your personal point of view. I really can’t stress enough how extremely individual tastes are when it comes to information management. Blogs and wikis can both be used in great ways together and frankly I’m wondering more about those people and organizations that use neither than about those that use one of the two or both.Regarding researchers and blogs - the short answer, in my view, is that they don’t use them nearly enough. But then, from a purely egoistical point of view that’s nothing I should be complaining about. This morning I chatted with a good friend who uses blogs intensively for teaching at the university level. She started about a year ago and introduced all sorts of blog-based tasks into her students’ coursework. They absolutely love it. She’s a great teacher and using blogs has made her classes even more popular. Recently she was invited to do a course for educators on how to use blogs for teaching at another university. She is essentially an expert on the subject now, simply because she has recognized the potential of a new technology that many of her colleagues are still unaware of.
I don’t believe that education and science will change over night because of social software, simply because institutions are fairly resistant to change (people are). Often this isn’t because we’re lazy either, but because we see no need to meddle with a system that we think works. But of course the ways we learn and do research will change fundamentally in the next twenty years or so. Symptomatically, I just need to look at how I do research using Google Scholar, del.icio.us, Zotero and my blog and I can see the writing on the wall. I use these tools because they allow me to be better at what I do and others will eventually use them for the same reason. And who knows, maybe those of us who got into it early will have a little head start.
Excuse the rather long silence - as ends-of-the-month go, August was a busy one. I’m still in the process of finishing two papers and fighting a rather annoying cold, but with the great research input I got over the last two days I am certainly not complaining.
To recap: Lilia Efimova invited me to hold a talk on corporate blogging at the Telematica Instituut in Enschede, which is only about 2.5 hours from where I do my work. We got in touch through our blogs and given that we both research corporate blogging it felt totally natural to get together and pick each other’s brains. I keep finding again and again that few things really connect people quite the same way that nerdy research interests do.
Lilia introduced me to Anjo Anjewierden, who (among many other thing) works on ways of visualizing blog data and has developed the very nifty text analysis package tOKo. I also met bloggers Ton Zijlstra and Elmine Wijnia with whom I had the chance to chat after the talk. I’m always vastly impressed by people who have been blogging for several years. Me, I tend to feel proud that I’ve managed to post in more or less regular intervals for roughly a year now, but a year seems so little compared with all the writing that many of the “veterans” have under their belts.
Anjo made an excellent point after the presentation by asking what a flog is (I use the word in the title of the presentation). Note to self: it’s a good idea to occasionally explain the neologisms that you carelessly throw about.There’s quite a bit of trip-associated homework that I need to do today, but I promise to post more on some of the things I have been pondering lately very soon. Thanks once more to Lilia, Robert and Alexander for letting me stay at their place and for wining and dining me! I’m looking forward to hosting you (ideally all of you, but for that I need a bigger apartment) in the future.
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!
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.
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…
After spending the last week touring several places in Germany (first for a presentation at the University of Osnabrück and then for a friend’s birthday party in Bavaria) I am now back on the ground in Düsseldorf, ready to pick up the blogging reins again.
I’ll start by sharing the slides for a presentation I held earlier at our local colloquium. I focused on Life at Wal-Mart, the public-facing blog described on WalMartFacts.com as “our associate blog”. I believe that LaWM represents what you could call a “pseudo blog” - something that uses the form of a blog, but is really a very tightly controlled and restricted form of one-way advertising that has little to do with a real blog. Anyway, let me know what you think.
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