May 16th, 2008 | Digital Humanities, Many Eyes, Project Bamboo, Web 2.0, iScience | No Comments
I’ve recently discovered Project Bamboo, an initiative that describes itself on the project website as a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question:
“How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?”
Come again? At first, the concept of shared technology services may seem a little vague. But a closer look at the full project proposal makes it fairly clear what is meant.
While academics use digital technology and the Net for a wide variety of things (research, teaching, publishing, communication), all of these uses have a degree of improvisation to them. Very few of the tools we use are developed specifically for the context of science and research, and sometimes this limitation shows.
For example, I’ve started to use del.icio.us to tag all books I read in Google Books (see what I’ve recently tagged). Del.icio.us is an all-purpose bookmark management application, yet the ability to collaboratively create bibliographies with colleagues in the same subfield makes it a useful tool for researchers. Del.icio.us is not the only example - Google Documents can be used to collaboratively work on a publication and SlideShare is great for making your presentations available directly and linking them to your CV (see my own), instead of just offering them for download. But for other, more specialized tasks there is still a severe lack of tools.
A few months ago, a colleague of mine needed a corpus (a collection of texts for linguistic analysis) for her research. Corpora exist in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, but the specific issue she was working on made it necessary for her to create an entirely new corpus (built from blog texts) instead of working with material from more traditional sources (newspapers, fiction etc). In addition, she also had only a basic working knowledge of corpora and the ways in which they can be used.
We approached the problem from two different angles. I helped her build a specialized corpus by using a piece of software that I had developed for my own work on blogs. To analyze the data, I pointed her to two interesting functions of Many Eyes, a web-based application for visualizing statistical information: tag clouds and word trees.
Tag clouds (or, in this case, word clouds) make it possible to visualize how often a word occurs in a piece of writing. Simply paste a text into the appropriate form field on the site and Many Eyes will do the rest (have a look at this cloud for Shakespeare’s complete works for a nice example).
Word trees visualize textual data in another way, allowing the reader in essence to navigate from one word to the next.
There are of course specialized tools for corpus analysis that do a whole lot more than this in terms of statistics and Many Eyes lacks a whole range of feature that a genuine linguistic research tool would need (say, differentiating between different word classes). Yet Many Eyes has several advantages that the more specialized tools lack. It is
- web-based
- freely accessible
- easy to use
and
- versatile
In a sense, the points above make all the difference. Desktop-based software is under all sorts of constraints: you have to acquire it, install it and figure out how to get data from and to it, keep it up to date and do all sorts of other “chores” that have little to with your main objective. And then you can’t even share your data and collaborate as easily as you can on the Web. In other words, you’re using a program, not a service.
Of course Project Bamboo is not just about developing new tools (well, at least not in my mind). The assumption has long been that as soon as someone puts a useful service on the web, a user community will magically appear. This may be true of web video, blogging, wikis and many other services with a broad appeal, all of which can and should be used much more in academia. But with more specialized services, adoption is something that should be actively supported. In others words: we need to do more than just develop tools. We should work to popularize general-purpose services like del.icio.us and document ways in which they can be appropriated for research and teaching - and (most importantly) how they can be connected to one another. At the same time, just putting developers and researchers into a room together can produce impressive results.
A great example for both a mashup of services and a new way of looking at data is the Web version of the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS). It’s a combination of Google Maps with the print version of the atlas, which shows the distribution of linguistic features across the world’s languages (say, which languages have definite articles). Not only is WALS Online more convenient to use than both the print version and the CD-ROM that comes with it (not to forget it is also free), but it makes entirely new uses possible. Think about collaborative annotation or linking research articles directly to WALS. Imagine an paper that lives on the Web and shows a map section from WALS in a side window, with the text flowing around it.
Developing services like WALS and getting them out there has the potential to completely transform academia in the long run, making it much collaborative and transparent than it is today. It will be exciting to see what role Project Bamboo plays in that context.
Edit: I forgot to include a link to the project outline, plus a workshop transcript and some background information.
Mar 4th, 2008 | Academic Publishing, Open Access Publishing, Open Science, Visualization, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment
Wow, I think I’ve never had a post title as long as that one.
As some of you might know, I’m very much engaged in the Open Access movement and involved in several projects related to making scholarly information more accessible. In light of this, I am enthusiastic to announce that I will be organizing a panel with the working title New Forms of Scholarly Communication: Blogs, Wikis and Web 2.0 in Academia at the Berlin 6 Open Access Conference in November. The event is the successor to previous Berlin conferences organized by the Max Planck Society and its partners and will take place here in Düsseldorf.
What exactly is behind the title of the panel? Essentially, I envision a bundle of presentations centered on these interconnected aspects:
- research publishing beyond e-books and e-journals - what new forms of publishing (if any) has the Net brought us?
- new ways of dealing with data - how do platforms such as IBM’s Many Eyes and MIT’s SIMILE library affect how we can look at data and, consequently, how we publish?
- new ways of collaborating - how do new means of communication and collaboration affect us - for example, the use of social bookmarking tools to create shared bibliographies, use of wikis to collaboratively write books etc?
- new ways of evaluation and discussing - how do approaches such as open peer review affect our view of science and the way in which we evaluate research results?
I am pinging the institutions and individuals listed below, which I believe could contribute greatly to making this an interesting and diverse panel. Please do let me me know (via blog or email to puschmann@gmail.com) if you are interested in contributing, or if you have suggestions for subtopics or speakers.
Tools/Technology
Zotero
Many Eyes
SIMILE
SciVee
Research into eScience and blogs/wikis/social networks in an academic context
Virtual Knowledge Studio
HUMlab
Lilia Efimova
Eszter Hargittai
New concepts and approaches in publishing/reviewing
Nature Peer-to-Peer
Living Reviews
Note that these are just a few names that popped into my head spontaneously - there are many more.
I also realized this morning that one immensely interesting speaker on the changing forms of information and on how we share it, disseminate it and evaluate its usefulness would be JP Rangaswami. About 1,5 years ago, I read this fascinating post by JP about what he called “livebrarians”. The post, in which he sketched out differences between the Net and physical libraries, ignited a debate about what role information “professionals” (in other words, librarians) can play in a read-write environment where retrieval happens via keyword search and semantic information is annotated automatically or by amateurs. I particularly liked this quote: “my problem is I really think that any damned fool can be a librarian.” I fully agree. JP has also recently posted about Many Eyes, a project that I very much want to integrate into the discussion.
One might think that open access publishing is a very specific issue, relevant only to academics and librarians, while what we generally call Web 2.0 is just a bundle of trendy buzzwords and an opportunity for tech companies to make money, and that the two issues have little to do with each other. But I believe that means not seeing the big picture. Ultimately, open access publishing is about making information accessible to anyone with an interest in a given area of research, because it is assumed that what can be created as a result of the information being free is worth more than what can be earned by selling it. Open access is to research what open source is to software and for that reason it should be every bit as relevant to companies.
Sep 20th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Web 2.0, iScience | No Comments
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.
*****
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.
Sep 13th, 2007 | Open Access Publishing, Open Science, Robert Forkel, Web 2.0 | No Comments
Robert Forkel has a cool post up about Web 2.0 for librarians. From the piece:
It’s no longer cool - or even ok - to publish a web site in PDF to browsers and some other data via a WS-* type web service to others. Instead, once you forget about browsers being the only user agents, quite a bit of the web 2.0 developments seem very natural.
So the participative aspect of web 2.0 starts well before everyone creating content; it starts with not making restrictive assumptions about who and how people - or programs - will use your site. Let the web participate in reusing your content.
With much of the 2.0 hype coming from a non-technical direction theses days, it is easy to overlook that access is what greases the wheels of the social web. Web 1.0 basically treated every user the same and forgot who you were or what you had just done a moment ago each time you clicked on a link. Data and design were essentially inseparable and websites were conceptualized as real estate on the Net - the more you had, the better (this was the age in which Yahoo still wanted to be a portal). We now get that websites are not like real estate and that our content is not synonymous with our website. People will want to use your content in ways you haven’t anticipated and it hardly matters whether they use it “here” (on your site) or “there” (on a portable device, their own site etc). As Robert points out, Web 2.0 is about making up for technical mistakes that were made in the past and about losing the spatial metaphor that makes us see the Web as consisting of sites and pages.
Sep 11th, 2007 | Opinion, Web 2.0 | No Comments
From this piece in Douglas Gray’s blog:
I’ve been arguing for years that hypertext does not represent any threat to the book. Here’s a case of the web’s influence to preserve a traditional aesthetic in writing while revolutionizing the economics of publishing, for the benefit of writers and publishers and the public.
When you have unlimited reach, your physical product simply can’t lose market share to its digital reproduction. But it’s the idea of unlimited reach for all of us that we’re still adjusting to, I think. Even digital files were still scarce in a sense before everything became networked. But since that has changed, the idea that we can sell more of a thing because we restrict access to its digital reproduction seems patently stupid to me.
Aug 20th, 2007 | CSR, Conferences, Corporate Blogging, Research, Web 2.0 | No Comments
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.
Jul 21st, 2007 | Linguistics, Other Stuff, Visualization, Web 2.0 | No Comments
It’s amazing what kind of great data visualizations you can create with IBM’s web statistics tool Many Eyes (I’ve used it before). The Many Eyes team has recently added a simple concordancing function so that you can see in what context a given word is used. People doing literary studies can do some interesting things with such a tool, as this word cloud from the ME site demonstrates.
While I was already at it, I decided to create a word cloud for HuffingtonPost.com using 2175 entries made in the last six months. You get a fairly clear idea of the topics that were central in that time by looking at the cloud. In case you were wondering - the terms appear so large because I used the top 50 words with their individual frequencies instead of a raw text.
Jul 13th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Conferences, Open Access Publishing, Web 2.0 | No Comments
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.
Jul 4th, 2007 | Linguistics, Other Stuff, Robert Scoble, Technology, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments
Robert Scoble likes Google better than Microsoft (but not much) - and I have proof for that. He also holds his wife Maryam dearer than his company PodTech, but sadly she is outranked by Twitter and Apple. Ah, cruel World 2.0 capitalism.
How do I know? Simple, I have a list of 1,587 posts with 273,994 running words of text that Mr. Scoble has produced between 2 Aug 2006 and 4 Jul 2007. That translates into 18,362 sentences. An average Scoble blog entry has a length of 172.6 words, with 14.9 words per sentence and an average word length of 3.8; all of which is fairly - deep breath - average for a blog.
All, except for the word count. It’s pretty impressive, especially when you consider that he’s been at it for almost 6 years (I believe he started in October 2001 - correct me if I’m wrong). That’s 69 months of blogging, which translates into an estimated staggering 1,65 million words. That would make him twice as productive as William Shakespeare, who (only) managed 884,647 words in his entire lifetime, though in all fairness it has to be noted that Mr. Scoble didn’t have to write all that with a quill pen.
And here are his favorite nouns, by frequency (the number after the word indicates how often in occurs).
1 Google 1015
2 blog 779
3 Microsoft 776
4 people 688
5 video 503
6 stuff 393
7 things 365
8 something 357
9 way 354
10 Web 343
11 lot 322
12 today 320
13 time 301
14 thing 290
15 link 280
16 Apple 267
17 week 259
18 Search 258
19 world 256
20 post 245
21 videos 229
22 bloggers 220
23 interview 217
24 Twitter 215
25 blogs 213
26 company 206
27 one 199
28 Maryam 199
29 update 197
30 day 195
31 fun 193
32 someone 192
33 news 190
34 team 185
35 companies 178
36 lots 177
37 iPhone 175
38 service 172
39 Steve 171
40 show 171
41 site 170
42 TechMeme 169
43 business 165
44 phone 160
45 Windows 159
46 conference 158
47 year 158
48 PodTech 153
49 minutes 153
50 developers 151
Jul 1st, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Blogosphere, Opinion, Other Stuff, Web 2.0 | 5 Comments
After reading a number of interesting comments in the course of the last few days, I thought it would make sense to follow up on danah boyd’s blog essay concerning socioeconomic status and social networking sites with a second post (read the first one here). As with my previous piece, I’m especially interested in the reception and in how boyd herself is reacting to the (shoddy) journalism of the BBC and others.
Last week, boyd posted this on the heels of her essay:
Dear esteemed members of the press,
I am in the field collecting data and then will be attending a conference. I am not able to respond right now. Do not call my house phone. Do not pester my department. And do *NOT* hound my subletter. All press inquiries should be sent to press [at] danah.org. When I can, I respond. When I can’t, I don’t. Do not use other email addresses - I check the press one from my phone and answer them in order when I have spare cycles. Other requests are typically ignored.
The BBC coverage of my blog essay is hugely problematic. If you want to discuss what I’ve written, please read the essay itself. This is not a formal report. This is a blog essay based on observations from the field. And this is not a 6-month study; it is a 4-year study with a tide shift that I’ve noticed in the last 6 months. Again, read the essay. At some point, I will turn this into a formal article, but this is not that. Cover it as you see fit, but do not call it a report.
Thank you,
THE MANAGEMENT
(emphasis mine)
From the viewpoint of anyone who has ever done genre studies, this is a pretty interesting text. Obviously the genre categories boyd uses - blog essay, formal report, study, formal article and report - are important. boyd essentially claims that the semantics of these terms place them in distinct distance from one another. In other words, the fact that a) her blog essay is in fact a blog essay (and not a report, study, article etc) and b) the knowledge of what a blog essay is should both have been available to the BBC’s reporters and their failure to use the correct terminology to describe her piece suggests incompetence or even a willful misrepresentation. They are calling it a study although it isn’t, because they don’t understand how ethnographic research works.
And of course this is perfectly true. All the labels used by the mass media to describe Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace are their invention -nowhere does boyd use the terms report or study.
Some of the comments I’ve read capture the problem quite well. Says Marianne Richmond:
I think perhaps that the fallout of Danah’s blog essay is a case study in new media participation and consumption in and of it self: Her observations were interpreted, misinterpreted and remixed within the context of academic research that is more typical of the author…even though the standards of academic research were specifically stated by the author as not applicable.
The last statement is actually incorrect. boyd made the explicit statement that the piece was not an academic article after the initial posting. This short paragraph originally preceded the text, followed by the essay proper.
I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been traipsing through the country talking to teens and I’ve been seeing this transition for the past 6-9 months but I’m having a hard time putting into words. Americans aren’t so good at talking about class and I’m definitely feeling that discomfort. It’s sticky, it’s uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don’t have the language for marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally descriptive, but in being so, it’s also hugely problematic. I don’t have the language to get at what I want to say, but I decided it needed to be said anyhow. I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I’m going to face the stickiness and see if I can get my thoughts across. Hopefully it works.
The paragraph following it - what could be called the ‘disclaimer for academic readers’ - was added retroactively:
For the academics reading this, I want to highlight that this is not an academic article. It is not trying to be. It is based on my observations in the field, but I’m not trying to situate or theorize what is going on. I’ve chosen terms meant to convey impressions, but I know that they are not precise uses of these terms. Hopefully, one day, I can get the words together to actually write an academic article about this topic, but I felt as though this is too important of an issue to sit on while I find the words. So I wrote it knowing that it would piss many off. The academic side of me feels extremely guilty about this; the activist side of me finds it too critical to go unacknowledged.
boyd also later edited the blog post announcing the piece. Sadly, I have no way of retrieving the original text to check what changes were made, but it seems she highlighted the word essay multiple times to emphasize the status of the publication as something other than an article/study/report etc. Of course, she also made no claim going into the other direction. When using a descriptive label for her piece, she consistently calls it a blog essay or essay. As I’ve noted before, the semantics of the compound term blog essay are bound to be unclear to her readers, as she is one of very few people who use this phrase at all.
That being said, I fully agree to Marianne’s observation. In the media ecosystem we live in today, an author constantly risks losing control of her text and it being recontextualized by others in meaning-changing ways that cannot be predicted. Such recontextualizations can be deliberately misleading or the result of a misunderstanding. It’s often a thin line.
In this vein, Elaine Young sides with boyd and notes the inaccurate reporting:
You go girl! Fancy that. Asking the media to READ something before they report on it. But … there is no guarantee that they will full comprehend what they are reading and there in lies the challenge in posting “information” that is somewhat controversial on the web in an open forum.
The way “information” is put in quotes here is interesting to me, as it seems also to point once more to the unclear status of the piece and a lack of clarity regarding boyd’s investigative methodology. Note that I’m not saying that her methodology is in any way unsound. It’s a perfectly well-established practice in a range of disciplines that produces highly valuable results. I am saying that Young’s way of phrasing it suggests that she is not clear about the kind of evidence that ethnographic methods produce (is it information or just “information”?).
This blog gives a very good summary of the sequence of events:
Berkeley PhD candidate Danah Boyd, has the web astir after she posted an informal essay on her blog about the class divisions associated with the popular social-networking sites Facebook and MySpace. Boyd, who is already among the most prominent of academics of the Internet’s social sphere, posted the essay on Sunday. On Monday morning, the BBC reported on Boyd’s “conclusions”, and by midday Monday, nearly 100,000 readers had flocked to Boyd’s original entry. Though many have written in support of the essay, others have taken major offense, calling the work “racist” and academically unsound. Boyd sees the negativity towards her essay as a product of its misrepresentation in the press–specifically in the BBC’s “hugely problematic” coverage of her essay–which she says referred to the essay as a final product of academic research, rather than the exploratory mid-process musing it was meant to be.
Kevin P comments over at Tuttle SVC:
I’m not sure. I can’t decide if we should blame danah for not being *more* clear it was not research or the media for not being *more* clear that it was not research.
Certainly she’s getting flamed, and boy is she getting known.
The topic is being discussed like crazy.
Blogs are confusing with standards and danah is firmly on the crack, but I think it’s put her out as a leader.
Would her problem have been solved if she had moderated comments like you do and just taken out the really nasty ones?
It’s interesting to conclude that the essay is “not research” (which is again not phrased that way by boyd). If it were not research, or based on research, the idea that there is a socioeconomic split between Facebook and MySpace users would merely be an opinion. Instead, it is supported by research data - just not by data of the right kind, in my view. Whereas a large volume of quantitative data could answer the question of the Facebook and MySpace user communities’ makeup with relative precision, the qualitative data that has been used cannot. That does not mean that the assumption isn’t true, it just means it can’t be validated.
This post also caught my attention:
Ms. boyd is a quite accomplished scholar of social systems and her thoughts tend to carry a fair amount of weight. She’s an acknowledged expert in a given field, yet as an academic, she has two different “modes” of presenting her thoughts. One is very formal, involving calculated and well researched statements reflecting research and study and highlighting correlation and conclusion. In other words, your typical research paper.
The other is the equivalent of sitting at a coffee shop for an hour.
The funny thing is that it’s often those latter statements that seem to have the highest likelihood of spreading like an Atlanta lawyer on a transcontinental flight.
Kent and i got into a quick discussion about this and i think he touched on something kinda key. He noted that it won’t be long before academics realize that they don’t necessarily need the structure and peer review that they previously always had. They can be more open and have greater impact without it. i disagreed, since i know that often that peer review system exists for a good reason and a lot of folks actually like it since it helps them refine and defend their assertions instead of just shouting them into the void.
Peer review is regarded by many as a guarantee of scientific integrity, yet to others it means elitism and expert-worship. I agree with the author though - without peer review, the scientific process can turn into a popularity contest. What can be proven often isn’t what’s generally believed, what is plausible or popular.
Ken Cousins of Augmentation is impressed by the potential of blogs as a publishing platform for academics:
Think about this - a grad student publishes preliminary fieldwork notes to the web, and within 24-48 hours has drawn the attention of a mid-sized city. Granted, danah is a rock star, and not all of the comments were appropriate or well-conceived. But I think most academics would consider their careers a success if they commanded an audience of such size over their entire careers.
Is danah a super-hub? Are the rest of us scattered throughout the long tail? Clearly, on both counts. But at the very least, this suggests an emerging mode for scholarship, a new means of engaging the broader community (both scholarly and pedestrian) in our work.
The awareness that you can communicate with an enormous number of readers almost effortlessly via your blog has still not reached the majority of academics, who are used to thinking in very tightly knit groups and don’t really consider the importance of addressing a wider audience. I’d be very surprised if the majority of researchers in the humanities and social sciences isn’t blogging 10 years from now. Why? Because I think these areas have suffered from a lack of knowledge about what they do and how, on the part of the majority of the population.
Finally, I want to quote a full post by Michael Clarke on the topic that I found very insightful.
The reaction to Danah’s essay in the newspapers suggests that mainstream media are still very fond of privileging expert, authoritative discourse - when it suits them (i.e. when it gives an opportunity to discuss/reinforce class divisions, say “Oooh, it’s bad this Noo Medjaa stuff, isn’t it?” and so on…). Three days previously, Weinberger and Keen were debating the “…value of authority in a connected world…” and it’s fascinating how much of the attention given to Danah’s post accrued from her status as an academic (and how much hatred that this seems to have generated on the comments on her most recent post).
This is in line with studies such as the Edelman Trust Barometer (see slide #22). Academics are still generally trusted as credible, though a democratization of trust is taking place (”someone like myself” is now considered the most trustworthy source of information in many areas).
One might argue that perceived “expertise” has always been related to demagoguery both benign and sinister (Gina Ford of Contented Little Baby, Scoble, Hitler, Alain de Botton, Ghandi…) - social media just democratises people’s access to becoming a demagogue (lowers the entry requirements).
I find that observation both keen and very amusing, though I don’t think Robert Scoble deserves being mentioned along with mass-murderous dictators.
Perhaps “experts” then, in a constructed sense, are still very much with us but social media renders them more open to challenge than ever before. The Danah cited in a slightly sloppy piece by the BBC is thoroughly mediated by their take on her work but it’s one click away from her blog. On her blog, she’s speaking for herself - and people can answer back.
No doubt the openness of the social media is a good thing, but the diversity of opinions and the lack of accountability also make it hard to figure out whom to believe. That isn’t a catastrophe, but the market for things which are simply untrue (but nicely serve to compound our stereotypes) is definitely there.
Any conclusions? Expertise is accountable on Web 2.0. And perhaps more useful as a result of this, as any socially mediated means of distribution makes the consumer of expertise equally accountable for the uses they put it to. Well, that’s my optimistic take on it, anyway…
Expertise is only truly accountable if you have it yourself. In other words, I have to be physicist to understand an advanced physics problem, social web or no social web. If I don’t, my only alternative is to trust someone who knows more about this stuff than I do. Believing what the majority finds plausible can be a dead end. That doesn’t mean that the social web is not a boon for academics, but since earning and keeping trust is vital to what we do, we should make sure we do our job well.
The initial lack of clarity regarding the genre-status of the piece is what caused all this fuss. While it would be nice if journalists and the general public knew more about different forms of academic writing, I believe that danah boyd intended the piece to be both more than just a blog entry and less than a real research paper - and therein lies the problem. I don’t think you can have it both ways and make it authoritative for those who believe and “just an essay” for those who don’t, which is what this looks like.
