On a fairly unrelated note: if you work with texts from a digital humanities perspective, you should definitely give Wordle a try. It is a simple tool (or toy) for making word clouds, but I find it quite useful.

Here’s a wordle for recent posts from this blog:

And here is another for my delicious bookmarks. Can you tell I work too much?

The ability to add publications is in itself a nice perk and it could make academia.edu a huge repository over time, provided that enough people use it. Exciting stuff.

Edit: I already anticipate people asking me whether I’ve lived under a rock for the past months (which I have in a sense, considering PhD work). From the stats page it looks like academia.edu has been around for a bit…

Edit 2: As Lambert Heller points out the service has probably not grown organically, but is likely to be the result of harvesting existing social networks. Still, the Google rankings of the profile pages on academia.edu alone are impressive.

I wonder how this ties in with things such as identification services (see the discussion here) and (as mentioned above) repositories. I think an SN for academics has the potential to get all of these things taken care of in a single go. Our mistake to date has been to think that researchers are interested in ID services or repositories in their own right, but I’m not really convinced that they are. A social network-style index where I can browse institutions, departments, research areas and colleagues, all aggregated in one place – that is something that has intrinsic value to academics. And technologists, librarians and administrators could sneak in features like ID services, optimal archiving and indexing of papers etc that are important on the larger scale of things, but that researchers don’t generally pay a lot of attention to.

“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.

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.

* 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.