And yet another "Alyssa reads a thing, here's sier notes." Yes, these are books I've been reading as I work on various chapters and papers and proposals as an academic person.
Citation for the book, as per usual.
Borgman, Christine L. Scholarship
in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet.
Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007.
And here's my notes!
In the first chapter, Borgman notes
that much of the content of the Internet is unverified/unverifiable
stuff like blogs and list serv discussions. As more and more
academics blog, I question both the unversified nature and the
unverifiable nature of these forms of media- blog posts with
references exist- I know because I write these.
“Students
acquire an insatiable appetite for digital publications, and then
find on graduatiion that they can barely sample them without
institutional affiliations” (3.) This is a huge, huge
problem for independent scholars, especially poor independent
scholars. And guess who's more likely to be an independent scholar
rather than have affiliations? Exactly the same people who face
barriers to participation in academia.
Nevertheless, making content that was created for one audience useful
for another is a complex problem. Each field has its own vocabulary,
data structures, and research practices. People ask questions in
different ways, starting with familiar terminology. (10.)
Basically
the quote I just copied in above. This is a big argument in favor of
the disciplinary versioning with discipline-nonspecific version
approach, though it also raises a question: what is the current
intended audience, and should that be the indended audience? In
conversations about disability, disabled people need to be part of
the main intended audience, not an add on.
“Journal
articles are more valuable if one can jump directly from the article
to those it cites and to later articles that cite the source article”
(10.) Oh hey, the Chinese journal system I used to download a ton of
papers when I was in Tianjin can do that. It was useful, except for
the part where a lot of papers didn't actually cite anyone...
Wissenschaften
is apparently a German word that covers sciences, social sciences,
and humanities. That is really cool.
Also, cyberwissenschaften
for the cyber kind. That's cool, but it's German and that means most
USAians won't really know or use it. Sads. Cyberscience:
Research in the Age of the Internet
by Nentwich apparently talks about this some. Woo linguistics but
sads because English.
I
think I need to find William Gibson's novel, Neuromancer.
“Notions of
scholarship, information, and infrastructure are deeply embedded in
technology, policy, and social arrangements” (33.)
“Underlying the
technical and policy developments are theories and philosophies about
what is socially acceptable and appropriate” (33.)
“Scholars in
the twenty-first century continue to use those channels [in person,
by phone, and by mail,] while also communicating via e-mail, blogs,
and chat” (47.) Ok so blogs are unverfied and unverifiable, but
also are a way scholars talk to each other? That makes SO MUCH SENSE.
Oh wait, no, it really doesn't.
Oh hey, problems
with peer review. Ibby talked about those some in the cognitive
accessibity and why we should share piece on the feminist wire, too.
Lets see what Borgman's got to say.
“Double-blind
reviewing is difficult to maintain, especially in online
environments, as authors can be identified by searching for similar
work on the topic of the paper.” (61.)
Cronin,
B.- interesting author. The Citation Process: The Role and
Significance of Citations in Scientific Communication (1984),
The Hand of Science: Academic Writing and Its Rewards,
(2005.)
Peer review is a
social process, with all the problems that can come from social
processes.
Open posting and
review of papers where anyone may comment brings up the question of
who is a peer. The system used to be pretty well closed, with authors
and reviewers being the same set of people. (I'm totally in favor of
questioning who is a peer, the current system is super elitist. Not
sure what Borgman thinks of blowing it open like this, I think she's
trying to sound unbiased here?)
“Reviewing
can be a conservative process that is more likely to reinforce the
norms of a field than to identify significant breakthroughs. Articles
that are ultimately highly cited often have difficulty getting
published.” (62.) She cites McCook 2006, Meadows 1998, Nature
2006, Shatz 2004, and Weller 2000, 2001 for this. So many citations,
here's the full ones below now.
McCook,
A. (2006). Is Peer Review Broken? Scientist
20 (2): 26.
Meadows,
A. J. (2001). Communicating Research.
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Shatz,
D. (2004). Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Weller,
A. C. (2000). Editorial peer review for electronic journals: Current
issues and emerging models. Journal of American Society for
Information Science and Technology
51 (14): 1328-1333.
Weller, A. C.
(2001). Peer Review: Its Strengths and Weaknesses. Medford, NJ:
Information Today.
“New
technologies did not result in shifting the balance among
stakeholders as radically or as rapidly as some had hoped, largely
because social practices are much more enduring than are technologies
(65.)
“In a print
world, most relationships are bibliographic references to other
documents or to data sources. In a digital world, these references
can be automated links that will take the reader directly to the
source document or even the cited passage within that document.”
(70.)
“With active
links, readers can follow a trail directly to sources and data, and
may be more likely to verify claims” (70.)
Information technologies now enable anyone to be a publisher, in the
generic sense that anything “made public” is published.
Nevertheless, the supposedly low barriers to entry in computer-based
publishing ignore the complex relationships between stakeholders.
“Self-publishing” is an oxymoron in the scholarly world. Authors
need peer-reviewers; publishers need authors, editors, and reviewers;
and libraries need content to collect, organize, make accessible, and
preserve. (76.)
Because academic
publishing doesn't do the whole self-publishing thing,
depending on others reviews before permitting publication, the
lowering of technical barriers to publishing is insufficient on its
own to make stakeholder voices be heard in academic conversations.
The lowered technical barriers to entry mean that a social change of
listening to stakeholders and inviting them into conversations are
easier to do from a logistics standpoint. That's it.
Changes in online
review led to asking “who is a peet?” “When considering the
legitimization of digital documents online, the question becomes,
“legitimate to whom?” (84.)
“Students,
practitioners, scholars with minimal access to the published
literature, and the general public usually are happy to read and cite
any free version of a document they can find online” (84.)
Posting documents
online was considered prior publication as far as journals were
concerned for a while. As more and more authors took advantage of the
interent to post working copies of papers on repositories and
personal websites, the policy changed, and such posting and
circulation became an informal communication which no longer
prevented journal publication. [Like Melanie Yergeau's blog post that
got expanded into an article on Disability Studies Quarterly!]
The ways that
people actually read (or decide whether or not to read)
scholarly publications aren't perfectly suited to print, with
skimming of titles, abstracts, and conclusions more common than
reading the entire article linearly. Similar jumping around sections
is common for books as well. Electronic publications could
take advantage of their increased flexibility, including the lack of
requirement for linearity, and design for these actual habits.
However, this doesn't usually happen. Online texts typically attempt
to be just as linear as print texts.
Scholarly information never will be completely translatable between
disciplines any more than languages ever will be perfectly
translatable. Some ideas within fields cannot be fully expressed in
the language of another field, just as some ideas in French or
Chinese cannot be fully expressed in English. We can improve the
transmission and translation of ideas through tools and practices,
however. (230.)
I think that also
ties in with the paradigm stuff that Nick Walker talks about in his
essay where he describes the neurodiversity paradigm. Ideas from
different paradigms don't really translate well to others, usually.
Sometimes a piece of data can be picked up from one and
re-interpreted in another, but it's a lot of work.
The lack of perfect translatability between academic fields is both a
strength and a weakness of information infrastructure. It is a
strength in that fields can express themselves in the full richness
of their own languages. It is a weakness in that rich internal
structures can create rigid boundaries between fields.
Interdisciplinary work depends on the ability to span those
boundaries. (231-232.)
Forfeiting the richness of local language is too high a price to pay
for interoperability. (232.)
These two bits
line up big time with the whole translation thing. Translators are
important, both across disciplines and between activists and
academics, and all kinds of cultural differences within and outside
academia.
And now I go
through the references section for stuff I'd read if time were
infinite. I probably won't read most of it, though, because time
isn't infinite.
Artandi, S.
(1973). Information concepts and their utility. Journal for the
American Society for Information Science 24 (4): 242-245.
Bailey, C.
(2005).
Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature
with e-Prints and Open Access Journals. Washington, D.C:
Association of Research Libraries.
<
http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/oab.pdf>
(URL is from 2006, might not still be working.)
Barnett, G. A.,
Fink, E.L., and Debus, M. B. (1989). A mathematical model of citation
age. Communication Research 16 (4): 510-531.
Crane, D. (1972).
Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific
Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Journal of Documentation- the
article cited is way
out of date now but the journal sounds cool.
Day,
R. E. (2001). The Modern Invention of Information:
Discourse, History, and Power.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dillon,
A. (1994). Designing Usable Electronic Text.
London: Taylor and Francis.
Duguid, P.
(2005). “The art of knowing”: Social and tacit dimensions of
knowledge and the limits of community of practice. Information
Society 21 (2): 109-118.
Gieryn, T. F.
(1999). Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hemlin, S. and
Rasmussen, S. B. (2006). The shift in academic quality control.
Science, Technology, and Human Values 31 (2): 173-198.
Hughes, T. P.
Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kling, R. (2004).
The Internet and Unrefereed Scholarly Publishing. In Annual Review
of Information Scheice and Technology, ed. B. Cronin, 38:
591-631. Medford, NJ: Information Today.
Knorr-Cetina, K.
(1999). Epistimic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge.
Camrbridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. We
Have Never Been Modern. Trans. C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Latour, B., and
Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory Life: The Construction of
Scientific Facts. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Tenopir, C., and
King, D. W. (2002). Reading behaviour and electronic journals.
Learned Publishing 15: 259-265.
Tenopir, C., and
King, D. W. (2004). Communication Patterns of Engineers.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
