Science Library Pad

ResearchBlogging.org

http://researchblogging.org/ is an aggregator that picks up posts (from registered blogs) that have BPR3 tagging to indicate it is a post about peer-reviewed research

via Bora

I think this is a great step in promoting peer-reviewed research on the web.

Previously:
August 09, 2007  the peer review logo

meta: 1000+ subscribers

I suspect a lot of this is due to GPS, digital photo and cellphone technology readers.
For those readers, you should know that all new reviews are on my new site, Richard's Tech Reviews.
(There is a lot of cross-linking to Science Library Pad, since I didn't want to move my legacy reviews.)

The list of all reviews includes both new Tech Reviews postings and older Library Pad postings.

As indicated in a previous posting, this blog, Science Library Pad, will maintain a focus now on library-related technologies and ideas.  If you do want to see some of the older GPS-related postings, they were all gathered in the Mapping category.

Clear as mud?

1000 readers is sort of the point where the number becomes so big I can't quite comprehend it.
André asked me if I felt obligated now to produce content for my readership, but my answer is that I try to maintain the same criteria for postings that I had originally, which is basically "interesting technology that may impact libraries, and rants about how libraries use technology".  In a way, being in that many feed readers actually reduces posting urgency, because you know that even if you go on hiatus, your posts will still show up in some readers after you return.

A more compelling is question is whether I feel obligated to create content solely to get the attention of Google's crawler and maintain PageRank... the answer there is a bit more complicated.  While I feel that "if you write good content, they will come", the impact of Google correctly crawling, indexing, and returning blog results is literally a factor of 10 in incoming traffic.  So I have to admit I do try to post in a Google-friendly manner (e.g. choice of post titles), and I get very annoyed when Google does a bad crawl (as it did from mid-December to mid-January for Tech Reviews, crippling my results).

Thanks again to everyone for reading.  I have a new e-science posting coming up next week...

edit Science 2.0 at Scientific American

Widely reported, but anyway

Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in "networked journalism," in which readers—you—get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.

The article, below, is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it's my feature story on "Science 2.0," which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it. Your inputs will influence the article’s content, reporting, perhaps even its point of view.

So consider yourself invited. Please share your thoughts about the promise and peril of Science 2.0

You can add your thoughts at: Scientific American - Edit This - Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? - January 9, 2008

It has some interesting discussion on the reputation issue

"The peer-reviewed paper is the cornerstone of jobs and promotion," says PLoS ONE's Surridge. "Scientists don't blog because they get no credit."

The credit-assignment problem is one of the biggest barriers to the widespread adoption of blogging or any other aspect of Science 2.0, agrees Timo Hannay, head of Web publishing at the Nature Publishing Group in London. (That group's parent company, Macmillan, also owns Scientific American.) Once again, however, the technology itself may help. "Nobody believes that a scientist's only contribution is from the papers he or she publishes," Hannay says. "People understand that a good scientist also gives talks at conferences, shares ideas, takes a leadership role in the community. It's just that publications were always the one thing you could measure. Now, however, as more of this informal communication goes on line, that will get easier to measure too."

The acceptance of any such measure would require a big change in the culture of academic science. But for Science 2.0 advocates, the real significance of Web technologies is their potential to move researchers away from an obsessive focus on priority and publication, toward the kind of openness and community that were supposed to be the hallmark of science in the first place. ...

Meanwhile, Hannay has been taking the Nature group into the Web 2.0 world aggressively. "Our real mission isn't to publish journals, but to facilitate scientific communication," he says. ...

Indeed, says Bora Zivkovic, a circadian rhythm expert who writes at Blog Around the Clock, and who is the Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE, the various experiments in Science 2.0 are now proliferating so rapidly that it is almost impossible to keep track of them. "It's a Darwinian process," he says. "About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread."

Here's what I left as a comment:

As I wrote in a recent blog posting, in the online world one has to think about both reputation and attention.  In the traditional print journal world, the only way to get attention was by first gaining reputation through publication.  In the online world, I would argue particularly for young scientists, the amount of attention they can get (from search hits, incoming links, and others reading their blog postings and wiki entries) can be invaluable in finding collaborators, and in building an "online reputation".  This means there is a challenging balancing act between waiting to gain reputation through traditional journal articles, versus taking a risk and being more open, and gaining both attention and reputation through the digital medium.  In my experience (as a non-scientist), the opportunities opened up by blogging have been much greater than I could ever have imagined, and the responses are more rapid and more numerous than I get when I publish in a journal.

in which I launch a new blog

Although I have been justifying my reviews of GPS devices and other such things as analogous to the Internet Librarian gadgets presentations, I can't quite justify stretching this blog to include fun technical topics like say, using WDS to create a wireless bridge using an Airport Express and a DGL-4300, so to celebrate the third anniversary of Science Library Pad I am hereby launching an additional blog

Richard's Tech Reviews

It will be mainly about the types of gadgets you may already have seen in this blog, presented as technically and comprehensively as I can muster the energy for.  It's a completely separate blog with a separate feed.  All gadget reviews and highly technical networking stuff will now be there.  Science Library Pad will continue to be about academic library future topics, as filtered through the lens of technology and my particular interests in SOA and e-Science.

Enjoy!  You can never have too many blogs or feeds in your reader, right?

blogiversary year 3

Just three years since I started this blog to hold presentation notes from Internet Librarian 2004.
I continue to be amazed at the connections and opportunities it has opened up.

As always, these numbers and graphics may demonstrate that my blog is either much bigger or much smaller than you thought, anyway, they're mostly for my own amusement.

Feed Stats

Feed readership growth has been steady, I was hoping to get to 1000 (as measured by FeedBurner) but I didn't quite make it, I hit 956.  That compares with about 575 last year.  (I might have done a bit more analysis but FeedBurner was having a rare meltdown as I was trying to write this.)  Part of that jump though, visible in February 2007, was just Google turning on the reporting of stats for Google Reader and other Google properties.  The various valleys and dips this year are FeedBurner temporarily losing connection with one of its feed stats sources.

Web Stats

The direct hits on my site (as seen by StatCounter) are steady to declining.  However the stats are a bit bogus in terms of library technology anyway, as many of the hits are for my GPS and other technology reviews (about which, more to come).

Technorati provides some vague measure of incoming links as "authority" a count of the number of different blogs that have linked to one's blog in the last six months as Technorati Authority, mine is currently 96, for whatever that's worth (major blogs have authorities in the thousands, in case you're wondering).

By far the most popular content as measured by feed item views was Sci Foo.  The all-time winner continues to be my controversial posting on the future of the research library.  For "clicks back to the site" Medicine 2.0 looks like the tops on a quick scan, but I only have click data starting from mid-2007 when Google bought FeedBurner and made FeedBurner Pro free.

Google Analytics has changed its map views, here are country-level and city-level views of my web hits (and no, I don't know why they made the thin strand of islands that curve off of Alaska look like a giant prong)

I am up to 1857 posts, 542 comments and 106 trackbacks (a few of the latter two groups are undeleted spam, but most are not).

Previously:
November 19, 2006  meta: 2 years of Science Library Pad
December 22, 2005  year-end wrapup
October 24, 2005  to every season turn turn - one year of scilib blogging

posting TypePad entries to Facebook

This was always possible by importing posts as notes, or by Share on Facebook, but now with Facebook Beacon it's err... I dunno, now with more cowbell.

TypePad Support - Automatically Sharing New Posts on Facebook

I guess it's nice to have everything in one place, but on the other hand, surely most of your friends who are interested will be subscribing to your RSS feed anyway.  I suppose it might be good for highlighting particular posts.  In any case, I'm still waiting for Facebook Cliques or Friend Groups or whatever it's going to be called, so I can share stuff in Facebook without worlds colliding.

That being said, APIs that let us connect stuff to other stuff are always good.

The Wrath of the Professional: more anti-Internet nonsense

There is a line of argument popular in the mainstream media, most notably captured in Keen's The Cult of the Amateur.  Another example was the nonsense in Maclean's cover "The Internet Sucks".

It goes something like this: "writers are trained professionals supported by editors", which is true, and then makes a leap to "therefore anyone who is NOT a professional and NOT supported by editors must be writing utter shite".

Yes, thank goodness for all that quality editing, that has produced well-crafted sentences of total untruth over the past years and decades.

Let me see if I can somehow craft a readable sentence even though I am bereft of an entire supporting organisation: a lot of what we get in the mainstream media is lazy, me-too, "consensus storytelling", factless junk.

I can't remember, are we still spending "blood and treasure" to clean up "pockets of resistance" or have we moved on to some other well-worn consensus story?

Remember, you must never break the narrative.  You can never write about how Google is amazing, or Wikipedia is incredibly useful, or shopping online saves time while providing vastly more information than is available in the store.

Which brings me back to the current threadbare tale of how all amateur content is junk, and it's all lonely people in their basements writing about their cats and collections of Star Wars action figures.

Of course most of the net is junk.  So is most TV, most movies, most music, most newspaper articles and most books.  But usually people don't decide to dismiss the medium entirely (although I do know people who watch little or no television).  Christie Blatchford, however, feels no such compunctions of reasonable balance, issuing a blanket dismissal:

Now, people merrily post their diaries online and call them blogs. The writing hasn't noticeably improved.

... most blogs: They are the writer's unedited, uncensored, unexpurgated thoughts.

...

So I do not read blogs, and if the day comes that, after I write for the newspaper, I am asked to write a blog for the online edition, I will take up surgery instead, or law, or social work. You know, without any training or practice at all.

   In a related vein, I do not have any Facebook friends. I do not respond to invitations to be anyone's Facebook friend.

...

   I am no one's beloved. I have no Facebook friends. I want no Facebook friends. I have no online community. I do not blog, I have not blogged, I will not blog and, furthermore, I do not care to read blogs.

Yeah, you tell it sister.  I read a book once that wasn't good.  So I guess I will stop reading books.  Oh and I saw a TV show that sucked, so I no more television for me.  Oh, and this one time, I read an article in the newspaper that was generic, lazy nonsense...

Globe and Mail - Dogs among blogs - Christie Blatchford - October 13, 2007 - behind a paywall, but available via rbcinvest.globeandmail.com

$10k US blogging scholarship

• U.S. citizen or permanent resident;
• Currently attending  full-time in post-secondary education in the United States
• 20 Finalists Announced and Public Voting Begins: 9am EST on Oct. 8th [2007]
• Public Voting Ends and Winner Declared: Midnight PST on Oct. 28th [2007]

from College Scholarships.org - The Blogging Scholarship

Phil Bradley is Typepad featured blogger

Internet Consultant Phil Bradley runs his UK-based blog around topics such as web design, search engines, and "anything that will interest librarians".

TypePad Featured Blogs: Phil Bradley

Check out http://philbradley.typepad.com/

Blog for OECD Participative Web goes live

The blog supporting the OECD Participative Web Forum has gone live.  RSS feed, comments, the usual.

I welcome your feedback; its primary purpose is as a channel for you to interact with the event and the participants there, as well as OECD policymakers, so the more comments or questions you post there the better.

Also feel free to promote it on any relevant web sites, blogs or listservs; I know you all collectively know far more venues and people who might be interested in it than I can possibly imagine.  (Plus which I refuse to use listservs :)

Kieren McCarthy and I will be liveblogging the event in Ottawa this Wednesday, October 3, 2007, starting at 9 AM or thereabouts, and finishing around 6 PM (or whenever our fingers give out).  It will also be webcast live so you may catch a glimpse of me (probably with my hair sticking out at some odd angle, if past experience is any guide).

The tag is oecdwebforum2007, but Technorati doesn't seem to be picking up the blog yet (also as usual).

It's a bit of an experiment for the OECD, opening up in this way, so as I said in the blog itself, please be gentle.

Previously:
September 13, 2007  provide your input to OECD participative web conference

provide your input to OECD participative web conference

There will be an event "OECD-Canada Technology Foresight Forum on the Participative Web: Strategies and Policies for the Future" on October 3, 2007 in Ottawa, Canada, so in slightly under three weeks from now.  You still have time to submit your comments as well as to suggest blog links and feeds

---> Participate online <---

There will be 2 official event bloggers who will blog about the event during the meeting. One will be a representative from civil society (ICANN) and one will be from Canada.

Err, the latter would be me.  I think the blogging will be on an official OECD site rather than here.

UPDATE 2007-09-30: The blog has gone live. ENDUPDATE

The event will be webcast live as well as archived with transcripts.

There are already some videos submitted by participants, rather confusingly listed under "podcasts", which they are not.

There is an E-Science session in the programme (PDF)

Session 2 STREAM B
Research 2.0: e-Science and new ways of interaction in the science community
Chair: Walter Stewart, Walter Stewart & Associates Inc.
- Andrew Herbert, Managing Director, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
- Bill St. Arnaud, Senior Director Advanced Networks, CANARIE Inc.
- Daniel Atkins, Director, Office of Cyberinfrastructure, National Science Foundation
- Ulf Dahlsten, Director for "Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures", Information Society and Media Directorate-General, European Commission

Check out

http://www.oecd.org/futureinternet/participativeweb

for more information.

I also created an Upcoming event and Google calendar entry and am suggesting the tag oecdwebforum2007

Bill St. Arnaud also provided a pointer a while back to the OECD report on this topic

OECD, 12-April-2007, Working Party on the Information Economy - PARTICIPATIVE WEB: USER-CREATED CONTENT (PDF, 888KB)

UPDATE 2007-09-14: I have made a Google Earth KMZ for the conference venue and hotels where the organisers have arranged room availability.  You can also view it in Google Maps.  I have indicated the location of Canada's Parliament as well.  It may be the only Parliament in the world where you can sometimes see people playing frisbee on the front lawn.  Note: Don't confuse the Government Conference Centre venue (the old Ottawa Union Station) with the Ottawa Congress Centre, located a block away.  Also note in some cases Google is not showing proper street names for downtown Ottawa at the moment.

Download OECD-ParticipativeWebForum.kmz

View Larger Map

my top blogs as measured by Bloglines saved items

I was reading the "top three" discussion, I'm not sure how I would pick mine, but I saw this comment

6. Emily C Says:
   September 7th, 2007 at 2:28 pm

   So I picked the three library blogs that had the most saved entries in my aggregator right now. Seemed like a good criteria.

I'm not sure exactly what this measures, since it depends on how long the blog has been in my aggregator, how often they post, and many other factors, but for what it's worth, in no particular order, here are my 5

panlibus (69)
Stephen's Lighthouse (62)
LibrarianInBlack (92)
The Ten Thousand Year Blog (51)
Open Access News (154)

Blogging 101

This post lists a few basics about blogging (and feeds) and the tools that I use, it also serves as an example of why I blog: sure I could send this as an email, or bookmark links for my own use, but if I'm going to that effort, I might as well just share it with everyone.

Peter Murray-Rust showing his blog

John Santini had the perhaps-misfortune of asking Peter Murray-Rust and I about both the reasons for and the mechanics of blogging, we proceeded to outgeek one another with dueling laptops showing the following:

www.typepad.com is what I use for a blogging platform, you have to pay but that does have the benefit of separating your site out from the unfortunate profusion of spam blogs on

www.blogger.com Google's free blogging platform

To prevent the flood of spam comments that inevitably flow to all blogs, Peter has a filtering system plus moderation, and I use TypePad's CAPTCHA system and moderation.  It's unfortunately not possible to filter trackbacks in this way, although you can moderate them.

To track get a full picture of your visitors, you need to track both web hits and (RSS) feed hits.  I use StatCounter for my web hits, plus both Peter and I use FeedBurner (now owned by Google) to track our feed hits.  Google Analytics is another web hit tracking option, but it's more for high-volume sites.  All these tracking tools are free.

You can also track references to your blog through Technorati and other blog/feed search tools, e.g. here are links to Peter's blog:

http://www.technorati.com/blogs/wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?reactions

Peter uses Feed Reader to read RSS feeds, I use Bloglines (you can see what I read at http://www.bloglines.com/public/rakerman ).

In terms of reasons and other meta-blogging areas, I blog mainly to have online searchable notes of stuff that I am sure to forget, and also to connect into the library technology community, which I entered only a few years ago.  If making connections like that is important to you, make sure to be generous with your outbound links.

John asked about how much of your identity you have to reveal online, you have every choice ranging from fully anonymous to complete disclosure.  Depending on your topic, revealing at least your work title may help to establish your position in the community for people who are reading yoru blog.

That's about it, it's quite easy to start blogging and through the magic of linking and Google, if you write it, they will come.

Peter has blogged some of his thoughts on the topic in scifoo: blogsession.

the peer review logo

In the session "Reinventing scientific publication (Web 2.0, 3.0, and their impact on science)" led by James Hendler at SciFoo, one of the items was an idea from Geoffrey Bilder, for publishers to provide a "peer review logo" that could be attached to (at this point I am interpreting based on my own understanding) e.g. blog postings, some sort of idea of a digital signature to indicate peer reviewed content.  (I know the list well since I'm afraid my major contribution to the evening, despite having thought about this topic a lot, was transcribing the list).

2) ID, logoing, review status tag, trust mechanisms
- other peer review status

I wonder if we should make a wiki where we list all of the grand (and not so grand) challenges of web science communication and discovery, and then people can pick off projects.  The SciFoo prototypes list is one angle on this.  Of course, in the perpetual-beta web world, it's probably faster to just create a wiki, than to try to start a discussion about whether one should be created.  It's in that "just do it" spirit that I'm pleased to find there is already a peer review logo initiative in the works, although the angle is to indicate that you're writing about a reviewed work, not that your work itself has been reviewed.  From Planet SciFoo:

Cognitive Daily - A better way for bloggers to identify peer-reviewed research, by Dave Munger

[we] have decided to work together to develop such an icon, along with a web site where we can link to bloggers who've pledged to use it following the guidelines we develop

via Bora Zivkovic, via Peter Murray-Rust

(it's strange and also good to be blogging now about people that I've finally met)

UPDATE: I do have a vague idea in a similar space, which would be a "repeatability counter".

As I have learned more about peer review, I have understood that it has many aspects, but preventing fraud is not one of them.  Peer review can help to create a paper that is well-written and has "reasonable" science, but it can't stop a determined fraudster.  (This isn't my insight, but comes from a presentation I saw by Andrew Adrian Mulligan of Elsevier - "Perceptions and Misperceptions - Attitudes to Peer Review".)  What does address fraud, and keep science progressing, is falsifiability: someone else does the experiment and sees if they get the same results.  Now I realise there are many different classes of results, but it's interesting that many of these are not publishable, and are maybe not captured in the current system:

• We tried to repeat the experiment, but it failed because we didn't have enough information on the protocol
• We tried to repeat the experiment, but it failed and we think the paper is in error
• We successfully repeated the experiment
• (probably more scenarios I haven't considered)

So I think it would be interesting to have a sort of "results linking service" where you would click and you would get links to all the people who had tried to reproduce the results, and indications of whether or not they succeeded.  We use citation count as a sort of proxy for this, but it's imperfect, not least of which because there is no semantic tagging of the citation so you don't know if it was cited for being correct or incorrect.  I think this kind of experiment linking might add a lot of value to Open Notebook Science and to protocols reporting (whether in the literature like Nature Protocols, or in a web system like myExperiment).  Otherwise I worry that the amount of raw information from a lab notebook makes it hard to extract a lot of value from it.

UPDATE: Christina in the comments rightly chides me on my loose use of "falsifiability".  Basically I'm trying to get at two aspects of testability: 1) is there enough information in the paper to test the author's claims?  2) What are the results of such a test?

citizen science blog

A blog about various citizen science projects

http://www.citizensci.com/

the Nature of rain and fire in the 21st century

July 22 2007: The town of Tewkesbury surrounded by floodwaters
Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Above image from Guardian Unlimited - Severe flooding.

Another view of this iconic image was also on the front page of the Globe and Mail yesterday, above the story Human activity altering rainfall patterns

"It's the first time that we've detected in precipitation data a clear imprint of human influence on the climate system," Francis Zwiers, one of the lead authors of the study and director of the climate research division at Environment Canada, said in an interview Monday.

"Temperature changes we can cope with. But water changes are much more difficult to cope with. That will have economic impacts, and impacts on food production, and could ultimately displace populations."

The study, to appear Thursday in the science journal Nature, comes as record rainfalls wreak havoc in Britain and force thousands from their homes.

Nature has a news item Rainfall changes linked to human activity ( doi:10.1038/news070723-4 ).

The article itself is Detection of human influence on twentieth-century precipitation trends ( doi:10.1038/nature06025 ).

We used monthly precipitation observations over global land areas from the most recent version of the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN)21 to analyse precipitation trends in two twentieth-century periods (1925–1999 and 1950–1999), during which observational data are considered to be sufficient to describe global-scale land precipitation change. This data set has been carefully quality controlled.

You can follow more of the discussion in the Nature climate change blog, Climate Feedback.

Twitterblogging

I've installed the new Twitter widget.

But it seems to me it kind of misses the point.  Most people never see my blog page, they only see my feed.
Adding a new content stream should offer the option to merge it into your RSS feed, not just display it on your page; there is no indication that the new Twitter widget does this.

the International Internet

Say what you will about the web, but there is no possibility whatsoever that I would have reached this audience without it.

From my FeedBurner stats this morning.

blogs, wikis and libraries, oh my

LITA BIGWIG (Blogs, Wikis, and Social Software IG) is pleased to present the first ever online, unconference at ALA Annual 2007. The Social Software Showcase will be occuring around and during Annual. We have gathered eleven librarians and leaders in the field to present on cutting edge technology and social software. Regardless of where you are in the world, you will have the opportunity to view and discuss the presentations on the official Social Software Showcase Wiki.

...

We will have a Twitter feed

http://www.twitter.com/bigwig

More great work by libraries adopting and promoting new web technologies - I have to say I'm impressed by the speed at which things are moving.

from LITA Blog - Social Software Showcase, sponsored by BIGWIG

The presentations aren't up yet, but they will be by the time ALA gets underway at the end of June.

meta: stats roundup

I kind of take the various web stats I monitor for granted.  While I've no million-hit-monthly blog, I'm always surprised to get many hits at all, considering I write about quite obscure library technology topics.  Since Brian Kelly is on the topic of measuring blog status, here are a few thoughts.

As you can see above, Typepad has a new statistics display, which includes the ability to download your stats for all time and chart them in the app of your choice.

This is a handy feature in terms of getting the full picture of the blog.  I actually use mainly Statcounter and (Google) FeedBurner to monitor my blog, FeedBurner in particular is essential if you have a lot of people reading your site using RSS, I have about three times as many RSS readers daily as direct web hits.

Statcounter is only useful though if you're getting a few hundred hits a day, if you're getting thousands or more, Google Analytics will give a better overview.

At this point one really, really has to hope that Google isn't evil.  (Note: they have tools beyond FeedBurner and Analytics to track user behavior, including the Toolbar, stats from ad impressions, and tracking your searches whenever you're logged into any of your Google accounts.)

I think direct hits plus feed hits give a pretty good idea of your blog's impact.  If you want to supplement that, the main other thing would be to do some searches on your name and your blog's title, to see if people have mentioned your blog without linking to it.

There's also a concept of audience impact.  If there are only 100 other people in the world working in your area of interest, and your blog is reaching 80 of them, maybe 80 hits per day from a particular set of domains indicates success.

the Google Mashup Editor

Everybody's gone mashin', mashin's A-OK.

On the heels of Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly, comes Google's Mashup Editor, complete with a blog and a site to host your creations

The Google Mashup Editor's simple online interface enables you to build, test, deploy and distribute your mashup.Using familiar technologies like HTML, JavaScript and CSS, you can create mashups in minutes and test them in our sandbox, a testing ground for your mashup.

You can also take advantage of a few of our extended XML tags so that you can reuse some standard AJAX UI components -- things like editable lists, Google Maps, Date Pickers, Calendars, and ratings controls -- with one line of code. These UI elements operate on feeds and can be reused in any application

Once you've created your mashup, you can publish it using Google's infrastructure and we'll serve it for you on the subdomain googlemashups.com. You don't need to set up a server and hosting, or a database or authentication for your users -- we do it all for you. You concentrate on the user experience of your app, and we'll make sure people can access it. You can even test a new version of your application while the current one is running. Once you're ready, you can publish it with one click of a button to get your site up and live.

via Mashups made easy
via ResourceShelf

Note: it's currently in limited release, you'll have to sign up on a waiting list.

Previously:
March 2, 2007  mashup platforms and SOA

cyberinfrastructure for the humanities

In Data Mining, Collaboration, and Institutional Infrastructure for Transforming Research and Teaching in the Human Sciences and Beyond, Cathy Davidson discusses many aspects of how cyberinfrastructure can and is transforming teaching and research

That brings me to another point, which may appear tangential but which is at the heart of the matter. New ways of thinking need support. If, at present, academic rewards go to the author of a monograph, especially one that posits a different analytical or interpretive hypothesis, for Human Sciences 2.0 we need to think of ways to reward teams of scholars working cross-culturally on collaborative projects. Collaborative work should count, and here humanists can use models that scientists have developed for determining credit in co-authored projects with multiple investigators.

...

We also need to rethink paper as the gold standard of the humanities. If scholarship is better presented in an interactive 3-D data base, why does the scholar need to translate that work to a printed page in order for it to “count” towards tenure and promotion? It makes no sense at all if our academic infrastructures are so rigid that they require a “dumbing down” of our research in order for it to be visible enough for tenure and promotion committees.

CTWatch Quarterly, Volume 3, Number 2, May 2007.

As a side note, the Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch) blog relaunched on May 25, 2007.

Previously:
March 25, 2005  Cyberinfrastructure Tech Watch Blog operational

meta: in which I make a claim

Just a posting to try yet again to claim the 2nd URL that Technorati sees for my blog

Technorati Profile

In other news, Technorati now presents a single search box, to search for tags specifically you'll have to go to advanced search.

UPDATE: It's working for both TypePad blog URLs now.  An interesting reminder about basing any decisions on a particular Technorati ranking result.

Science Library Pad      

Rank: 74,734 (84 links from 63 sites)

• URL: http://scilib.typepad.com/science_librar...

Science Library Pad

Rank: 56,727 (174 links from 82 sites)

• URL: http://scilib.typepad.com

Previously:
July 6, 2006  Technorati rank, updating, and multiple blog URLs

IASSIST and open data

Reminder: there are notes from the recent IASSIST conference "Building Global Knowledge Communities with Open Data", as well as other thoughts on that topic, in the IASSIST blog

http://iassistblog.org/

via Open Access News

Previously:
November 14, 2006  IASSIST open data blog and conference

politics-free science blogging?

At Allen Press I mentioned that most of the "science" blogs I found spent their time on (mostly American) politicized science sideshows (creationism, global warming denial, etc.)

By contrast, it appears that

http://www.scientificblogging.com/

is trying to keep the focus on just the science.