The article was publicized with a tweet asking “Why haven’t #wikis revolutionized scholarship?”

Of course, I’d rather ask “how have wikis impacted scholarship?” — though that’s less sexy! First, the largest impact is in technological infrastructure: it’s now commonplace to use collaborative, networked tools with built-in version control. (Though “wiki” isn’t what we’d use to describe Google Docs nor Etherpad or its many clones). Second, wikis are ubiquitous in research, if you look in the right places. (nLab, OpenWetWare, and numerous departmental wikis). Third, “revolutions” take time, and academia is essentially conservative and slow-moving. For instance, ejournals (~15 years old and counting) are only just starting to depart significantly from the paper form (with multimedia inclusions, storage of data and other, public comments, overlay  journals, post-publication peer-review, etc). Wikis have been used for teaching since roughly 2002², meaning that academic wikis might be only about 8 years old at this point.

Other responses: Viva la wiki, says Brian Lamb, who was also interviewed for the article. Daniel Mietchen thinks big about the future of wikis for science.

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1. I used to be AcaWiki’s Community Liaison and now contribute summaries and help administer the wiki.
2. see e.g. Bergin, J. (2002). Teaching on the wiki web. In Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (pp. 195-195). Aarhus, Denmark: ACM. doi:10.1145/544414.544473 and related source code

What’s the key aspect of the book?

1. the cognitive experience
2. information storage and retrieval enabled (e.g. book features such as ToC & indexes within a book itself; reproducibility of ‘exact’ copies, wider distribution and ownership of books, ability to have multiple books on the shelf, etc.)?

That arises from Steven Berlin Johnson:

[W]as the intellectual revolution post-Gutenberg driven by the mental experience of long-form reading? Or was it driven by the ability to share information asynchronously, and transmit that information easily around the globe? I think it is a mix of the two, but Nick, taking his cues from McLuhan, places almost all of his emphasis on the cognitive effects of deep focus reading. There’s no real way to prove it, but I think there’s a very strong case to be made that the information storage-and-retrieval advances made possible by the book were more important to the Enlightenment and the modern age than the contemplative mode of the literary mind. And if that’s true, then the Web should be seen as a continuation of the Gutenberg galaxy, not a betrayal of it.”

from a post where Steven Berlin Johnson summarizes his own New York Times essay Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social responding to Nick Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. I assume Carr’s current position to be well-represented by his 2008 article in The Altantic, Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Monday, Liza Daly shared an epub demo which pulls in the reader’s location, and makes decisions about the character’s actions based on movement. Think of it as a choose-your-own-adventure novel crossed with a geo-aware travel guide. It’s a brief proof-of-concept, and the most exciting part is that the code is free for the taking under the very permissive (GPL + commercial-compatible) MIT License. Thanks, Liza and Threepress for lowering barriers to experimentation with ebooks!

‘Locative hypertexts’ also bring to mind GPS-based guidebooks as envisioned in the 2007 Editus video ‘Possible ou probable…?’¹:

Tim McCormick summarizes:

In the 9-minute video, we get mouth-watering, partly tongue-in-cheek scenes of continental Europe’s quality-of-life — fantastic trains & pedestrian streetscapes,independent bookstores, delicious food, world-class museums, weekend getaway to Bruges, etc.– as the movie follows a couple through a riotous few days of E-book high living.

On their fabulously svelte, Kindle 2-like devices, they

• read and purchase novels
• enjoy reading on the beach
• get multimedia museum guides
• navigate foreign cities with ease
• stay in multimedia contact with friends and family
• collaborate with colleagues on shared virtual desktops while at sidewalk cafes
• see many hi-resolution Breughel paintings online and off that I’m dying to see myself

etc.

Multimedia guidebooks² are approaching this vision. Combine them with (also-existing) turn-by-turn directions, and connectivity and privacy will be the largest remaining obstacles.

So then what about location-based storytelling? I got to thinking about the iPhone apps I’ve already encountered, which are intended for use in particular places:

• Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill – a murder mystery/travel series based in Boston (available as an iPhone app and podcast).
• Museum of the Phantom City: Other Futures – a multimedia map/alternate history of NYC architecture, described as a way to “see the city that could have been”. It maps never-built structures envisioned by Buckminster Fuller, Gaudi, and others – ideally while you’re “standing on the projects’ intended sites”.
• Museum of London: Streetmuseum, true history of London in photos, meant for use on the streets
• Historic Earth, has historical maps which could be interesting settings for historical locative storytelling

1. Editus’ copy of the video
2. e.g. the Lonely Planet city guide series for iPhone

I was happy to browse the proceedings while lounging. The papers I mark show up in my personal schedule and in a reading list.

I think it’s an attractive alternative to making a paper list by hand, using some conferences’ clunky online scheduling tool, or circling events in large conference handouts. If you keep an iPhone/iPod in your pocket, the app could be used during the conference, but I might also want to print out my sessions on an index card. So exporting the list would be a good enhancement: in addition to printing, I’d like to send the list of readings directly to Zotero (or another bibliographic manager).

The advance program embedded on the conference website still has some advantages: it’s easier to find out more about session types (e.g. alt.chi). Courses and workshops stand out online, too.

Wayfinding is hard in on-screen PDFs, so I hope that in the long run scholarly proceedings become more screen-friendly. While at present I find an iPhone appealing for reading fiction, on-screen scholarly reading is harder: for one thing, it’s not linear.

I’d like to see integrated, reader-friendly environments for conference proceedings, with full-text papers. I envision moving seamlessly between the proceedings and an offline reading environment. Publishers can already support offline reading on a wide variety of smartphones: the HTML5-based Ibis Reader uses ePub, a standard based on xHTML and CSS. There’s no getting around the download step, but an integrated environment can be “download first, choose later”. I’ve never had much luck with CD-ROM and USB-based conference proceedings, except in pulling off 2-3 PDFs of papers to read later.

When we spotted something interesting, we recorded it in a highly structured way that could be accurately and quickly communicated over a two-way radio, to be transcribed by specialists at our border camp and relayed to intelligence analysts in Brussells.

The story, says Conover, is only one aspect of reporting. The other part? Gathering structured metadata, which could be stored in a database—or expressed as linked data.¹

Newspapers already have classification systems and professional taxonomists. The New York Times’ classifications system, in use since 1851, now aggregates stories from the archives in Times Topics, a website and API.²

What if, in addition to these classifications, each story had even more structured metadata?
Capturing metadata ranges from automatic to manual. Some automatic capture is already standard (timestamps) or could be (saving GPS coordinates from a photo or storing timestamps), and some information needing manual capture (like the number of alarms of a fire) is already reported.

Dan compares the “old way” with his “new way”:

The old way:

Dan the reporter covers a house fire in 2005. He gives the street address, the date and time, who was victimized, who put it out, how extensive the fire was and what investigators think might have caused it. He files the story, sits with an editor as it’s reviewed, then goes home. Later, he takes a phone call from another editor. This editor wants to know the value of the property damaged in the fire, but nobody has done that estimate yet, so the editor adds a statement to that effect. The story is published and stored in an electronic archive, where it is searchable by keyword.

The new way:

Dan the reporter covers a house fire in 2010. In addition to a street address, he records a six-digit grid coordinate that isn’t intended for publication. His word-processing program captures the date and time he writes in his story and converts it to a Zulu time signature, which is also appended to the file.

As he records the names of the victimized and the departments involved in putting out the fire, he highlights each first reference for computer comparison. If the proper name he highlights has never been mentioned by the organization, Dan’s newswriting word processor prompts him to compare the subject to a list of near-matches and either associate the name with an existing digital file or approve the creation of a new one.

When Dan codes the story subject as “fire,” his word processor gives him a new series of fields to complete. How many alarms? Official cause? Forest fire (y/n)? Official damage estimate? Addresses of other properties damaged by the fire? And so on. Every answer he can’t provide is coded “Pending.”

Later, Dan sits with an editor as his story is reviewed, but a second editor decides not to call him at home because he sees the answer to the damage-estimate question in the file’s metadata. The story is published and archived electronically, along with extensive metadata that now exists in a relational database. New information (the name of victims, for instance) automatically generates new files, which are retained by the news organization’s database but not published.

And those information fields Dan coded as “Pending?” Dan and his editors will be prompted to provide that structured information later — and the prompting will continue until the data set is completed.

- Dan Conover in The “Lack of Vision” thing? Well, here’s a hopeful vision for you

And that data set? It might even be saleable, even though each individual story had perhaps been given away for free. Dan highlights some possibilities, and entire industries have grown around repackaging free and non-free data (e.g. U.S. Census data, phone book data). I think of mashups such as Everyblock and hyperlocal news sites like outside.in.

1. Some news organizations, like the New York Times (see Linked Open Data) and the BBC (overview, tech blog) are already embracing linked data.
2. I delved into Times Topics’ taxonomy and vocabulary in an earlier post.

‘Conversations’ is deliberately plural, I think, to evoke the many conversations, invisible to one another: “The comments, ratings, and annotations increasingly happen at the aggregator and are invisible to the original source.”

Using Salmon, an aggregator pushes comments back to a “Salmon endpoint” (via POST). These can be published (or moderated) upstream at the original source. See also the summary of the Salmon protocol.

Comments swimming upstream…

Fragmentation of conversation.

Disconnects between older and newer generations of social media

Lack of control of identity, contacts, and data.

A better social Web on mobile devices.

Poor integration between social media and location services.

Difficulty of coherently engaging in social activity across many channels.

Coping with and getting value from the expanding information volume of social media.

from “The social Web in 2010: The emerging standards and technologies to watch” encountered via Ed H. Chi’s post at the PARC Augmented Social Cognition blog.

The trends? Openness, portability, aggregation of distributed content. Hopefully we’ll see more on all these fronts in 2010 and beyond. Hinchcliffe also suggests that we want “Better social and location capabilities added to the core of mobile devices.”

See the full post at ZDNet for more discussion and references to a number of standards, formats, and related developments. In the next post, I’ll highlight Salmon, a protocol for distributed commenting, which I’d neither encountered nor heard of.

Tweetie

Jill Gengler: I love being able to save someone’s bacon.

Tom Coates: The great slab of fatty pork that I presume to call a brain is almost totally recumbent this morning. Come on piggy! Do some thinking!

We’re making progress at archiving individual streams, I think. But the overall conversation, “what was I seeing then”, and the links between things? Needs work, at least chez moi!

Updated 2010-04-14 to fix typos. :)

MediaCommons has just announced funding from the NEH to create “digital portfolios”:
“Given this proliferation, what we need as scholars may be less a system that will manage our communication for us than a system that will allow us to manage our communication, a system than recognizes that the key aspect of scholarly communication into the future may be less the distribution of the products of our research than the management of the social networks through which our research is distributed.” [emphasis mine] MediaCommons as Digital Scholarly Network: Unveiling the Profile System. Via @kfitz.

So scholars don’t have to roll their own,¹ or depend on dubiously-funded startups.²

While the announcement implies “less is more”, Kathleen’s sample profile strikes me as a lifestream. Streams themselves are more “more” than “less”. (‘Firehose’ comes to mind.) So streams alone aren’t going to solve scholarly communication. But streams can be sliced and diced any number of ways. First the data. Then, if there’s interest, maybe some services.

1. Personally I’m all for rolling your own. At least in theory. The first lifestream I ever noticed was code4lib’ber Mark Matienzo’s self-hosted planet , which aggregates his blog posts (both personal and work), tweets, youtube uploads, delicious bookmarks, and last.fm scrobbles. Brilliant, but thus far I’ve been too shy & lazy to follow suit.
2. FriendFeed popularized lifestreams. When Facebook bought FriendFeed back in August, my networks of librarians and scientists had several discussions of alternatives for scientists and other scholars.

If Google Books is successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to obtain permissions.

-Sergey Brin, New York Times, A Library To Last Forever

Brin is wrong: the proposed Google Books settlement will not smooth the way for other digitization projects. It creates a red carpet for Google while leaving everyone else at risk of copyright infringement.

The safe harbor provisions apply only to Google. Anyone else who wants to use one of these books would face the draconian penalties of statutory copyright infringement if it turned out the book was actually still copyrighted. Even with all this effort, one will not be able to say with certainty that a book is in the public domain. To do that would require a legislative change – and not a negotiated settlement.

– Peter Hirtle, LibraryLawBlog: The Google Book Settlement and the Public Domain.

Monopoly is not the only risk. Others include³ reader privacy, access to culture, suitability for bulk and some research users (metadata, etc.). Too bad Brin isn’t acknowledging that!

Don’t know what all the fuss is with Google Books and the proposed settlement? Wired has a good outline from April.

1. “Several European nations, including France and Germany, have expressed concern that the proposed settlement gives Google a monopoly in content. Since the settlement was the result of a class action against Google, it applies only to Google. Other companies would not be free to digitise books under the same terms.” (bolding mine) – Nigel Kendall, Times (UK) Online, Google Book Search: why it matters
2. “Google’s five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project.” (bolding mine) – Geoffrey Nunberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars (pardon the paywall)
3. Of course there are lots of benefits, too!