The Social Semantic Web – a message for scholarly publishers

November 15th, 2010
by jodi

I always appreciate how Geoffrey Bilder can manage to talk about the Social Semantic Web and the early modern print in (nearly) the same breath. See for yourself in the presentation he gave to scholarly publishers at the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors last month.

Geoff’s presentation is outlined, to a large extent, in an interview Geoff gave 18 months ago (search “key messages” to find the good bits). I hope to blog further about these, because Geoff has so many good things to say, which deserve unpacking!

Social Media and Scholarly Communication

View more presentations from CrossRef.

I especially love the timeline from slide 159, which shows that we’re just past the incunabula age of the Internet:

The Early Modern Internet

We're still in the Early Modern era of the Internet. Compare to the history of print.

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Posted in future of publishing, information ecosystem, PhD diary, scholarly communication, semantic web, social semantic web, social web | Comments (3)

  • Marijane White says:
    November 15, 2010 at 12:31 am

    The fact that the distance between salient events on the Internet timeline suggests the progress of the Internet is moving faster than the progress of print.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Accelerating_Returns

  • Geoffrey Bilder says:
    November 22, 2010 at 9:34 am

    Marijane,

    This is almost everybody’s first reaction to the timeline.

    However, I actually use the timeline to point out (amongst other things) that “incunabula” (early printed works made to look like manuscripts) just about disappeared by 1501, but that we are *still* creating digital incunabula (digital publications made to look like print) in the form of PDFs. So in this respect, at least, we are progressing a bit slower than our 16th/17th century counterparts.

    I should also note that I suspect that our ability to pick the “salient events” on the internet timeline is somewhat hampered by our proximity to said events. As such, my list of events is somewhat arbitrary and probably shows a level of “progress” that future historians will scoff at.

  • jodischneider.com/blog » Supporting Reading says:
    January 21, 2011 at 5:47 pm

    […] me down this path, and to Geoffrey Bilder who presented these ideas in a way I couldn’t help thinking about and remixing. Cathy Marshall’s clear exposition, in Reading and Writing the Electronic Book […]