Christina's LIS Rant

This is the third in a series of test essays I'm doing to prepare for my comprehensive exams.  The questions for these essays come from 3 places: ones I've made up based on my readings, ones assigned to previous doctoral students, and ones my advisor makes up based on my readings.  I'm assuming the advisor ones will be closest, but I don't want to knock them all out in a row - it almost seems like a waste when part of this is getting the timing right, practicing writing, and test-taking.  

Rules of the road are as follows: closed book, closed internet, all you have is the question, a computer with a word processing software, pen and paper.  You have two hours alone in a little room.   In this case, I set my timer for 2 hours, but I had to move around the house because one neighbor started mowing his lawn and someone else was using a chain saw, I also had to ignore the phone ringing and a cat trying to climb onto my keyboard - which, incidentally, I'm currently fighting, too - back, Diana, back. It's amazingly difficult to have 2 hours uninterrupted in my house so after a few more of these, I'll get a study room at the local public library or I'll go to my office in College Park.

This question came from my advisor, and it's for a minor-area, Computer Supported Communication (which is a melange of CMC, CSCW, social software, online communities, etc).  The essay is copied below, with a few very minor edits: main > maintain, a couple of typos, and additions between [ ]. In the cases of the additions, I started a sentence and never finished it.  Oops!  The citations are not complete - they are just as I remembered them. I ran out of time for this essay, so I didn't actually get to revise and edit.  The typical practice is to spend 20 minutes taking notes and organizing your thoughts, 80 writing, and 20 revising.

Test essay 3, DS’s CSC 1
Wikis, Blogs and Microblogs are playing an increasing role in scientific communication. Define each of these technologies and discuss: (i) the benefits, and (ii) the threats that they bring for scientific discourse.

0. Introduction
Social computing technologies (SCT) such as wikis, blogs, and microblogs are being used by many scientists for scientific communication. This essay discusses how these SCTs are used and how their use benefits scientific discourse as well as how their use might post a threat to scientific discourse. The essay starts by defining and reviewing the literature on scientific communication. The essay continues by defining wikis, blogs, and microblogs and providing examples of how they are used in scientific communication. The essay ends by discussing the benefits and threats these SCT pose to scientific communication.

1. Scientific Communication
Before discussing the role of SCTs in and their impact on scientific communication, it is important to review the literature on scientific communication and to establish the state of scientific communication prior to the introduction or widespread adoption of SCTs. Scientific communication is a broad concept that encompasses both public communication of science and scholarly communication.

Public communication is communication about scientific topics with people outside of the particular research community. This may be done by professional science communicators such as lab public relations staff members, teachers, and outreach educators or by scientists. The intended audiences may be groups of scientists who are not in the immediate research area (see Kyvik and Weigold), policymakers, or adults or children of varying interest levels in and education in science.

Scholarly communication in science takes place between scientists. It includes the communication within collaborations for the purposes of completing the scientific work, as well as reporting completed work outside of the collaboration. For reporting the scientific work, the standard model is the Garvey in Griffith model. This model divides scholarly communication into informal and formal. Traditionally the first reports of completed work were given to symposia, colloquia, and conferences and these were called informal scholarly communication. Informal scholarly communication also includes hallway discussions at conferences. The features that identify informal scholarly communication include that it is not archived, it is not accessible to a larger group, and it may be of work that is not complete.

The gold standard for formal scholarly communication is the peer-reviewed journal article, but it also includes some peer-reviewed conference papers as well as monographs and textbooks. Formal communication is archived, and findable. It is written for a broader audience and provides fewer details of how the work was completed.

2. Definitions
This section defines each of the SCTs, discusses the general literature on how they are used, and provides examples of how they are used in scientific communication.

2.1 Wikis
The original conceptions of the web envision it as being a “read/write” medium in which everyone could participate and communicate. Most web sites were developed to be read-only, like electronic versions of newspapers. Ward Cunningham created wikis to be a web site in which visitors could edit the content of the site itself, not just leave comments. Wikis are defined as websites where “anyone” can edit the content. In practice, there are usually registration requirements and some wiki pages are locked from editing, but there are still some common features. First, the pages can be edited without having access to the server and generally without knowing html or complex coding languages. Second, wikis maintain a history of edits with time and date stamps and a record of which user made the edit. Wiki pages can typically be rolled back to previous versions using this history. Third, there may be discussion pages around the page that is being edited for authors to develop their ideas and to discuss what should go on the main page.

Most of the research done on how people contribute to wikis has been done on Wikipedia which is by far the most famous wiki. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that covers all areas of knowledge, in many languages. Forte and Bruckman (sp?) and others have discussed the formation of norms in the editing of Wikipedia, the evolution of roles, and the cycle of credit (Latour and Woolgar). Wikipedia has evolved like many open source software projects. Participants start by being just readers or users of the system, but gradually start making edits, then creating new pages, and finally by discussing policies. The Wikipedia community has developed clear policies on things like discussing living persons, reporting original work, and citing references. Individual contributions to articles are not credited, however, new participants get credit by participating in discussion pages that go with the page being edited and by listing the edits they have made on their user page.

The two most prominent uses of wikis by scientists are Jean-Claude Bradley’s Open Notebook Science (ONS) and Open Wetware, but scientists also contribute to the chemistry pages and other science pages on Wikipedia and similar collaboratively edited encyclopedia-type sites. ONS is a broader concept than just a wiki, but wiki software performs an important function. In both of these cases wiki software is used as a laboratory notebook. The lab notebooks are publicly available, and time-date stamped. In Bradley’s case, he can comment on his students’ work and also verify that they completed their work by the deadline. Wikis are also used because they can link to other work easily, can include multimedia such as pictures of the lab set-up and videos of procedures, and can easily be shared in real-time.

Wikis as lab notebooks are scholarly communication, but many scientists, particularly chemists, put a great deal of effort into editing science pages on Wikipedia. This is a form of public communication.

2.2 Blogs
Blogs are generally defined by their format – they are reverse chronologically arranged collections of discrete posts (Mortensen and _, 2002). Each post is a self-contained unit, that has a time-date stamp, a fixed URL, is signed (for blogs with more than one writer), and usually allows comments. Posts might also be assigned keyword categories to enable retrieval by general subject. Blogs often provide RSS feeds so that readers can be notified when new content is available and can reuse or redisplay content in a personal information management tool called a feed aggregator.

Community forms in blogs by linking and commenting. Unlike wikis, where anonymous contributions are merged into a central web page, blog posts are authored by a single person, but comments can be made at the post. Depending on the community, there may be a rich interchange of comments on each other’s posts, or few to no comments. Another form of community is through linking within posts to other blogs – commenting on posts on your own blog instead of the blog in which the post originally appears. Likewise, there are “social aggregators” like FriendFeed in which communities comment on blog posts, social bookmarks, shared photographs, and other RSS feeds, and not at the content source itself.

Many scientists maintain blogs and read other scientists’ blogs. In my qualitative study of how chemists and physicists use blogs, a few of the scientists reported that their originally intention when they started their blog was to communicate with the public either to report and explain their work or to explain scientific concepts in a clear way. Sessions at Science Blogging conferences have dealt with how scientist bloggers can make their content more useful and usable to science educators at the k-12 level. However, in practice the participants in my study found that their audience consisted primarily of other scientists and well-educated, highly interested members of the public and not necessarily the audience they intended.

Other scientists use their blogs to keep track of ideas that are too small or not well-enough developed for journal articles. They also use their blogs in lieu of letters to the editor to respond to articles in the journal literature.

A very successful recent use of a blog was a project led by Tim Gowers to experiment with “massively collaborative” mathematics. His proposal was that mathematicians are often stopped when working out proofs by needing to take side trips to solve problems that are not central to their proof and that may require two weeks’ worth of research to overcome. Other mathematicians may be able to quickly resolve these problems but there is no easy way to just get that bit of help so mathematicians go and learn this sub area before continuing. He posted a proof to his blog and over the course of six weeks, mathematicians from all over the globe contributed comments, brainstormed ideas, and helped solve the proof. The work has resulted in papers posted to ArXiv and submitted to journals.

2.3 Microblogs
Microblogs are the newest of the three types of SCT included in this essay. The primary example of this is Twitter. Twitter allows users to input 140 characters and this can be shared by following other users or by subscribing to the RSS feed either in a general aggregator or in a “social aggregator” such as FriendFeed. Twitter asks the question “what are you doing now?” but many users do not answer that question, but instead use the 140 characters to capture conference talks, comment on readings, to announce new blog posts, and to share content with other users. Over time, new [ways of using twitter] have been added including re-tweeting information – re-posting someone’s tweet, tweeting “at” someone (@username) to have a conversation, marking posts with hashtags (#subject) to allow conference posts or subject posts to be retrieved together, appending geographic positions to tweets to allow local search, and appending pictures to posts. Lots of scientists use twitter, but I know of no formal published study describing how they do so. Computer and information scientists whom I follow frequently tweet conference sessions. Other scientists point to their blog posts, comment on news stories and noteworthy events, and point to interesting new scientific articles.

3. Benefits
Scientists use of these SCTs provide many benefits to their work and to science in general.

3.1 Immediacy
First, letters to the editor and discussion papers might not appear in journals for months to years after the original article appeared. Commenting on a journal article in a blog or microblog can be done when the article first appears as a pre-print on the author’s page or in an institutional or disciplinary repository (like ArXiv). This rapid turnaround time enables faster growth of scientific knowledge while at the same time performing a filtering function. Scientists can be made aware of interesting new work through tweets and blog posts, and can make decisions to read or not to read based on recommendations from their trusted friends.

3.2 Expertise Location
Posting on a blog or being recognized as a valued contributor on a wiki makes a scientist’s work findable in a web search. Searching the scholarly literature or attending conferences are typical ways to find potential collaborators, but [using a few co-authored articles is not as informative as seeing that scientist’s work progress].

3.3 Findability/Archiving
As discussed by Bohlin and Borgman, a feature of informal scholarly communication was that it was to a limited audience, was not archived, and could not be retrieved. However, blog posts and wiki posts are easily findable with many web tools. Additionally, blog posts are archived and wiki pages are archived and are available long after they were written. This a great benefit to forming collaborations, and to finding expertise as mentioned above.

3.4 Collaboration
There are many papers describing how co-authoring is done (see for example Noel). Some ways include dividing up the task and each author working on a section independently or passing the document around for each author to add to the various sections. Wikis enable greater collaboration and easier co-authorship of scholarly articles. Contributors can edit at the same time and form a cohesive document. Edits are saved, time stamped, and are attributable to their author.

3.5 Personal Information Management (PIM)
In my study, the scientists reported that it was much better to take notes on their blog, because that information could be found using a standard web search whereas LaTeX files on their desktop and print files could not be found. We know from the PIM literature that people retrieve personal information by date or time either by associating the contents creation or saving with a date or event or in sequence with other activities. Blogs, tweets, and friendfeed all arrange content in reverse chronological order. In particular, blogs archive posts by date, allowing for the easy retrieval of old posts by month or year.

4. Threats
There are benefits to scientists’ use of SCTs but there are also threats. Many of these come from the fact that they are new and not integrated into the scholarly system.

4.1 Promotion, Tenure, Credit, and Attribution
First, as described in Polanyi, Price, and elsewhere, citations are the currency of science. That is, promotion, tenure, grants, and other benefits accrue to scientists based on their publications, the venues in which the publications appeared, and the citations their publications received. Contributions to wikis or blogs are not credited in promotion decisions, either when done as service by communicating with the public, or when done as scholarly communication. Several famous scholarly bloggers have not gotten tenure, and the case has been made that their blogs were at fault. New ways of providing credit for other forms of scholarly communication are required.

4.2 Authority
In information literacy training, there are usually heuristics to judge the authority of a piece of information. Blogs, in particular pseudonymous blogs written by women scientists, would probably fail many of these steps. Scientists assess the authority of scientific work by looking at the content – the citations, the method, the discussion – but also by looking at the author (their previous work, their institution), and the reputation of the publication venue. In blogs, the authority is built over time. Likewise, there may be pseudoscience or denialists who edit wiki pages, mock up blogs, or comment on blogs to further their political aims, but do not further science or indeed, take scientists’ attention from doing new science, to argue about autism, climate change, or evolution.

4.3 Intellectual Property
By posting work in progress on a blog, the scientist is making it impossible to patent, which may conflict with his organization’s goals. There is also the concern that information posted can be “stolen” and the author can be scooped by another author who then gets the credit.

5. Conclusion
This essay briefly described scientific communication, defined several types of SCTs, provided examples of how these SCTs are used by scientists, and then discussed the benefits and the threats. Communication is central to science, and these SCTs by democratizing and facilitating communication on the web, greatly increase the immediacy, findability, and usability of scientific information. However, until the promotion and intellectual property systems catch up, this scientific communication cannot reach its potential. Furthermore, information literacy teaching must advance to enable potential users of this information to better gage its value for it to have the greatest benefit.
[yeah, so now I see all these links to papers on microblogging, thanks... :) oh, and no I guess I never talked about benefits/threats for public communication]