Future of Entertainment

Blogs, Science and Peer Review

Here is a familiar commentator on scientific communications and scholarship, Andrew Odlyzko's, paper on scientific communications and the internet. In this one he talks about peer and non-peer review and new modes of communication. Lyn, I think we read this but I am blogging it to put in our shared "record".

http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/peer.review.txt

The articel is linked from another intersting post from John Udell's weblog. Here he mentions Paquet and his thoughts about blogging and scientific scholarship, listing the pros and cons. See the extended entry for the list of pros and cons or the url for teh whole post. He talks about con #6 (someone stealing your idea from a blog) in more depth.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/12/29.html

And finally, here is Udell's own report http://udell.roninhouse.com/GroupwareReport.html on web blogs, wikis and other grou software for scientific scholarship. I think we should integrate these kinds of analyses with our more ethnographically based examination.

Back in September, Sébastien Paquet wrote me a thoughtful email, which I cited with permission, on the subject of blogging and research culture. His assessment bears repeating:

Here are reasons why Sébastien thinks blogging and research culture should naturally go together:

Scholars value knowledge. They have a lot of it to manage and track.
A scholar's professional survival depends on name recognition. A K-log can help provide visibility and recognition.
Scholars are used to writing; most of them can write well.
Scholars are geographically disparate. They need to nurture relationships with people that they seldom meet in person.
Scholars need to interlink in a person-to-person fashion (see Interlinktual)
Scholars already rely heavily on interpersonal trust and direct communication to determine what new stuff is worth looking at. Such filtering is one of the central functions weblog communities excel at.
For many scholars, the best collaborations come about when they find someone who shares their values and goals (this is argued e.g. in section 3 of Phil Agre's excellent Networking on the Network). The personal output that is reflected in one's weblog makes it much easier to check for such a match than work that is published through other channels.
Scholars recognize the value of serendipity. Serendipity can come pretty quickly through weblogging; see Manufactured Serendipity.
Every scholar must strive to be a knowledge hub in his niche, and an expert in related areas. A K-log is a good medium for this, as it is a way of letting knowledge flow through you while adding your personal spin.
Scholars pride themselves on being independent thinkers. K-logs epitomize independent thought.
Here are reasons why Sébastien thinks blogging has failed to become a research nexus:

It takes time.
"The technology is not well-established and tested at this point."
Many people don't like being among the first ones doing something.
Not all scholars are used to the Web and hypertext.
Shyness and fear of public mistakes. Many scholars won't write unless they have to. They may especially be reluctant to publicly expose ideas that they haven't tested.
Fear that someone else will pick up their ideas and work them out before they do.

Posted by at June 11, 2003 05:13 PM