The Scholarly Kitchen

This has been one of the most unsettling and inspiring years in memory, with the economic meltdown balanced out by the amazing outcome of the US Presidential election.

To wish you well through the end of the year and into 2009, please find a montage of inspiring speeches and outtakes from famous movies as assembled by Matthew Belinkie. Enjoy!

We’ll be back in 2009 for more recipes and serving suggestions from the Scholarly Kitchen.

I was listening to a recent edition of the Backstory podcast, and a comment about the history of financial crises made me think about the current economic crisis and the travails and possible demise of newspapers. In the 1800s and nearly until 2000, newspapers were the main way that people communicated current and changing data effectively. Lists of commodities prices, sports scores and standings, stock prices, movie times, weather forecasts — they all made the newspaper a daily necessity.

Then, data picked up and moved online. Weather forecasts? Online. Stock prices? Online. Movie times? Online. Sports scores? iPhone.

So now newspapers are beginning to plan for less-than-daily publication in order to cut costs and endure a little longer. But the die is cast, and not just because the newspapers have lost the “news” part of their image, by and large. It’s also because they lost daily relevance when they stopped being the quickest way to access dynamic data.

To me, this is a hidden source of disruption for newspapers. Once they lost the daily reason for delivery and consumption — a habit largely supported by data tables — their fates were sealed.

What hidden, indispensable dimension of scholarly publishing could be disrupted? I think it’s reputation. When it becomes equally reputable or even more reputable to be published online as it is to be published in print, watch out!

Author/entertainer Bill Dyszel has written and performed a tribute to folded magazines called “Morbid Major Magazine Song,” which chronicles the many magazines that have fallen by the wayside in recent years. It was written in October, so others like Financial Week and Radar are not included.

Is the emergence of YouTube changing us from a textual culture to a visual culture? If so, what might it portend for scholarship? A number of observations indicate that we need to think about this.

Alex Iskold of ReadWriteWeb recently reported on a session at the November Web 2.0 conference. After some interviews and additional observations, he concludes that YouTube is becoming the next Google.

Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley pointed out at the same conference that YouTube is now the #2 search engine in the world.

Iskold writes:

Because video was not possible before, the web was dominated by text. Now that video cameras and broadband are cheap, information that is better served by video is getting converted. As a result, YouTube is now the second largest search engine, and traffic is through the roof.

YouTube is gaining on Google’s traffic for search (luckily for Google, it owns YouTube).

Michael Bhaskar from thedigitalist.net wonders about the possibility of a video generation, and what this might mean for literacy, capacity for critical thinking, mental efficiency, and culture overall. Referring to Maryanne Wolf’s excellent “Proust & the Squid,” he worries:

. . . we are evolving out of a text based culture. Sure there will always be a place for the economy and density of text. This place could get ever smaller though. The early days of the internet might come to be viewed as a golden age for text, a time when web sites and blogs poured forth a profusion of words such as the world had never seen, a textual Eden before the video Fall.

Even Bhaskar feels this is a little too dramatic. What Iskold observes is, I think, the truth — what is best shown can now be shown. The efficiency and mental habits of words, language, and reading will continue to have a place. What the shifting of that place into a new — even subordinate — role might mean for mental acuity and scholarship remains to be seen.

Since Albrecht Durer and his contemporaries, we’ve been supplementing a broadly textual culture with images. Then those images were given the illusion of motion. Now, these moving images can network.

Will this change the way we think? Will this change cultures?

Yes, but if history is any guide, more information — even visual information — will, on balance, be better. Scholars can use the new medium to teach, to show, and to communicate. That’s why networked video is so popular already. It helps.

Academics are praised for their accomplishments, awards, and foremost for their productivity as authors.  Some of the most productive researchers are authors on hundreds of papers.

At first blush, one wonders how this is possible.  Then you realize that the researcher may not have written the paper or even conducted the experiment.

Like high-energy physics, author lists in biomedical research have gotten long.  This is partly due to very large experiments.  In 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine published a cardiac intervention study that was run in 15 countries, 1081 hospitals, and involved over 40,000 patients.  The authorship on this paper was so long it was given to a group who called themselves “The GUSTO Investigators.”  In the appendix are the names of the 972 authors of this paper.

This paper was satirized with an Ig Nobel Prize in Literature that year.   To the audience, the journal editor declared jokingly that “each author was responsible for exactly two words.”  These physicians were not given authorship credit because they drafted or edited the article — they were rewarded with authorship because they were able to recruit patients into the study.

Editors of biomedical journals are keenly aware of the problems long author lists can make.  It is easy to distribute credit when work is highly praised, but difficult to assign blame when a study is found to be invalid, or worse, based on fabricated data.

Unlike high-energy physics, where authors are listed in alphabetical order, authorship order in the biomedical field conveys some meaning.  The last author is typically the senior author, the one who is supposed to have overseen the research.  In the case of the stem-cell controversy involving the South Korean researcher, Woo Suk Hwang, it was an American physiologist, Gerald P. Schatten who was listed as last author.

If all he did was to write the paper, he should not have been named an author [1]

The University of Pittsburgh investigation report notes, “the discrepancy lies in the subtlety of interpreting the word ‘write’” (p.6).  While Schatten claimed to have written the paper, he did not generate the data, figures, or tables in the paper, which is often considered a strict requirement for authorship in the biomedical sciences.

Drummond Rennie has argued for some time that we should abandon the notion of author in favor of contributors and guarantors.  Many top journals now require a short list of who did what and who takes full responsibility for the paper.  Even more, some journals require signed statements from all authors attesting to what they are responsible for in the manuscript.

This has removed some ambiguity from authorship but it has also replaced trust in science with a formal legal system.

Notes:

[1] Guterman, Lila. “A Silent Scientist under Fire.” Chronicle of Higher Education 52, no. 22 (2006): A15. (subscription required)

As we explored in last week’s post, author lists in high-energy physics have become fantastically long.  From the late 1600s to the 1920s, sole authorship was the unwritten rule, and the one-paper : one-author model worked well for attributing credit and responsibility.  Since then, multi-authored papers have been on the rise in all fields, with the exception of the humanities, where sole authorship is still the norm.

The rise of authorship has been attributed to Big Science, scientific experiments that require collaboration and specialization of many individuals.  Yet Robert Boyle’s experiments with the air pump in 17th century England required scores of individuals to build and operate equipment as well as to support the infrastructure that allowed Boyle to do his science.  The only difference is that all of these individuals remained invisible to the record of science.

Only part of the rise in authorship is the result of Big Science.  Part of the rise may be due to formally acknowledging those who would have remained invisible in the past.  Another part may be attributing credit to those whose contribution may be symbolic, such as giving honorary authorship to the head of a department.

Authorship in science wasn’t always clearly defined.  In the 17th century, science was the pastime of gentlemen-scholars who operated in a culture where virtue meant presenting oneself as a humble and selfless public benefactor [1].  On the other hand, plagiarism was common practice, and it was impossible to guard against intellectual theft when one did not assert oneself as the rightful author and owner.  Henry Oldenburg, the first editor of the Transactions of the Royal Society, was instructed by Robert Boyle to begin dating when his letters were received because Boyle feared intellectual theft.

Robert Boyle, however, did not work alone.  Some of Boyle’s equipment was designed and built by Robert Hooke, who was never acknowledged in Boyle’s manuscripts.  Similarly, Boyle employed many technicians who were responsible for running the experiments, and who remain essentially invisible to the record of science [2].  Denis Papin, a skilled technician employed by Boyle, not only designed and built apparatus and performed experiments, but even wrote up the results for which Boyle claims sole authorship.

Denying authorship to Papin would seem morally wrong by today’s standards, but in the culture and values of 17th century England, we should view the relationship between Boyle and Papin as master-servant.

Servants might make machines work, but they might not make knowledge.[3]

When we think of an author, we often consider the inscriber of words, and yet author is more historically linked to the concept of authority, such as the one who authorizes or instigates, or the person on whose authority a statement is made.[4]  Robert Boyle was considered the author of his experiments because he possessed the authority to make these knowledge claims.

Science has ceased being the providence of gentlemen-scholars and is now the domain of professional scientists, graduate students and technicians, all of whom depend on being acknowledged for their work.

The invisible are now being recognized.

Notes:

[1] Shapin, S. A social history of truth : civility and science in seventeenth-century England. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p.184
[2] Shapin, S. 1989. The Invisible Technician. American Scientist 77: 554-563.
[3] Ibid, p.562
[4] “Author”, from The Oxford English Dictionary.

Image via Wikipedia

As you begin to wrap gifts this holiday season, you will be peeling plenty of tape. You may also be exposing yourself to a lot of x-rays, as scientists recently demonstrated in an article in Nature.

The video of their experiments is well worth watching. It’s a bit long, but it never becomes uninteresting. It’s especially spooky when they use the x-rays from adhesive tape peeling to take x-rays of their fingers. The crackling Geiger counter isn’t too reassuring, either.

The scientists aren’t peeling the tape at excessive speeds. In fact, a harried gift-wrapper probably moves tape more rapidly, generating even more x-rays.

The microscopic view of tape adhesion is startling.

Fortunately, to get the full effect, the tape has to be peeled in a vacuum. This fact alone likely mitigates the real-world effect, meaning it’s still safe to wrap your presents using good old-fashioned adhesive tape, as long as you don’t do it in a depressurized chamber (which would kill you anyhow).

That said, perhaps this portends a new way of peeking inside presents . . . using the tape itself to thwart the wrapper!

In a New York Times Magazine feature every editor, writer, and publisher should read, Virginia Heffernan writes about “Content and Its Discontent.” Her observations are lucid and thought-provoking. She takes head-on the issue of migrating old-style content into new distribution and presentation media:

We have to develop content that metamorphoses in sync with new ways of experiencing it, disseminating it and monetizing it. This argument concedes that it’s not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms. All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries — music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows — are designed for a world that no longer exists. They fail to address existing desires, while conscientiously responding to desires people no longer have.

The past is rapidly receding as a vestige of the technologies we used to rely upon. Now, new technologies have overthrown them, or are in the process of insurrection.

Content has to change. It is morphing in function, which means it must morph in form. Modern content is geo-aware, identity-aware, and network-aware. It is brief, smart, crisp. It gets shipped around, linked to, and is rapidly supplanted by new information.

Given the power of information tools, content is no longer king. In fact, it now vies with applications, tools, and technologies to find relevance. And when the governance of content is of, by, and for the people, something truly revolutionary has happened.

(A nod to Stewart Wills’ excellent Twitter feed, featured as Side Dishes on this blog.)

Amazon continues to come up with surprising things, lining up its initiatives in intriguing ways.

In 2005, their Mechanical Turk initiative began, but its exact application was unclear. Sure, it let people do work for Amazon for micro-payments, but often the workload exceeded the reward by quite a factor. Still, 100,000 people do work through the service.

For the iPhone, Amazon has a great version of its site, making finding and buying products through it a snap.

Now, Amazon has created an iPhone application that makes Mechanical Turk useful in a new way.

The basic premise is this: you’re out somewhere, you see something you like, but you don’t know if Amazon carries it. You take a picture of it using the Amazon iPhone application. Someone in the Mechanical Turk program identifies the product, finds out if Amazon carries it, and sends you an email with the result. If Amazon carries it, you’re given a link to the product so you can buy it.

Using cell phone cameras in a retail space is an old idea, but this is a new way to realize it. Instead of using the camera to recognize bar codes, Amazon is allowing users to just snap a picture of the thing they see — a vase, a dish, a broach, a pair of pants. Then, other people earn a few cents telling that user where to find the thing on Amazon.

How important will this be? It’s hard to say. Given Amazon’s track record, the results might surprise us all.

But here’s my notion — science teachers and educators should start something like this for students.

Millions of students are trotting around with camera cell-phones. Imagine if they could snap a picture of an interesting bug, cloud, rock formation, or plant, and find out from a scientist what it is. Science education would be interactive in a whole new way, and “teachable moments” could occur more spontaneously.

It may never happen, but uniting portable technologies with human intelligence seems like something that will have an application someday, somehow, in the educational realm.

Just picture it.

Last week, I asked whether publishers are anti-publishing. Perhaps a better question would have been why US and/or scholarly publishers are giving up on the subscription model. A recent post from Samir Husni’s Mr. Magazine.com talks about the “mass suicide” magazine publishers are committing by giving up on the subscription model. The same morning I saw this, I received an email from Amazon.com offering me $5 off magazine subscriptions that are already ridiculously cheap (Wired drops from $10 to $5, New York drops to $14.95, etc.).

As Husni writes in his blog entry:

I say we live in desperate times when it comes to the American magazine scene. Just days after returning from an overseas trip where I enjoyed seeing and buying magazines and newspapers that charge real prices for their content, I received an e mail from Hearst Magazines inviting me (being the valued subscriber who paid less than $7 to subscribe to all their magazines just a few months ago) to take advantage of “incredible savings” on all my favorite magazines. . . . It is time to CHANGE our ways of doing business. It is time to change our method of pricing and selling magazines. Maybe, for a change, we can start saying Yes We Can and start thinking of the readers as a good source of revenue.

Logically, the subscription model makes incredible sense — readers paying editors and publishers to work for them and provide valuable content or risk cancellation. It makes more sense than the advertising model, which is about an indirect relationship and about extrinsic economic realities more than intrinsic value economics.

From a business and editorial perspective, the annuity model at the heart of subscriptions allows for institutions that can endure the viscitudes of politics, economics, and taste, establishing important cultural landmarks and sustainable employment and revenues. Having a direct income stream from readers spreads the risk of the business, and puts it where it belongs.

Yet even some publishing people celebrate the low subscription prices, as if these prices are the salvation of print. They are not. Low prices devalue expensive finished goods. As James Gleick put recently in a New York Times Op-Ed:

Forget about cost-cutting and the mass market. Don’t aim for instant blockbuster successes. You won’t win on quick distribution, and you won’t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered. Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.

In a world of cheap magazines (and books, in Gleick’s essay), editorial work is devalued, layout and art direction are devalued, photography is devalued, superb printing is devalued — in fact, with advertising as the de facto business model when subscription prices drop below the cost of fulfillment, the only thing of value remaining is the distribution. And for publications to compete on distribution in the age of the Internet is truly suicidal.

Print publications can exist and thrive even amongst online competitors. But as undervalued commodities selling audience to advertisers instead of content to readers, their fates are sealed.