The Ed Techie

A digital scholar is...

Just a quick post as a reminder that my book launch is next Tuesday, 15th at 3pm - it is being streamed live and we'll be hoping for some twitter contributions.

We have a prize of a signed (or, even better, unsigned) copy of the book, which we've simplified. Just do a tweet completing the sentence 'A digital scholar is...' and tag it #digitalscholar and I'll pick one winner on the day.

I've been doing some Despair.Inc posters for my talk on the day, so thought I'd share this one:

Views on a book

I have been completing the index for my digital scholarship book and thought I'd share some thoughts on different views of the book. I put the entire text through Wordle to produce the following tag cloud:

I then restricted this view to only 50 words:

And by way of comparison, here is a draft of the index in Scribd:

The Digital Scholar - Index

Two questions arise for me: do these representations reveal anything to me, as author? And do any of them provide useful insight or make you as potential reader, interested?

The word clouds contain some pretty obvious terms (if digital, open or scholarship weren't in big letters, we'd all be surprised). But there may be some subtlety in there too. The qualifiers and adjectives may be revealing, for example the prominence of 'may' and 'might' indicates that I am hedging a lot of terms, so maybe (there I go again) suggests it is a considered, balanced approach and not a mainfesto. Also the presence of 'significant', 'change' and 'new' demonstrates that I am trying to grapple with a transition in 'practice'. It also highlights which words I overuse. So I think you could glean some idea both about content and approach from the word cloud. I'm just not sure it's the best way to do it.

The index is probably more revealing about content as it shows what I think are the main concepts and also the significant names. But it doesn't show as much about approach, and as an author doesn't reveal much as I compiled it. An index created by someone else would be interesting.

References are like airport security checks

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/4228752706/ by Mike Licht>

This is the penultimate post in my week-long series of reflections on the book writing process (you have been reading them all, right?).

I've moaned before that referencing is largely an anachronistic practice which is located in dealing with physical objects. As I said in that post, there are two main reasons that I can see:

1. To properly acknowledge the work of others. The act of referencing provides a clear framework for avoiding plagiarism since it positively encourages students to reference others and thus removes ignorance as an excuse.
2. To allow readers to locate any sources for themselves. This acts as both a check on the author (they can't make up references or misrepresent them), and also promotes knowledge sharing.

The first reason, that of acknowledgement, is obviously valid. But in an online context this is achieved by linking - the link is the acknowledgement, nothing else is required. And indeed, proper acknowledgement is one of the cultural norms of blogging, twitter, etc. We don't have problems with acknowledgement.

But in compiling the references section for my book, I was struck again by the redundancy of official referencing systems. You want to know where a book was published? Really? Isn't Amazon enough? You need a full reference for a quote when the quote itself is the reference in Google? Is an accessed date for every online reference really necessary? 

But I'm a good boy and I have a properly structured reference section of around 230 sources. It seems especially strange as most of my references are online, so I have to find a way of structuring the link into a recognised format, so something like "As Anderson notes.." becomes "Anderson, C. (2008) ‘Freemium math: what’s the right conversion percentage?’ <http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/11/freemium-math-w.html> [Accessed 11^th February 2011]". I'm not sure what additional information is conveyed in the second version of this.

This then goes offline into a printed book, fair enough, and will then go back online. But what bugs me is the supposed supremacy of print in this. For an online reference of a journal article, the URL is not sufficient but rather the full journal reference is required, because that legitimises it.

And we treat referencing as such an immutable practice. This is a classic of example of where the method has become confused with the intention. What we want is to find sources and for that work to be acknowledged. In a print world a standard method of describing these characteristics to enable location made sense. It makes little sense in an online world. 

This reminds me of airport security checks, such as questions around whether you packed yourself or are carrying guns, body checks, etc. Any questioning of the practice is dismissed with very serious concerns about terrorism. Just as querying the reference system is met with furrowed brows and deep sighs about plagiarism and proper scholarship. But like those airport checks this adds delay, is cumbersome and only inconveniences people who are happy to play by the rules anyway. It does nothing to catch the hardcore plagiarists, and doesn't guarantee a reference will still be available any more than a link does. Yet we have no choice and have to persist in it.

If I had the courage of my convictions, here is what I should have submitted for my reference section:

JFGI

Book analytics

This is the fourth in my musings on the book writing process. When my book comes out it will be freely available online, in HTML (I think). I don't know how the site will be constructed, but it strikes me that as an author this is potentially very interesting.

I'm at the Learning Analytics conference at the moment, and Tony has been talking about Google Analytics. I run this on my blog, and it's always interesting, but the type of data it might give a book author is more revealing. On my blog it tells me where people have come from, that most people tend to come from search, and come to one post only. That's probably what you'd expect.

But analytics on a book is a different thing. As an author you have no idea how people actually read your stuff or what they find interesting. Potentially (it will depend on how the site is constructed) it could show me the following:

1. How long people read
2. What elements are most popular
3. What search terms bring people to my book (which could be seen as a proxy for what the audience really is)
4. What sections are being linked to (and therefore are presumably of most use?)
5. If people come back, which would be some indication of interest and relevance

You'd never know this stuff from a conventional book, which is one of the advantages of working this way. What would be interesting then would be if I did a rewrite of the book, how much this analytics might influence the process. If one chapter hardly ever got read, should I just excise it? Conversely should I expand a section that gets lots of links? 

What I won't know is if there are different reading patterns for the physical book and the online version. I suspect people will tend to read the paper version in longer chunks, and the online one in a less linear fashion. But paper doesn't give me any data back, dammit.

 

A tale of two books

Continuing my thoughts on the book writing process, this post is about how the process itself has changed, for me at least, over recent years.

I start my book by comparing the process of writing this book with my last one about 6 years ago. Below is a list of some of the tools and resources I used to write this book:

1. Books – via the library but increasingly as ebooks and on Kindle, and one audiobook
2. E-journals – my university library has access to a wide range of databases, but I also made frequent use of others through tools such as Google Scholar and Mendeley
3. Delicious/social bookmarking – as well as searching for key terms I would ‘forage’ in the bookmarks of people I know and trust, who make their collections available
4. Blogs – I subscribe to over 100 blogs in Google Reader, which I try to read regularly, but in addition I have cited and used many posts from other blogs
5. YouTube, Wikipedia, Slideshare, Scribd, Cloudworks and other sites – text is not the only medium for sharing now, and for certain subjects these ‘web 2.0’ services offer useful starting points, or overviews, as well as insightful comment
6. My own blog – I have kept a blog for around five years now, and it provided a useful resource for items I have commented on, and drafts of sections of this book. I also have a scrapbook type blog I keep using Tumblr where I post any interesting links or multimedia, and revisited this for resources I had harvested over the past few years. The blog was also a means of posting draft content to gain comments and feedback, which could then be incorporated into further iterations of writing
7. Social network – my Twitter network is especially useful for gaining feedback, asking for suggestions, and on a daily basis, as a filter and collection mechanism for sharing resources
8. Work and personal network – undoubtedly working in an intellectually lively environment, and having face to face discussions with colleagues has been invaluable
9. Google alerts – I set up alerts for a few key phrases, which would then provide me with daily email updates on new content containing these key words. This allowed me to find new resources, track conversations and stay abreast of a field which was changing as I wrote the book
10. Seminars and conferences - my attendance at face to face conferences has declined due to other commitments but I regularly attend, or dip into conferences remotely (see Chapter 10 for a more detailed exploration of the changing nature of conferences)

 

If I compare this with the tools I used when I wrote my last book in 2004, then many of these services did not exist or were in their infancy. Of this list I probably used books, journals and face to face conferences, with maybe some initial exploration of blogs. 

In many ways the changes are not dramatic – books and journal articles still constitute a large part of the information sources I draw upon, although blogs in particular have increased in significance. And the output of all this is still that most traditional of information sources, a book. But the changes are also significant for three reasons, I would suggest.

Firstly, the quantity of this information that is available online has increased considerably. I could access nearly all of it from my desk at home, there was no need to visit a physical library or bookstore. The digitisation of relevant content was almost total for the information sources I required for this book, compared with about half of that in 2004.

The second factor is the significance of my online network in the writing process. I have around 3,000 followers in Twitter and around 2,000 subscribers to my blog (often they are the same people), which represents a wide pool of experience to draw upon. Sometimes I would put out a direct call to this network, along the lines of ‘Does anyone have a good example of …’ In other cases I would post drafts of the content to my blog and receive comments and links to relevant material. Even without these direct appeals this distributed, global peer network represents an invaluable information source, comprising links to resources, commentary on issues, extended debate, use of new methods and technology, and contributions in the form of blog posts, videos and audio.  

This last item leads me to the third significant difference from the previous book, which is the range and variety of content that I drew upon. Even six years ago the type of content was largely limited to journal articles and books. Now, this has diversified to include blog posts, videos, draft publications, conference presentations and also the discussion, comment and debate surrounding each of these. The change from 2004 is partly a result of the first factor, quantity. There is just more of this stuff around. But it is also a result of a shift in attitude (at least on my part), in the legitimacy of these other forms of output, and their central, vital role in everyday scholarly activity.  

The comparison of writing these two books is instructive, I feel, because it gets to the heart of digital scholarship: it is both a profound change and a continuation of traditional practice. This can be seen with the final output also: the previous book existed only in traditional, paper format, and the copyright to this was owned by the publishers. The new book is available in the traditional format, but also online, freely available under a Creative Commons licence. In addition there is a set of resources, such as videos, presentations, blog posts, etc which relate to the book, and then comment and reaction to these. And this is becoming more common: my colleague Grainne Conole, is writing a book by blogging chapters and gaining feedback in a site called Cloudworks (http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2155). Conor Gearty, a Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, is writing a book by posting a weekly video which sets out his theme and encourages discussion (http://therightsfuture.com/). The boundary between Gearty’s book and a course, and the comments of the participants is deliberately blurred.

This conflict between what, from one perspective, seems a substantial change in practice, and from another, appears to be a conservative, minor adjustment to standard approaches, characterises not just book production, but any aspect of scholarly activity, including research, knowledge dissemination, public engagement and teaching. Both radically different and yet familiarly traditional seems to be the story of digital scholarship at the moment, and it is the tension between these two forces that my book sets out to explore.

The book isn't dead, it just has new friends

So the first of my reflections on completing my digital scholarship book can probably be filed under 'No shit, Sherlock':

The book is a good format for some ideas 

I have suggested that books and articles have had a monopoly as the format for the dissemination of ideas, and new media liberate us from this somewhat. In my case the book has grown out of stuff I've been blogging over the past 4 years or so, but it isn't just a load of blog posts bundled together (whatever you may think). The length and format of a book is a very good means of both exploring ideas in depth and pulling together various strands that have been rather fragmented. Who knew eh? One of the points I make (repeatedly, ad nauseum) is that we now have alternatives, where there were previously limited options. It is not the case that the book will disappear, or is dead, but that we have alternatives now to expressing and sharing ideas. Is an article, a blog post, a video, a slidecast, a podcast or conference presentation the best? Sometimes the book really is the best format. 

Perhaps more interesting is not which one of these you choose, but the combination of them. What is the boundary of the book? Is it the physical object? What about the shared comments and highlights on Kindle? Then there will be related media, blogs, twitter conversations. The decision is less about which sole method you select but rather which one you place at the center of this distributed knowledge bundle. 

Some thoughts on the book writing process

(The printout of my book) 

I submitted the manuscript (well the Word files) of my digital scholarship book to the publishers, Bloomsbury Academic, a couple of weeks ago. It should be out in September, with an online OA Creative Commons version as well as the printy touchy feely one.

So now is a good time to reflect on the process. In the following posts I'll suggest a number of reflections on the process. Overall it's been rewarding, and a useful exercise, but I couldn't have done it without this blog. Whereas many authors create a blog to accompany a book, I think I have created a book to accompany the blog. 

I'm not sure if this is one long post or several small ones, but I'm breaking with my usual style of long (ponderous) posts and trying some shorter, pithy ones focusing on one element, because, well, because I can, which is the joy of it. So over the coming week I'll do a post a day on this subject.

And you thought you were in for a dull week...