Science 2.0: What Every Scientist Needs to Know About How the Web is Changing the Way They Work
Toronto, MaRS Centre – July 29th, 2009 – Free Admission
Slides and Speaker List available
The title of the conference was slightly misleading, as it suggested a broad view of science 2.0 landscape. Instead, I found that at least half the talks were aimed at a specific type of researcher: those that do computational science research. There were, however, some interesting ideas that were of a broader nature, which I will discuss further.
Michael Nielsen – Doing Science Online
Nielsen opened his talk with a discussion of blogging in the sciences. In particular, he described the blog of Terrence Tao, a mathematician and Fields medalist. What makes Tao’s blog special is that it is a place for very high-level thinking and discussion. Tao writes blog posts outlining a mathematical problem he’s working on, along with his ideas for how they might be solved, or introducing a new way to think about them. The comments section is full of other mathmaticians offering advice, rebuttal, criticism, and discussion. It has, in essence, become a forum for mathematical thought that cannot be replicated in traditional journal-style publishing. The output of Tao’s blog is professional enough that it has been formally published in two volumes: “Structure and Randomness: pages from year one of a mathematical blog” and “Poincaré’s legacies: pages from year two of a mathematical blog“.
Blogs allow for a rapid exchange of information, almost in real-time. It also makes the scientific conversation readily searchable, and open. While traditional scientific publishing methods are still critical, it is interesting to note that other media can be an important part of the process. Another example is the so-called open notebook approach to using the web. In a similar way, ideas and notes are published and made available for viewing.
Tao and Nielsen, amongst others, have started up another blog (and associated wiki) called Polymath Projects, designed to be “massively collaborative mathematical research projects”. Essentially, these spaces allow many mathematicians to combine their talents to solve larger, more difficult math problems, which will later be published (attributed to a polymath pseudonym). While not a new idea (see Bourbaki for collectives publishing under pseudonyms, and later, Crowdsourcing), it is still incredibly powerful.
What can the library do, then, to support this kind of work? The simplest action is to support the tools that researchers and scientists need, like blogs and wikis. These tools will not use themselves, however, so the librarian must play advocate. Another, more complex act is to find ways to support open data curation for scientists, that allows for data to be re-used and re-analyzed.
Cameron Neylon – A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
Neylon opened his talk by suggesting that the traditional mode of distributing scientific information is waning, while other modes are rising. The problem, he suggests, is that current publishing methods are too static, too non-interactive. Beyond this, traditional publishing is slow, doesn’t allow for re-use, mashing-up, and does not necessarily accommodate the ‘size’ of a publishable idea. Neylon sees modern science as requiring strong connections to other science, suggesting that it be less like words in a book and more like a highly branched and interconnected network.
In his lab, he is using the web in a different way – rather than do a bit of research, then transcribing it to a paper notebook, and then possibly transcribing it again online, he skips the middle bit. He has wired his machines to take the results of an analysis and upload it automatically to his website. The online lab notebook, then, is partially automated, networked and linked, and very interactive. But, most of all, it is open. Failed experiments, unused or raw data, and so on – it is all present and accounted for, and available to be manipulated and mined by other researchers. There are hurdles associated with such openness, though: most researchers are less willing to share results and findings so quickly, lest they be scooped by a competitor. According to the Wikipedia entry, there are also issues with curation and organization of such an incredible amount of data.
Jon Udell: Collaborative Curation of Public Events
Udell pointed out that when it comes to public events, the most common system of notification is simple tacked up poster (on poles, windows, etc.). At the community level, this is a more comprehensive event aggregator than anything that exists online. As such, most of these posters don’t have an associated webpage, nor is there a comprehensive index. While these posters have a low barrier to entry, they offer poor searchability.
A solution that Udell envisons is an event aggregator – an online tool that collects calendar information from a number of disparate sources, and can than output them back to the end user. More than that, however, Udell wants to maintain some core values for this platform: collaboration, open data, standards, transparency, and re-use. This project also asks that users do not only need to be subscribers of data and information, but can be producers of it. Udell sees members of the project as ‘curators’ – people that go out and collect event information, but also create it, and encourage that the community produces it, too.
There is a challenge in this, however. Many event producers (cities, tourism boards, universities, etc.) do not publish their event data in an open format – the ideal is .ICS or iCal – and so that information cannot be aggregated.
I have taken a personal stake in this project. (you can, too! – In fact, Udell sees librarians as having role in this kind of work.) After the talk, I volunteered myself to be an event curator for Guelph, ON. I have found it challenging, in the sense that many of the organizations that list events in the city lock up their information in RSS or email notifications that cannot be easily captured. Nonetheless, I have ‘nagged’ the major event producers to open their information up, and continue to scour the ‘net for iCal feeds.
And so…
In the land of Science 2.0, I see a role for librarians – whether it be providing access to technologies or curating data or other kinds of information. It is important to be listening to pioneering researchers, discovering their needs, and finding ways to meet them.
The ridiculous step.
“Google brought books to life—instead of reading through survey texts, I could search for footnotes, which led me to more precise titles, which led to still others and others, in much the same way that we navigate the Web using hyperlinks. Eventually, of course, I had to drag myself to the library to pick up physical copies of the works in question—a step that I considered ridiculous. I would gladly have paid Google and the authors for the right to electronically review the books and papers, but there was no way to do so.”
Farhad Manjoo, Wednesday, May 6, 2009, “Your Search Returned 12 Million Books”. Slate.com
A sign of the times; I’ve suggested this previously, but I’ll do it again. Academic libraries need to figure out digital delivery of books, and soon. If Google or Amazon or somebody else does it better and easier, the library ‘market share’ will erode. If somebody manages to do it for ‘free’ (ad-driven, or otherwise), then we’re sunk.
Groomed for Management
In a week of thought-provoking ideas, I wish to touch on one in particular: should management in libraries necessarily be librarians?
We are seeing this issue come up again and again, and is an early theme in library education. “There will be a shortage of management in libraries, we need to be sure that new librarians have the appropriate skills.” Of course, the reality is that even with the new emphasis on management courses in the curriculum, librarians have little formal training in management. Furthermore, the vagaries of business and budget are often at odds with the principles that many librarians espouse. (Not only that, many are just uninterested..)
I recall a particular moment in during the degree program where we had a guest speaker from the local public library system. This individual was the director of the library system but was not a librarian, but rather a management professional. The class discussion afterward was very critical of the business-like changes that were being made.
So, then, should that give license to libraries to hire trained management personnel to perform management duties instead of librarians? The fundamental problem is clear: individuals trained in management do not have library training and MLIS grads have little management training. Where is the middle ground?
There is also another issue here. As professionals, there is some expectation that our peers and supervisors will also be professionals. Imagine a hospital that was managed by a non-doctor. Is this an apt comparison?
On cheating
“If I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, or improve my golf swing, or write HTML, “cheating” would be the last thing that would ever occur to me. It would be utterly irrelevant to the situation.
On the other hand, if I wanted a certificate saying that I could pick a jib, play a round in under 80, or produce a slick Web page (and never expected actually to perform the activity in question), I might well consider cheating (and consider it primarily a moral problem).
This is the situation we’ve built for our students: a system in which the only incentive or motives anyone cares about are marks, credits and certificates.”