Page 10

Borgman on the merging of primary and secondary information sources .

primary and secondary information sources long to be treated as a dichotomy, with different strands of research on each. Sociologist of science study the context in which primary data are produced, or primary archivists are concerned with how those that are captured, managed, and preserved. Researchers in the field of information studies and communication investigate how scholarly publications are written, disseminated, sought, used, and reference. Librarians select, collect, organize, conserve, preserve, and provide access to scholarly publications and print and digital form. Little research has explored the continuum from primary to secondary sources, much less the entire lifecycle from data generation through the preservation of scholarly products that set those data in context.

Page 156

Borgman discusses a couple of things that are useful for me. The first is how students discover what they miss from the library after they graduate and no longer have access to journals.

The second is that this passage supplies some evidence for the claim that things that are not online no longer exist as far as such behavior is concerned.

There's some bibliography at the end of the passage covering both of these points in the print book.

Scholars seem to be even more dependent on library services for access to scholarly publications than in the past. Personal subscriptions to journals have declined substantially. Faculty and students have been known to panic when unable to access online library services, whether due to system failures or incorrect authentication settings. Students' dependence on these services becomes especially apparent when they graduate and no longer have access. Librarians learned early in the days of online catalogs that people rely on online sources, even if those sources are incomplete. Older material accessible only via the card catalog was quickly "widowed," which was a primary motivation for libraries to complete the retrospective conversion of card catalogs to digital form. The same phenomenon occurred with online access to journals. The more access that libraries provide, the greater the depth of coverage that users expect. The use of printed indexes in libraries has dropped to near zero, although printed finding aids remain popular in archives.

Page 220

Humanistic research takes place in a rich milieu that incorporates the cultural context of artifacts. Electronic text and models change the nature of scholarship in subtle and important ways, which have been discussed at great length since the humanities first began to contemplate the scholarly application of computing.

Page 217

Methods for organizing information in the humanities follow from their research practices. Humanists fo not rely on subject indexing to locate material to the extent that the social sciences or sciences do. They are more likely to be searching for new interpretations that are not easily described in advance; the journey through texts, libraries, and archives often is the research.

Page 213

Humanities scholarship is even more difficult to characterize than are the sciences and social sciences. Generally speaking, the humanities are more interpretative than data driven, but some humanists conduct qualitative studies using social sciences methods, and others employ quantitative methods. Digital humanities scholarship often reflects sophisticated computational expertise. Humanists value new interpretations, perspectives, and sources of data to examine age-old questions of art and culture.

Page 226

Borgman on why we need a common effort in building a scholarly Commons

Striking contrast exists between disciplines and artifacts, practices, and incentives to build the content layer. Common approaches are none the less required to support interdisciplinary research, which is a central goal of the research. Scholarly products are useful to scholars and related fields and sometimes to scholars in distant fields as the boundaries between disciplines becomes more porous, the interoperability of information systems and services becomes indispensable.

Page 225

Here is a great statement as to the need for a self-conscious commons :

The content layer of the scholarly information infrastructure will not be built by voluntary contributions of information artifacts from individuals. The incentives are too low and barriers too high. Contributing publications through self archiving has the greatest incentives and the fewest barriers, but voluntary contributions remain low. Contributing data has even fewer incentives and even greater barriers. Scholars continue to rely on the publishing system to guarantee that the products of their work are legitimized, disseminated, reserved, curated, and made accessible. Despite its unstable state, the system does exist, resting on relationships among libraries, publishers, universities, scholars, students, and other stakeholders. No comparable system exists for data. Only a few fields have succeeded in establishing infrastructures for their data, and most of these are still fledgling efforts. Little evidence exists that a common infrastructure for data will arise from the scholarly community. The requirements are diverse, the common ground is minimal, and individuals are not rewarded for tackling large institutional problems. Building the content layer is the responsibility of the institutions and policymakers rather than individuals. Individual behavior will change when the policies change to offer more rewards, and when tools and services and prove to decrease the effort required….

Page 223

This is Borgman discussing the role of priority in the humanities

cultural and historical events can be reinterpreted repeatedly. Prizes are based on the best interpretation rather than on the first claim to a finding.

Page 223

Borgman is discussing here the difference in the way humanists handle data in comparison to the way that scientists and social scientist:

When generating their own data such as interviews or observations, human efforts to describe and represent data are comparable to that of scholars and other disciplines. Often humanists are working with materials already described by the originator or holder of the records, such as libraries, archives, government agencies, or other entities. Whether or not the desired content already is described as data, scholars need to explain its evidentiary value in your own words. That report often becomes part of the final product. While scholarly publications in all fields set data within a context, the context and interpretation are scholarship in the humanities.

Pages 220-221

Digital Humanities projects result in two general types of products. Digital libraries arise from scholarly collaborations and the initiatives of cultural heritage institutions to digitize their sources. These collections are popular for research and education. … The other general category of digital humanities products consist of assemblages of digitized cultural objects with associated analyses and interpretations. These are the equivalent of digital books in that they present an integrated research story, but they are much more, as they often include interactive components and direct links to the original sources on which the scholarship is based. … Projects that integrate digital records for widely scattered objects are a mix of a digital library and an assemblage.

Page 219

In the humanities, it is difficult to separate artifacts from practices or publications from data.

Page 219

Humanities scholars integrate and aggregate data from many sources. They need tools and services to analyze digital data, as others do the sciences and social sciences, but also tools that assist them interpretation and contemplation.

Page 215

What seems a clear line between publications and data in the sciences and social sciences is a decidedly fuzzy one in the humanities. Publications and other documents are central sources of data to humanists. … Data sources for the humanities are innumerable. Almost any document, physical artifact, or record of human activity can be used to study culture. Humanities scholars value new approaches, and recognizing something as a source of data (e.g., high school yearbooks, cookbooks, or wear patterns in the floor of public places) can be an act of scholarship. Discovering heretofore unknown treasures buried in the world's archives is particularly newsworthy. … It is impossible to inventory, much less digitize, all the data that might be useful scholarship communities. Also distinctive about humanities data is their dispersion and separation from context. Cultural artifacts are bought and sold, looted in wars, and relocated to museums and private collections. International agreements on the repatriation of cultural objects now prevent many items from being exported, but items that were exported decades or centuries ago are unlikely to return to their original site. … Digitizing cultural records and artifacts make them more malleable and mutable, which creates interesting possibilities for analyzing, contextualizing, and recombining objects. Yet digitizing objects separates them from the origins, exacerbating humanists’ problems in maintaining the context. Removing text from its physical embodiment in a fixed object may delete features that are important to researchers, such as line and page breaks, fonts, illustrations, choices of paper, bindings, and marginalia. Scholars frequently would like to compare such features in multiple additions or copies.

Page 215

Borgman discussing the half-life of citations and humanities :

while the half-life of literature is considered to be the longest in humanities, the large comparative study discussed earlier found the shortest citation age of an average article in humanities…. [another study] also found that the usage of history articles was much more concentrated in recent publications and was the usage of articles in economics or mathematics (the three fields studied). A close inspection revealed that the use of history articles was widely scattered across countries, without the clustering around classic articles from the other two fields. Although history can be considered within the humanities or the social sciences, comparisons between these findings do reinforce others conclusions that humanists’ may read current journal articles to keep up with their fields, but rely more heavily for their research on sources not covered by journal indexes. The findings also amplify concerns about the validity of citation studies of journal literature in humanities, given the reliance on monographic and archival sources. In sum, the humanities draw on the longest literature time span of any of the disciplines, and yet have the least amount of their scholarly literature online. So far, they are the discipline most poorly served by the publications component of the content later.

Page 214

Literature in the Humanities goes out-of-print long before it goes out of date, so efforts to make older, out-of-copyright books available greatly benefit these fields.

Page 214

Borgman notes that the bibliographic coverage of journal literature is shallow in the humanities. The ISI Arts and humanity citation Index only goes back to 1975. In Sciences it goes back to 1900. In the social sciences it goes back to 1956. Also SCOPUS does not include the humanities.

What is interesting about this is that the humanities are the least cumulative of all the disciplines in the sense that they do not build on previous knowledge so much as we examine previous thought.

Page 214

Borgman on information artifacts and communities:

Artifacts in the humanities differ from those of the sciences and social sciences in several respects. Humanist use the largest array of information sources, and as a consequence, the station between documents and data is the least clear. They also have a greater number of audiences for the data and the products of the research. Whereas scientific findings usually must be translated for a general audience, humanities findings often are directly accessible and of immediate interest to the general public.

Page 204

Borgman on the different types of data in the social sciences:

Data in the social sciences fall into two general categories. The first is data collected by researchers through experiments, interviews, surveys, observations, or similar names, analogous to scientific methods. … the second category is data collected by other people or institutions, usually for purposes other than research.

Page 203

Citation age of an average article is longest in the social sciences.

Page 202

Borgman on information artifacts in the social sciences

like the sciences, the social sciences create and use minimal information. Yet they differ in the sources of the data. While almost all scientific data are created by for scientific purposes, a significant portion of social scientific data consists of records credit for other purposes, by other parties.

Page 187 On hyper authorship

"hyper authorship” is an indicator of "collective cognition" in which the specific contributions of individuals no longer can be identified. Physics has among the highest rates of coauthorship in the sciences and the highest rates of self archiving documents via a repository. Whether the relationship between research collaborators (as indicated by the rates of coauthorship) and sharing publications (as reflected in self archiving) holds in other fields is a question worth exploring empirically.

Page 184

In the section “Description and Organization in the Sciences” Borgman discusses some of the ways in which scientific literature is better organized: for example these include uniform language, taxonomies, thesauri, and ontologies.

Page 184

scientific data will not be "all digital "anytime soon, however. Substantial amounts of important "legacy data "remain in paper form, both public and private hands. Estimated 750 million specimens in the US natural storymaker history museums, for example, black digital descriptions. And effort is underway to digitize the descriptions of large-scale, using barcoding technics. Digitizing historical documents such as newspapers, handbooks, directories, and land-use records will benefit the sciences in addition to the humanities and social sciences. These records are used to establish historical patterns of weather, crop yields, animal husbandry, and so forth. And untold wealth of scientific data lies in private hands. Individual scientists often keep the records of the research career in their offices of oratories, only by storage limited only by storage space on the shelves and refrigerators, freezers, and digital devices.

Borgman, Christine L. 2007. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

My notes

Page 48

Scholarly communication is a rich and complex socio-technical system formed over a period of centuries. Despite new technologies and economic models, the purposes of scholarly communication have remained remarkably stable.

page 182

the sciences create a variety of objects the salt in the gray area between documents and data. Examples include Laboratorio field notebooks, slicer talks, composition objects such as graphic visualization of data. Laboratorio notebooks are often classified as data because their records research. Slides from talks, which were once ephemeral forms of communication, now our compost and competent person websites are distributed to accomplish proceedings. Graphic visualization data can be linked to scarlet documents to report research or to the underlying data.

Chapter 8 is an excellent overview of the nature of the commons its differences and similarities

Page 182 Borgman on the disciplinary differences in scholarly practice

Despite many common activities, both the artifacts and practices of scholarship very by discipline. The artifacts very as scholars make choices about the sources of data, along with what, when, where, and what form to disseminate the products of their work. Scholarly practices vary in the way that scholars create, use, and share documents, data, and other forms of information.

Page 158

George Barnett, Edward think, and Mary Beth debus constructed a mathematical model of citation age to test this ordering using large data sets from each of the science citation index, social sciences citation index, and arts and humanities citation index published by the isi. In each of these three sets, the citation age of an average article reaches its peak in less than two years, with the Arts and Humanities peeking soonest parentheses 1.164 years close parentheses comma and the social sciences speaking latest parentheses 1.752 years close parentheses, contrary to expectations. The maximum proportion of citations did have the predicted ordering, with science the highest, and the Arts and Humanities the lowest. While the models presume that citation rates were stable over time a close examination of the data revealed that citation for article increase substantially over the time period of the study parentheses in science, from 12.14 per article in 1961 to 16 in 1986 God semi colon in the social sciences, from 7.07 in 1970 to 15.6 in 1986 semi colon no Citation for article data were given for the Arts and Humanities close parentheses.

Page 158

Half-Life studies are used to identify temporal variations in the use of literature by discipline most such studies indicate that the humanities have the longest citation half life and the Sciences the shortest with the social sciences in between. In other words, scientific articles reference the most recent Publications and Humanities articles the least recent ones.

Pages 153 and 154

Borgman on how data Deluge affects the balance between traditional and new forms of scholarship

Changes in scholarly practices such as mining data sets can have significant influences on scholar is professional identity. Shifts in technology and funding that favor computational methods May disadvantage those whose research is based on fieldwork for instance. These transitions can create a double bind for those research areas more funding for computational modeling made me less funding for field research to collect new data. Not only does less data collected but fewer students are trained in field methods. Substantial expertise and data collection and the ability to interpret older data may be lost. Conversely those who rely on computational methods must have sufficient knowledge of how the data were collected to be able to interpret them. They do require adequate training and data collection methods.... Research Specialties that use more computational methods are seeking a balance between a steady supply of new data, avoiding duplicate or redundant data collection where possible, and training students in field research and computational methods. Thus, new technologies for producing and analyzing data may have subtle but important influences on Scholars career path.

Page 147

Borgman on the challenges facing the humanities in the age of Big Data:

Text and data mining offer similar Grand challenges in the humanities and social sciences. Gregory crane provide some answers to the question what do you do with a million books? Two obvious answers include the extraction of information about people, places, and events, and machine translation between languages. As digital libraries of books grow through scanning avert such as Google print, the open content Alliance, million books project, and comparable projects in Europe and China, and as more books are published in digital form technical advances in data description, and now it says, and verification are essential. These large collections differ from earlier, smaller after it's on several Dimensions. They are much larger in scale, the content is more heterogenous in topic and language, the granularity creases when individual words can be tagged and they were noisy then there well curated predecessors, and their audiences more diverse, reaching the general public in addition to the scholarly community. Computer scientists are working jointly with humanist, language, and other demands specialist to pars tax, extract named entities in places, I meant optical character recognition techniques counter and Advance the state of art of information retrieval.

Page 155

Boardman on The Change-Up brought on by the web as to the most important consideration in Source selection sharing information retrieval by scientist

One of the findings worth revisiting is the prior to the 1990s, accessibility was the most important consideration and Source selection. Has information access improved, relevance and quality became the most important selection factors, which has implications for the design of searching tools.

Page 137

Borgman discusses hear the case of NASA which lost the original video recording of the first moon landing in 1969. Backups exist, apparently, but they are lower quality than the originals.

Page 122

Here Borgman suggest that there is some confusion or lack of overlap between the words that humanist and social scientists use in distinguishing types of information from the language used to describe data.

Humanist and social scientists frequently distinguish between primary and secondary information based on the degree of analysis. Yet this ordering sometimes conflates data sources, and resorces, as exemplified by a report that distinguishes quote primary resources, ed books quote from quote secondary resources, Ed catalogs quote. Resorts is also categorized as primary wear sensor data AMA numerical data and filled notebooks, all of which would be considered data in The Sciences. But rarely would book cover conference proceedings, and he sees that the report categorizes as primary resources be considered data, except when used for text or data mining purposes. Catalogs, subject indices, citation index is, search engines, and web portals were classified as secondary resources.

Pages 119 and 120

Here Borgman discusses the various definitions of data showing them working across the fields

the following definition of data is widely accepted in this context: AT&T portable representation of information in a formalized manner suitable for communication, interpretation, or processing. Examples of data include a sequence of bits, a table of numbers, the characters on a page, recording of sounds made by a person speaking Ori moon rocks specimen. Definitions of data often arise from Individual disciplines, but can apply to data used in science, technology, the social sciences, and the humanities: data are facts, numbers, letters, and symbols that describe an object, idea, condition, situation, or other factors.... Terms data and facts are treated interchangeably, as is the case in legal context. Sources of data includes observations, complications, experiment, and record-keeping. Observational data include weather measurements... And attitude surveys... Or involve multiple places and times. Computational data result from executing a computer model or simulation.... experimental data include results from laboratory studies such as measurements of chemical reactions or from field experiments such as controlled Behavioral Studies.... records of government, business, and public and private life also yield useful data for scientific, social scientific, and humanistic research.

Pages 117 to 1:19

Here Borgman discusses the ability to go back and forth between data and reports on data she cites Phil born 2005 on this for a while medicine. She also discusses how in the pre-digital error data was understood as a support mechanism for final publication and as a result was allowed to deteriorate or be destroyed after the Publications upon which they were based appeared.

Page 115

Borgman makes the point here that while there is a Commons in the infrastructure of scholarly publishing there is less of a Commons in the infrastructure 4 data across disciplines.

The infrastructure of scholarly publishing Bridges disciplines: every field produces Journal articles, conference papers, and books albeit in differing ratios. Libraries select, collect organize and make accessible publications of all types, from all fields. No comparable infrastructure exists for data. A few Fields have major mechanisms for publishing data in repositories. Some fields are in the stage of developing standards and practices to activate their data resorces and Nathan were widely accessible. In most Fields, especially Outside The Sciences, data practices remain local idiosyncratic, and oriented to current usage rather than preservation operation, and access. Most data collections Dash where they exist Dash are managed by individual agencies within disciplines, rather than by libraries are archives. Data managers usually are trained within the disciplines they serve. Only a few degree programs and information studies include courses on data management. The lack of infrastructure for data amplifies the discontinuities in scholarly publishing despite common concerns, independent debates continue about access to Publications and data.

Chapters 4 and 5 the continuity of scholarly publishing and the discontinuity of scholarly publishing

These are both useful and important chapters for the scholarly Commons working group. They discuss the things that are common across scholarly communication as well as the different functions comma and they also discuss a new technology is disrupting this common area.

Page 63

Publication indicators as proxies for quality. Despite the many problems with peer review, publication indicators are used to evaluate Scholars for hiring promotion, finding, and other Rewards. Weather appropriate or not, outputs of the system in the form of data, documents, and Publications are easier to measure than are the inputs such as Scholars time, education, reading of scholarly literature, and research activities in their Laboratories and libraries. More time in the laboratory or in the library does not necessarily translate into more or better research, for example. While it is understandable that the recognition of Scholars should be based heavily on quality assessments of their scholarly contributions to their fields, it is essential to distinguish clearly between quality of scholarship and the use of indicators such as the publication form and citation counts as proxies for quality.

Page 63

A discussion of fraud in the humanities involving a book on gun ownership

In one case, allegations of inadequate, and accurate, and unverifiable data to support much-publicized conclusions about the historical rates of gun ownership led to the revocation of a major book prize and the loss of the author's University position.

The book is called arming America. The Astorian is Michael Bellesaies

Page 62

Borgman discussing the purpose of peer review

Pre-publication mechanisms serve as expert filters on what becomes part of the scholarly record, when doing out there researchers reading list.

Page 60

The use of a publication form as a proxy measure for the quality of research productivity has distorted the peer-review system so severely that some consider it broken. Peer reviewing is an expensive process, requiring considerable time and attention of editors comma editorial board members, and other reviewers. Top journals in the sciences and medicine they put fewer than half of the submitted papers through a full P review process, rejecting the remainder on an initial editorial review, and ultimately publish 6 to 10% of the total submissions. Particularly in The Sciences, researchers are under so much pressure to place papers and talk to your journals that they submit them to the same journals, whether or not the content is appropriate.

Page 51

Calls preprints a guild publishing model

Page 47

Between the most public and private forms communication lies a wide range of channels and activities. Scholars communicate with each other not only through books and journals but also through manuscript, preprints, articles, abstract, reprints, seminars, and Conference presentations. Over the course of the 20th century, they interacted intensively in person, by telephone, and through the postal mail. Scholars in the 21st century continue to use those channels, while also communicating via email, dogs, and Chad. Need to send an Asian channels for written work include personal websites, preprint archives, and institutional repositories. An information infrastructure to support scholarship must facilitate these Myron means of communication. Scholars use the internet to communicate with more people, and more frequently, then was feasible in the days of paper and post. They can share much larger volumes of data and documents. The internet has led to more, faster, and cheaper communication among Scholars. Because anyone can publish online, the balance between authors, Publishers, and Librarians has shifted radically.... preserving the scholarly record is more difficult in a digital world than a print one, due to the rapid evolution of Technology, changes and intellectual property regulations, and new business models for publishing.

Page 47

Communication is the essence of scholarship comment as many observers have said in many ways. Scholarship is an inherently social activity, involving a wide range of private and public interactions within the research Community. Publication comment as the public report of research, is part of a continuous cycle of Reading, Writing, disgusting, searching, investigating, presenting, submitting, and reviewing. No scholarly publication stands alone. Each new work in a field his position relative to others through the process of citing relevant literature.

Page 47

Communication is the essence of scholarship comment as many observers have said in many ways.

Borgman gives bibliography of claims that scholarship is communication

Page 41

discussions of digital scholarship tend to distinguish implicitly or explicitly between data and documents. Some of you data and documents as a Continuum rather than a dichotomy in this sense data such as numbers images and observations are the initial products of research, and Publications are the final products that set research findings in context.

Pages 36 and 37

Boardman discusses Merton. Lots of references here to series of citation and networks of relationships among Scholars the other references they make to each other's work

Page 35

open science has been subjected to rigorous economic analysis and found to meet the needs of modern, market-based societies. As an economic framework open Science is based on the premise that scholarly information is a "public good." Public goods have two defining elements. One is that they can be shared without lessening their value; the economic term is non rival. Call David quotes Thomas Jefferson's eloquent statement in 1813 on this point: he who receives an idea from me comma receives instruction himself without lessening mine: as he who lights his paper at mine receives light without dark getting me. The second characteristic of public goods is that they are difficult and costly to hold exclusively while putting them to use semicolon the economic term is non-excludable.

Page 29

it is essential however to recognize that these new opportunities do not benefit all Scholars equally. Investments That Advantage some Scholars will disadvantage others. Technological Investments made her funds from field research, travel to libraries and archives where unique materials are held, and other forms of scholarship that are less dependent on a data-intensive infrastructure.

Page 29

benefits of digital scholarship are expected to approve not only to The Sciences and Technology but also to the social sciences and Humanities. They will accrue in different ways, due to the different types of data, research methods, and practices in these fields. The social sciences are becoming more data of intensive as they assemble records of computer-based communication and mine databases of demographic and economic data produced by government agencies. The humanities are building large computational models of cultural sites, digitizing archival and Museum records, and Mining cultural records that are being generated or converted to digital form around the world.

Page 28

Borgman discusses the invisible College of scientists

Page 22

Boardman argues that the term cyberspace was popularized by William Gibson in Neuromancer his 1984 novel

Page 17

Borgman argues that the term Digital Library causes trouble because it quote obscures the complex relationship between electronic information Collections and libraries as institutions.

Page 16

guessing domain names declined in Effectiveness as the ww.w grew in size, which is another example of the scaling problems of information retrieval.

I wonder if this is true. Did people really get domain names?

Page 13

Paul Otlet's bibliographic networks of the 1930s were a precursor to hypertext.

See Rayward 1991 1994 Wayward & Buckland 1992

A great paragraph here on the value of interconnection

scholarly data and documents are of most value when they are interconnected rather than independent. The outcomes of a research project could be understood most fully if it were possible to trace an important finding from a grant proposal, to data collection, to a data set, to its publication, to its subsequent review and comment period journal articles are more valuable if one can jump directly from the article to those insights into later articles that cite the source article. Articles are even more valuable if they provide links to data on which they are based. Some of these capabilities already are available, but their expansion depends more on the consistency of the data description, access arrangements, and intellectual property agreement then on technological advances.

I think here of the line from Jim Gill may all your problems be technical

Great quote here on how scholarship and knowledge mobilisation have difficulties interacting.

never the less, making content that was created for one audience useful to another is a complex problem. Each field has its own vocabulary, data structures, and research practices. People ask questions and different ways, starting with the mill your terminology. The repurposing of research data for teaching can be especially challenging. Scholars goals are to produce knowledge for their Community, while students goals are to learn from the concepts and tools of a given field. These two groups have different levels of expertise in both disciplinary knowledge and the use of data and information resources. Different descriptions tools and services may be required to share content between audiences.

Page 10

descriptions of Museum objects created for curatorial and research purposes are interesting to museum visitors.

Borgman on the intersection of popular Outreach / knowledge mobilisation and scholarship.

Page 10

little research has explored the Continuum from primary to secondary sources, much less the entire life cycle from data generation through the preservation of the scholarly products that set those data in context.

More from Borgman on the gradual collapsing of primary and secondary sources

p. 8-actually this is link to p. 7, since 8 is excluded

Another trend is the blurring of the distinction between primary sources, generally viewed as unprocessed or unanalysed data, and secondary sources that set data in context.

Good point about how this is a new thing. On the next page she discusses how we are now collpasing the traditional distinction between primary and secondary sources.

p. 6

Retrieval methods designed for small databases decline rapidly in effectiveness as collections grow...

This is an interesting point that is missed in the Distant reading controversies: its all very well to say that you prefer close reading, but close reading doesn't scale--or rather the methodologies used to decide what to close read were developed when big data didn't exist. How to you combine that when you can read everything. I.e. You close read Dickins because he's what survived the 19th C as being worth reading. But now, if we could recover everything from the 19th C how do you justify methodologically not looking more widely?

Discussion of the methodological difficulties involved in close reading: i.e. there is no such thing as "just reading."

Culler, Jonathan. 2010. “The Closeness of Close Reading.” ADE Bulletin, 20–25. doi:10.1632/ade.149.20.

Discussion of the methodology of close reading: middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: U of alabama P, 2005. Print.

Page 16

One benefit of traditional hermeneutical practices such as close reading is that the trained reader need not install anything, run any software, wrestle with settings, or wait for results. The experienced reader can just enjoy iteratively reading, thinking, and rereading. Similarly the reader of another person's interpretation, if the book being interpreted is at hand, can just pick it up, follow the references, and recapitulate the reading. To be as effective as close reading, analytical methods have to be significantly easier to apply and understand. They have to be like reading, or, better yet, a part of reading. Those invested in the use of digital analytics need to think differently about what is shown and what is hidden: the rhetorical presentation of analytics matters. Further, literary readers of interpretive works want to learn about the interpretation. Much of the literature in journals devoted to humanities computing suffers from being mostly about the computing; it is hard to find scholarship that is addressed to literary scholars and is based in computing practices.

Page 15

Rockwell and Sinclair on the importance of staying up-to-date on commercial developments in text mining and text-handling:

we are practicing thinking in the humanities while the way people read, the tools of reading, and information privacy and organization are shifting around us. These shifts matter. If we continue to treat textuality as a subject, we need to understand how text can be mined.

Page 15

Rockwell and Sinclair call for

a new kind of literacy that allows us to continue our pursuits as humanities scholars in the changing world we find ourselves in.

Page 14

Rockwell and Sinclair note that corporations are mining text including our email; as they say here:

more and more of our private textual correspondence is available for large-scale analysis and interpretation. We need to learn more about these methods to be able to think through the ethical, social, and political consequences. The humanities have traditions of engaging with issues of literacy, and big data should be not an exception. How to analyze interpret, and exploit big data are big problems for the humanities.

Page 14

Rockwell and Sinclair note that HTML and PDF documents account for 17.8% and 9.2% of (I think) all data on the web while images and movies account for 23.2% and 4.3%.

Pages 7-8

Rockwell and Sinclair talk here about developing an “agile hermeneutics” by which they mean an approach to fast/extreme writing. An example of this is that they tried to write a short essay in one day from the initial research but they also do things such as working in pairs with one person typing and the others talking things through.

Page 6

Computer-assisted research in the humanities, by contrast to the Cartesian story and traditional humanities practices, has almost always been collaborative. This is due to the variety of skills needed to implement digital humanities projects. It is also linked to the relationship between the practices of interpretation in the development of the tools of interpretation, be the tools for analyzing text or digital editions. Anyone who has used tools forged by another person is in collaboration, even if one isn't personally influencing the provider of the tools. The need to collaborate, though acknowledged in various ways, has been a professional hindrance, as anyone who submits a curriculum vitae for promotion listing nothing but co-authored papers knows.

Pages 6-7

Collaboration is not always good. It separates the interpreter/scholar from the designer/programmer who implements the scholarly methods. Willard McCarthy notes that the introduction of software "separated the conception of the problems (domain of the scholar) from the computational means of working them out (baliwick of the programmer) and so came at a significant cost.” As computing is introduced into research, it separates consumption, implementation, and interpretation in ways that can be overcome only through dialogue and collaboration across very different fields. Typically, humanities scholars know little about programming and software engineering, and programmers know little about humanities scholarship. Going it alone is an option only for the few who have time to master both. The rest of us and up depending on others.

Pages 1-2

… Practices are changing. Older forms of communal inquiry are being remixed into modern research. We have come to recognize how intellectual work is participatory even when it includes moments of solitary meditation. Internet conferencing tools allow us to remediate dialogical practices, collaborative communities such as Wikipedia and Twitter depend on contributions by a large group of users, and the communal research cultures of the arts collective or engineering lab are influencing the humanities. Accessible computing, data availability, and new media opportunities have provoked textual disciplines to think again about our practices and methods as we build digital libraries, process millions of books, and imagine research cyber-infrastructure that can support the next generation of scholars. We have recently begun imagining large-scale humanities-based projects that require a variety of skills for implementation – skills rarely found in a solitary scholar/programmer, let alone in a Cartesian humanist. We find ourselves working in teams, reflecting on how to best organize them and then reflecting on what it means to think through with others. This inevitably turns to methodological reflection that takes new media into account as we try to balance our traditional Cartesian values with the opportunities of open and communal work.

p. 141

Initially, the digital humanities consisted of the curation and analysis of data that were born digital, and the digitisation and archiving projects that sought to render analogue texts and material objects into digital forms that could be organised and searched and be subjects to basic forms of overarching, automated or guided analysis, such as summary visualisations of content or connections between documents, people or places. Subsequently, its advocates have argued that the field has evolved to provide more sophisticated tools for handling, searching, linking, sharing and analysing data that seek to complement and augment existing humanities methods, and facilitate traditional forms of interpretation and theory building, rather than replacing traditional methods or providing an empiricist or positivistic approach to humanities scholarship.

summary of history of digital humanities

p. 100

Data are not useful in and of themselves. They only have utility if meaning and value can be extracted from them. In other words, it is what is done with data that is important, not simply that they are generated. The whole of science is based on realising meaning and value from data. Making sense of scaled small data and big data poses new challenges. In the case of scaled small data, the challenge is linking together varied datasets to gain new insights and opening up the data to new analytical approaches being used in big data. With respect to big data, the challenge is coping with its abundance and exhaustivity (including sizeable amounts of data with low utility and value), timeliness and dynamism, messiness and uncertainty, high relationality, semi-structured or unstructured nature, and the fact that much of big data is generated with no specific question in mind or is a by-product of another activity. Indeed, until recently, data analysis techniques have primarily been designed to extract insights from scarce, static, clean and poorly relational datasets, scientifically sampled and adhering to strict assumptions (such as independence, stationarity, and normality), and generated and alanysed with a specific question in mind.

Good discussion of the different approaches allowed/required by small v. big data.

p. 86

25% of data stored in digital form in 2000 (the rest analogue; 94% by 2007

Kitchin, Rob. 2014. The Data Revolution. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Kitchin, Rob. 2014. The Data Revolution. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Structure of the fundamentals class

The structure of the camp

description of DHSI

Bialkowski, Voytek, Rebecca Niles, and Alan Galey. 2011. “The Digital Humanities Summer Institute and Extra-Institutional Modes of Engagement.” Faculty of Information Quarterly 3 (3): 19–29. http://current.ischool.utoronto.ca/system/files/pages/publications/fiq_3-3.pdf#page=19.

Most critical period for journals is 6-9 years. After year ten, the number of journals that stop drops quickly

Interesting charts showing the rise and then decline of independent, scholar-published OA journals

Average numbers of articles in OJS journals: 31

• 74% publish 0-30
• 9% 60 or more

Key issues facing scholar-published journals: can they ramp up; can they survive succession.

Bibliography of "independent journals"

Problems with Scholar-published journals

History of OA journals. Initially scholar-published, non-APC, post 2003 mostly APC-publisher-led journals

Abstract

Björk, Bo-Christer, Cenyu Shen, and Mikael Laakso. 2016. “A Longitudinal Study of Independent Scholar-Published Open Access Journals.” PeerJ 4 (May). peerj.com: e1990. doi:10.7717/peerj.1990.

McCain, Katherine W. 2014. “Assessing Obliteration by Incorporation in a Full-Text Database: JSTOR, Economics, and the Concept of ‘bounded Rationality.’” Scientometrics 101 (2). Springer Netherlands: 1445–59. doi:10.1007/s11192-014-1237-3.

Jänicke, S., G. Franzini, M. F. Cheema, and G. Scheuermann. n.d. “On Close and Distant Reading in Digital Humanities: A Survey and Future Challenges.”

Legg, Angela M., and Janie H. Wilson. 2012. “RateMyProfessors.com Offers Biased Evaluations.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 37 (1): 89–97. doi:10.1080/02602938.2010.507299.

Article used RMP questions in in-class surveys and then collected RMP results posted after the surveys were done. Found that the measures were different for the same questions in the two media,

Good rate my professors bibliography

This is the entrance to the edition

Security-forced obsolescence

Same issue here: these three siblings involve two different documents.

These take you to a different document

This is the conclusion of the chapter

Another interface code

More instructions on how to do things.

No background.

This table of contents doesn't reflect the actual document hierarchy: it looks like it is a new document, but it is part of the previous one. Higher up on the TOC, an indent at this level indicates a new document as well.

Doesn't discuss the reconstructions here, just tells you how to access them.

Lack of argumentation in the text by itself. I.e. he uses the repository to do the arguing.

Not really. Diplomatic transcription is also interpretative.

This is in fact shown by Kiernan's own use of symbols to describe the (also present) images: i.e. ...) lost at margin.

| to mark a line boundary

Another interesting bibliographic issue: this is a continuous, running, text of a chapter from a print book.

The addition of another UI convention

Great use of image processing to estimate what could be the conjectural readings.

Do tool tips identify this or do we need to remember this section?

A major option not on the option bar

Also shows up at the end of http://ebeowulf.uky.edu/studyingbeowulfs/optionaccesspoint#linenumbering

Broken sentence here. Not quite sure what the 1300 is.

Beowulf 3.0 text snuck through here.

This page is essentially identical to http://ebeowulf.uky.edu/studyingbeowulfs/overview except there this mistake was found.

Fuchs, Milena Žic. 2014. “The Future of Publications in the Humanities: Possible Impacts of Research Assessment.” In New Publication Cultures in the Humanities: Exploring the Paradigm Shift, edited by Péter Dávidházi, 147–71. Amsterdam University Press. http://books.google.ca/books/about/New_Publication_Cultures_in_the_Humaniti.html?hl=&id=4ffcoAEACAAJ.

Really interesting idea: do an analysis of humanities researchers in general (DARIAH) and Holocaust researchers in specific (EHRI). One is very heterogeneous, the other very homogeneous (at least in terms of working conditions and, broadly speaking, data sources).

description of "arts and humanities researchers"

Benardou, Agiatis, Panos Constantopoulos, and Costis Dallas. 2013. “An Approach to Analyzing Working Practices of Research Communities in the Humanities.” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 7 (1–2): 105–27. doi:10.3366/ijhac.2013.0084.

Exclusion criteria from "collaborator":

• those who make only minor or occasional contributions
• "those not seen as, or treated as, 'proper' researchers (e.g. technicians, research assistants)" [!]

Additional criteria for inclusion "sometimes":

• Those responsible for a key step
• original funder/proposer

Some core definitions:

• Those who work together through the duration of a project
• Those whose names appear on the original proposals
• Those responsible for one or more of the "main elements of the research (e.g. the experimental design, construction of research equipment, execution of the experiment, analysis and interpretation of the data, writing up of the results in a paper)."

ways of distinguishing collaborators from "other researchers."

"Unwieldy" being used as a criterion for deciding on what collaborators are.

Important bibliography on division of authorship credit

How credit for multi-authored papers is not fractional.

Productivity is dependent on the frequency of collaboration.

Hi productivity is correlated with high collaboration

Important bibliography

Lotka's rule of productivity: 1/n2

Coauthorship not 1:1 proxy for co-authorship

Types of collaboration

Actually, these are pretty weakly divided: I think there are really basically 4:

• Teacher-pupil,
• Colleague-colleague
• Researcher-technician
• Project-to-project

International collaboration

Inter-organisation collaboration

Really this could be better called "supervisor-technician" collaboration.

Collegial collaboration

Teacher-pupil collaboration

Subramanyam, K. 1983. “Bibliometric Studies of Research Collaboration: A Review.” J. Inf. Sci. Eng. 6 (1): 33–38.

Call not to be bound by legacy issues.

Data in digital scholarship

Obligation to explain your work.

p. 53

Discussion of collaboration in DH:

Collaboration is not, however, without its own problems and challenges, as scientific research practices have demonstrated. Aside from questions about how collaborative work will be reviewed for tenure and promotion, internal procedures for distributing authority, making editorial decisions, and apportioning credit (an especially crucial issue for graduate students and junior faculty) are typically worked out on a case-by-case basis with digital humanities projects.... Precedents worked out for scientific laboratories may not be appropriate for the digital humanities. While the lead scientist customarily receives authorship credit for all publications emerging from his laboratory, the digital humanities, with a stronger tradition of single authorship, may choose to craft very different kinds of protocols for deciding authorship credit, including giving <pb n="54"/>authorship credit (as opposed to acknowledgement) for the creative work of paid technical staff.

only 15.6% of authors reported that they matched all three ICMJE criteria. Approval was the one they missed most. 38.6% fit the first two criteria.

Evidence that medical writing is very different from other kinds of academic writing.

Argument for movie credit model

Really interesting discussion of how authorship requirements can be manipulated to hide influence.

Importance of drafting.

How industry uses the "sign off" requirement to avoid being named an author.

Why knowing authorship is important.

The medical writers also want credit.

Great question!

Different fields read authorship lists differently, meaning that the same placement can have different impacts on a career.

Focus on distinguishing

"The rule states that anyone that joins collaboration in good faith will be listed equally as an author, regardless of the relative contributions they end up making.

This has a list of guidelines about authorship in different disciplines, particularly the natural sciences.

Biagioli, Mario, and Peter Galison. 2002. Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science. Routledge.

Cronin, Blaise. 2001. “Hyperauthorship: A Postmodern Perversion or Evidence of a Structural Shift in Scholarly Communication Practices?” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 52 (7): 558–69. doi:10.1002/asi.1097.

This is a really important paper that anticipates a lot of the arguments I made in my 2013 Force11 talk.

It discusses a history of what authorship means, glances at the idea that the use of "authorship fetishes writing, discusses how other schemes have made contribution much more important, and concludes with a discussion of differences between High Energy Physics and Biomedicine.

Argues in the end weakly for a contributor model for those fields in which authorship can no longer capture the value of the cognitive labour involved in science.

authorship is associated with writing and remains the core of the standard model

Critical theorists may question the "prestige of authorship," but there is little doubt that the material consequences are more far reaching than they were in ancient times.

Actually, this is a misreading of Foucault, who discusses the economic implications of authorship.

Winston, Roger B. 1985. “A Suggested Procedure for Determining Order of Authorship In Research Publications.” Journal of Counseling & Development 63 (8): 515–18. doi:10.1002/j.1556-6676.1985.tb02749.x.

Interesting discussion of typology of credit and a point system attached to it. A nice alternative to the Fermilab approach perhaps!

Also has some Social Science bibliography from the 1980s on how to determine authorship credit.

Foucault, Michel. 1979. “Authorship: What Is an Author?” Screen 20 (1): 13–34. doi:10.1093/screen/20.1.13.

Really interesting and far ranging essay about authorship. Shows how literary authorship is really a function: i.e. a thing we use to capture assumptions about ethical background to an oeuvre. Makes a number of useful distinctions among genres and the like in this regard,

A very interesting discussion has to do with "initiators of discursive practices," which are in a certain sense the Humanities equivalent of Kuhn's paradigm shifters. He argues though, that people like Freud and Marx establish practices to which we "return," rather than disciplines that we refine (as he argues they do in science). This is not 100% true, in the sense that evolution is a theory in the Freudian sense, especially when it manifests itself as evolutionary psychology. But it is largely true, in the sense that there is less to be gained in rereading Galileo than in rereading Freud. (Although these line up roughly on a humanities/science division, it isn't 100%: I'd argue that oral formulaicism is more like Galileo than Freud, for example, while Darwin is more like Freud).

An interesting companion to this is Fish 1988, where he argues against blind peer review in the humanities. He uses examples of other discourse initiators, like Frye, for example, to argue that their opinions are more important than others because of who they are.

In my own notes, thinking about the article on scientific authorship, I developed the idea of Oeuvre as a key distinction between this kind of authorship and scientific authorship.

This is not true (in theory) of scientific authorship. We don't judge the coherence of the oeuvre.

Again it conflict with Fish's view of literary criticism

This is very interesting, because it brings in Booth's Implied Author (i.e., basically, the "Author brand"). For literature, this is a real thing. We are interested in specific canons and ouevres because we like them and are attracted to the implied author they represent. But in Science writing, there should not be a similar implied author--in the sense that we shouldn't find science better because one person and wrote it and not another; we don't see science in terms of the ouevre of the author, but rather the instance of the work.

This then finally, ties to Fish's point about how anonymity is not appropriate to literary criticism: he sees the existence of an ouevre being relevant there in a way it shouldn't be in science.

Great answer!

Ties the discussion of ecriture to derrida.

Great epigraph for article on scientific authorship

We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions: 'Who is the real author?' 'Have we proof of his authenticity and originality?' 'What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?' New questions will be heard: 'What are the modes of existence of this discourse?' 'Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it,' 'What placements are determined for possible subjects?' 'Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?' Behind all these questions we would hear little more than the murmur of indifference: 'What matter who's speaking?'

A nice summary of the difference between "return" in a new discourse, and "revision" in a new science.

This is a more convincing difference: practitioners of new discourses return to their founding documents in a way that practitioners of new disciplines do not.

This is a basic methodological difference between science and the humanities, however, and it helps explain why Darwinism is in some ways really a branch of the humanities: it is a theory you come back to rather than an observation.

Oral formulaic theory, on the other hand, is more like the scientific discipline: no need to go back to Parry and Lord.

On the difference between scientific and discursive schools. I don't find it convincing.

Don't find this a convincing distinction, I must say.

Paradigm shifts are part of the science that follows (i.e. are filled in by normal science, in Kuhn's terms).

How initiators of discursive practices are different from founders of scientific schools or disciplines.

How Freud and Marx shift the paradigm: "not only made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but, as importantly, they also made possible a certain number of differences."

I don't find the "differences" part convincingly expressed, but I think he means that they created domain-boundaries: not just, "here's the id, you can use it" but also "hey, we can analyse dreams."

Really useful passage to compare to Kuhn. This is basically an argument about paradigm shifters and normal science as applied to literature.

Has another category: people like Marx and Freud (and I'd say Darwin) who constructed theories that are productive in other works as well. These are "initiators or discursive practices."

This ties in well with Kuhn's paradigms.

Nice move. Identifies authors of movements as well: could include Homer, Artistotle, church fathers

Four characteristics of the "author-function":

1. "the 'author-function' is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine,and articulate the realm of discourses;"
2. "it does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture";
3. "it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures";
4. it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual in so far as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to aseries of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy"

Hmmm. Argues for a "second self" in scientific writing.

1. I'm not sure this kind of first person is that common (though it is common in literary criticism);
2. If it is, I'm not sure there is a distinction between the author and some narrator-type figure or his third category (the person who speaks of the goals of the investigation (an implied author?)).

There you go: he means that grammar changes in all texts that support the "author-function". Somehow he distinguishes this from simply "poetic texts," but I'm not sure why or how.

Grammar has different meaning with fictional author and non-author texts: in the second case (not fiction), the grammar is deictic; in the former, it is literary.

This is a really interesting point, by I think MF is confusing terms a little. the issue has to do with the deictic nature of the text rather than the availability of an author-attribution (unless he means "literary author of the kind I've been discussing as an author-function").

Jerome's criteria that rule out an authorship attribution:

1. Author as standard of quality (work is less good than you'd expect)
2. Author is field of conceptual or theoretical coherence (i.e. this work disagrees with some other work by the person)
3. Stylistic uniformity (written in different style)
4. Temporal unit (i.e. written before or after the author's known life).

Fish, Stanley. 1988. “Guest Column: No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission.” PMLA 103 (5): 739–48. http://www.jstor.org/stable/462513.

An interesting essay in the context I'm reading it (alongside Foucault's What is an author in preparation for a discussion of scientific authorship.

Among the interesting things about it are the way it encapsulates a distinction between the humanities and sciences in method (though Fish doesn't see it and it comes back to bite him in the Sokol affair). What Frye thinks is important because he is an author-function in Foucault's terms, I.e. a discourse initiator to whom we return for new insight.

Fish cites Peters and Ceci 1982 on peer review, and sides with those who argue that ethos should count in review of science as well.

Also interesting for an illustration of how much the field changed, from new criticism in the 1970s (when the first draft was written) until "now" i.e. 1989 when political criticism is the norm.

How much literary criticism changed between 1979, 1982, and 1988! From ontological wholes to politicised

creating an implied author in peer review

Fish reporting on the minority in response to Peters and Ceci who argued that track records should count in peer review of science

Peters & Ceci 1982 comes up!

Again definition by exclusion

Colonisation of Milton by the Spenser society. Anxiety of Influence among scholarly societies.

The creation of the Spenser industry: how communities create fields

On the creative nature of literary criticism

author-function at work: Frye is an author-concept and his work is a coherent whole--an Oeuvre.

This is absolutely fine for literary criticism and the humanities. The same is in practice true of the sciences--what Steven Hawking says about physics is more interesting than other people, especially if he reverses his previous claims. But in contrast to Frye, where a reversal is a change in the discursive practice (cf. Foucault), in the case of science, it should not be the case that hearing a "great man" reverse himself is more significant than hearing an unknown post-doc. The reversal should be evidence-based.

merit is fashioned by communal practice

on the necessity of discovering virtue in literary work as a professional convention of our discipline.

This is a really interesting and useful passage for my first year lectures

On the role of professionalism in enforcing community standards:

[T]o be unprofessional is not simply to have violated some external rule or piece of decorum. It is to have ignored (and by ignoring flouted) the process by which the institution determines the conditions under which its rewards will be given or withheld. These conditions are nowhere written down, but they are understood by everyone who works in the field and, indeed, any understanding one might have of the field is inseparable from (because it will have been produced by) an awareness, often tacit, of these conditions

This is very applicable to scientific authorship

Convention is a way of acknowledging we are engaged in a community activity in which the value of one's work is directly related to the work that has been done by others.

Interesting riff on professionalism in this whole paragraph.

People are able to define merit by its absence... like excellence.

Fish arguing that intrinsic merit doesn't exist

Discussion of debate at MLA about plan to introduce blind submission to PMLA and comparison with sciences and social sciences.