Clayfox has never been deluged with comments, despite some provocatively insouciant — if not downright ignorant — claims. It’s a quiet place, this blog, offering arcane pondering that trips barely a ripple in the chat-o-sphere. But let’s consider quality as an inverse of quantity. Indeed, I’ve been honored to net responses from a few mindful colleagues, nostalgic friends, quizzical strangers, and producers of a couple of the projects touched on here — reacting to or extending my quick generalizations.

Spam has been kept largely at bay by the popular Wordpress plugin Spam Karma 2. Dr. Dave gets fooled once in a great while — I too was an early sucker for those “I love your blog!” Trojan insincerities — but on the whole, he’s been a valiant defender against relentless bots, and commentary has been a quiet and easily managed thing here.

So why change what ain’t broke? Walking home, listening to a Digital Campus podcast (another fine offering from George Mason’s CHNM, oft-mentioned here), I heard about a little validation program that is such clever good citizenship, I had to install it: reCAPTCHA.

You’ve doubtless already proven to a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) that you’re a human being, not a computer bot, while submitting a comment or voting in a poll or registering for something online. CAPTCHAs are those funny distorted words that you’re asked to type out, using powers of discernment that extend beyond an optical character recognition (OCR) program.

reCAPTCHA’s twist is that it uses actual ‘rejects’ from OCR processing — image patches of text that OCR software isn’t sure what to make of during digitization — and works these mystery patches into the validation process. It is up to you, flesh and blood, to recognize the distorted word and type it back. When you ’solve’ a reCAPTCHA to post a comment, say, you’re also contributing human brainpower to the digitization of a book in the Internet Archive . The reCAPTCHA motto conveys the doubleplay: “Stop Spam. Read Books.”

This is just a picture. For a true reCAPTCHA experience, you’ll have to post a comment.

You might wonder how much effect your little ’solution’ has in the scheme of things. reCAPTCHA claims that 60 million CAPTCHAs are daily solved: that’s a lot of blurry text getting cleared up, a steady current of human recognition. You may also wonder how reCAPTCHA determines that your submitted solution is correct. The key is delivering two words to you to ’solve’ at once: a word for which the answer is known, and a word that can’t be determined by OCR. If you correctly solve the ‘known’ word, reCAPTCHA has more confidence in your solution of the mystery word, and compares your solution to other presumed correct solutions of the word.

So that’s what you’re doing, should you favor Clayfox with a comment going forward: proving your human identity while hastening along the migration from print. Oh, and you’ll be registering — at least here — what you thought.

The web is spinning ever-faster, shards of content are scattering every which way, RSS and podcast feeds radiate in all directions, each new day brings new ways of grabbing & saving & sharing digital bits shorn of context.

It can seem so… centrifugal. Now that web content has slopped out all over the place, churning and reprocessing itself in a puppydog frenzy to deliver customized services, we might take a nostalgic moment to recall when “webmasters” published “pages” that we “surfed.” Somehow, while you were downloading that mp3, emailing your baby pics to all and sundry, setting up your personalized sports news alerts, punching up maps in your car — the very notion of a website became quaint.

To defenders of edifices and books and beautiful places, the 2.0 web world might seem a wilderness of fleeting, fractured signification: a million ephemeral pokes. Of course the web is still designed, even triumphantly, but that architecture is more likely to be in the form of submerged code — design that delivers a teeming, unfixed front end, the on-the-fly, just-in-time, gotta-go whimsies of what I want at the moment.

Two ways of plucking at the web at will — as if it were a lo-fat all-you-can-eat banquet — crossed my path lately. The first, Clipmarks (”Just the best parts of the page”), offers a browser-integrated clipping tool that will grab words, paragraphs, selected images, even video posted on YouTube & its ilk. The Clipmarks demo says it all, and will only detain you for 49 seconds:

The Clipmarks Vision celebrates reach-for-scissors epiphanies, “moments that snap people out of a day dream.” A Bartlett’s Familiar Quotes dream, that is:

Think about when John Kennedy said “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” That line was part of a much longer speech. Imagine if instead of being able to clip that line from the speech, people were forced to listen to the entire speech every time.

Now imagine if that was a web page. What if you were forced to bookmark the entire page, but you really wanted to clip the part that mattered most. How many people would have the time or attention span for the whole thing?

We believe that information is easier and more enjoyable to digest in small portions. Kind of like movie trailers, sushi and cliff notes.

Armed with virtual scissors, web readers are less passive, less hostage to what someone else packaged, less hostage to the ‘writerly,’ as Barthes might suggest from the grave. But is improved appropriation of web content leading to a world of Cliff Notes movie trailers with the shelf life of sushi? Or, more portentously, “obnoxious, mean-spirited dialogue” conducted by anonymous clippers, fueled by uncertainly sourced and possibly stolen material?

Fortunately not every such tool is so blithely delivered into the Whatever Zone. The second grab-it tool coming across the transom recently is more purposeful in emphasis: MediaMatrix, developed at Michigan State University.

In an informative video introducing MediaMaker (a video that, ironically, can’t be easily embedded inline here), we see similarities to Clipmarks: server-side application, browser integration, links-driven. The difference here is that clipped objects load into an editor that encourages annotation, resizing, cropping, notes association, and metadata assignment. Streaming audio and video can be segmented without actually being copied or downloaded — through clever use of just URLs and text parameters. This is sophisticated, task-oriented clipping of media that Clipmarks can only dream about (at 3 a.m., drooling into its Cliffnotes).

With the exception of text, which can be custom-selected, Clipmarks grabs elements in the form that they have been fixed on a webpage (the image, the video, the song as is). MediaMatrix, on the other hand, lets you edit those elements for yourself: it lets you create out of what you collect, even as it encourages responsible tracking and attribution through “metadata skins” that appear during the annotation process.

A clipped sound file is edited on MediaMatrix

MediaMatrix encourages metadata application

But what then happens to your MediaMatrix clip-derived creations? Well, they hang like fruit on an individual’s “tree”…

Clipped and edited assets hang on a MediaMatrix tree

…and await plucking into essay/presentation spaces:

A MediaMatrix workspace, where one prepares presentations or multimedia essays

It’s here, oddly, where MediaMatrix starts to feel outpaced by the bubbleheaded Clipmarks. We’ve had recent occasion to think about centralized versus distributed models of publication; here we have a comparison that exemplifies the dichotomy. MediaMatrix imagines that you will collect and analyze the assets you’ve plucked out of various contexts within a rather gloomy, solitary, pre-formulated workspace. It’s a one-way ride: bits and pieces come out of the web and get imprisoned in “my portal”; if you want to work with them, you have to use MediaMatrix editing tools in a MediaMatrix environment. To publish your work, the best you can do is send out a URL that draws right back to MediaMatrix. What happens in MediaMatrix stays in MediaMatrix.

Clipmarks, in the other hand, cheerfully offers you any number of ways to fling your clipped treasures in any direction. You can save them on their site (and share them with fellow clippers, tossing them up into the communal winds to see what happens — sociability entirely lost on MediaMatrix), or you can push them to your email client, your printer, even your blog (a connection that was fairly easy for me to configure).

Where do you want it? Clipmarks sends your selection any which way.

Clipmarks frankly doesn’t care much about what happens to what you’ve clipped — leaving options for you if you do. Route your purloined selections of web content to the publication platform of your choice, private or public, online or off.

While we’re waiting for perfect digital object recontextualization engine, one that mashes up Clipmarks’s flexible and social publication with MediaMatrix’s editing power, analytic focus, and sense of responsibility, we might think about how to emphasize new wholes out of digital fragmentation. When “the torch has been passed to a new generation,” it will have to know about how to create connections with virtual splinters; “divided there is little we can do.” It is with an exhortative spirit that I clip here the whole Kennedy inauguration address, grabbed in two pieces from YouTube:

Participatory is the lodestare for those trying to steer the social networking juggernaut towards actual improvement of education. As described in Henry Jenkins’s Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (a white paper on the MacArthur Digital Media Learning site), participatory culture is our technologically-delivered hope for banishing passivity, instilling the kind of know-how that comes with activity, and promoting critical judgment about media.

Today, YouTube; tomorrow, MyYouTubeSpace? I’ve pulled together a little demonstration of something that can be done today with the greatest of ease, something that does its part to elevate video out of the realm of slack-jawed consumption. A slick little new service called Mojiti allows you to write captions and overlay them onto video that has been previously created and posted. Mojiti, then, lets you annotate someone else’s video–which is a way of claiming it, analyzing it, perhaps even transforming it. Participating.

Here’s an example. Before seeing it scribbled over, have a look at my victim-video, a little snippet from The Daily Show (via YouTube) that lampoons social networking websites. It’s mighty entertaining unto itself, and it features an upcoming star of our University Seminar series, Siva Vaidhyanathan:

And now have a look at my annotated version of the very same video. As you’ll see, I’ve discovered a hidden subtext to the piece - watch with amazement as I prove it to you!

I rest my case.

If you agree that Wikipedia presents more thorns than roses to academic experts, you have good company: one of Wikipedia’s two founders.

The split between Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger has a certain Old Testament character: Wales (the Web 2.0 brother) reigns over the miraculous worldwide flourishing of the anonymously and communally edited encyclopedia that nobody predicted, while Sanger wanders in the web wilderness, in stubborn pursuit of distinctly pre-2.0 constructs of expertise.

Nupedia, Sanger’s original attempt to build an expert-authored online encyclopedia (and the predecessor of Wikipedia) crashed and burned. Now Sanger’s back with a similar idea: a “progressive fork” off of Wikipedia called Citizendium. His vision of harnessing “educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly” into rival encyclopedia generation awaits you here.

In Sanger’s new scenario, regular Joes and Janes would be welcome to pitch into Citizendium as long as they deferred to ‘editors’: subject-area specialists who “meet certain benchmark requirements–the same straight-up credentials that the offline world relies on.” These expert editors would claim the right to patrol topics by flashing credentials. If several editors with the right credentials claimed a topic, well, “the more the merrier”: disputes among them would be settled “by discipline-oriented editorial workgroups” that would be “staffed only by editors.”

Wikipedian anonymity is quite obviously out of the question here. If the world of Wikipedia is mythically flat — built by faceless if not selfless peers — Citizendium is stunningly hierarchical, as if brandishing one’s identity could settle most any question of authority. One can easily imagine, though, a “straight-up credentials” demolition derby: institutions impugned, publications trashed, countries belittled, research areas broadswiped. If the offline world relies on credentials, it also relies on heterogeneity, microclimates, and quite local constructs of authority.

Citizendium would begin by mirroring Wikipedia, and, presumably, refine this populist chaff into premium wheat. Expertise standing on the shoulders of undifferentiated pygmies, as it were. And since Citizendium content would be freely available under the GNU Free Documentation License, Wikipedia could in theory suck the refined content back into itself, without directly compromising on its disdain for egghead experts.

The reigning smackdown of Citizendium is Clay Shirky’s blog post last month entitled Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise — a precise attack that drew a defensive response from Sanger. I generally agree with Shirky, who sees disaster looming in Sanger’s dream of a self-certifying expertocracy shorn of institutional context. Shirky’s concluding dismissal, however, gives me pause:

Sanger is an incrementalist, and assumes that the current institutional framework for credentialling experts and giving them authority can largely be preserved in a process that is open and communally supported. The problem with incrementalism is that the very costs of being an institution, with the significant overhead of process, creates a U curve — it’s good to be a functioning hierarchy, and its good to be a functioning community with a core group, but most of the hybrids are less fit than either of the end points.

Such categorization is ominous for any of us skating the half-pipe of that ‘U’: those of us, that is, applying social software to learning environments. Ours is a hierarchical world, we want to build communally supported processes: are we doomed to hybrid mush? Admittedly, even the most starry-eyed 2.0 prophets have trouble describing how communal software is to work its magic, once it’s scooped out of the vast flickring seas and let loose within the tiny microclimate of a classroom. Yochai Benkler, for example, says much about networked production of educational texts, but little about peer production within a class (in, for example, his article Common Wisdom:. Peer Production of Educational Materials).

If social software depends on scale — the happy fact of human diversity that guarantees that someone, somewhere, is bound to perform a necessary function — then what happens when your field is winnowed down to, say, eight bright-eyed students with the same major? If your software is thoughtlessly cribbed from a quite different environment, one that depends on scale or interconnection that is foreign or even inimical to a classroom, you’re courting failure. Shirky’s notion of situated software — “small, purpose-built apps” — is well worth bearing in mind in this respect.

Whatever the tool it’s using, customized or off-the-rack, a classroom exists in a microclimate that consists not just of a gaggle of students, however skilled and productively interactive — it also contains a super-entity, an authority akin to Sanger’s editor: the credentialed teacher (and plenty of other shadowy figures behind her — but we won’t go into that here). Whatever is peer-produced in such an environment will be some fairly complicated blend of authoritative fiat and collaborative discovery. It will be as forced as it is fortuitous — a provenance quite different from Wikipedia, but perhaps a bit like Citizendium. However quixotic Sanger’s dream of expertise within a collaborative framework may seem, and however displaced onto a grudge match with Wikipedia it may be, it is worth tracking from the curvy heart of the U.

Yo, can I borrow your notes?

Harkening back to the salad days of college, I seem to remember a free-floating faith in the power of someone else’s notes to fill in cracks of attendance & attention. I doubt that much significant learning took place in power-cramming sessions entirely reliant on someone else’s diligently indented transcription of wisdom. But I’m struck now, thinking back, by the instinct to herd together in such situations.

A study tool named stu.dicio.us has recently made its debut, promising del.icio.us-like value through aggregation of communal effort. Now maybe some stranger from West Virginia Tech will save you from the consequences of having slept through Chemistry. Or maybe that concept your prof seems so fond of has been dropped in another class somewhere, in a context just different enough to fuel your next paper. Or maybe you can meet that hottie on the far side of the lecture hall because you’ve done a search limited to your school and this class and lo & behold here you both are, believing in the power of networking your notes.

Sharing notes is not cheating, insists stu.dicio.us. Everyone should have every advantage possible in increasing individual knowledge. The site rather mysteriously claims to be created for students, by students, and is rather predictably in beta.

There are bugs, and slender participation makes any 2.0 service like this awkward at first, but give it time. After a little tour, I think that stu.dicio.us is actually more useful for its lightweight organizational tools. There’s a sortable todo function – handy even if you aren’t interested in checking peers’ todos. The basic Textile formatting for notes encourages precision (see this testimony), and auto-save is built in. You can use simple brackets for auto-links to Wikipedia, Google, or Google scholar. You can upload files and access them whenever you want –as long as the service remains online. For those times when you can’t get online, stu.dicio.us offers an offline mode.

Here are a couple of screenshots. First, my fake schedule, with grades, notes, files, todos, and (sadly) no friends. This would be useful, I’d say, especially if it were within a course management environment:

… and someone’s notes, which i found by doing a search for history and columbia:

Enlightening? I doubt it – but misery does love company – and if you’re casting around randomly for any mention of history in anyone’s notes, chances are that you’re feeling a bit miserable.

You’ve wrangled that paper to a plausible conclusion — a bit of sleep is just around the corner — but hold on, not so fast, you’re Sisyphus after all. Citation formatting is a special curse, the inane labor at the end of hard work that holds all your effort hostage. Never does it seem less true that it’s the thought that counts.

The best portrait of this frustration that I know is Louis Menand’s New Yorker article from three years back, “The End Matter; The Nightmare of Citation.” (And no, I won’t properly cite it.) Menand mobilizes here a full sense of the tyranny that must be endured in the construction of endnotes —

Every error is an error of substance, a betrayal of ignorance and inexperience, the academic equivalent of the double dribble. That the decorums of citation are the arbitrary residue of ancient pedantries whose raisons d’etre are long past reconstructing does not reduce the penalties for nonconformity.

Surely technology should free us from such tiresome finish-line ambushes. And yet, as Menand observes,

The notion that the personal computer has eliminated the bone-crushing inefficiency of the typewriter, and turned composing The End Matter into a drive in the word-processing park, belongs to the myth that all work on a computer is “fun”-one of the Digital Age’s cruellest jokes.

Microsoft Word, as Menand observes, is too often a baffling mess when it comes to foot/endnote generation, plaguing you with random formatting and automatically generated annoyances. Too many options: the exhauster citer just wants to be faultless and to be done.

EndNote — which is a plug-in in my version of MS Word — might seem to be a lifesaver. Indeed, many of us have been happy to sit through earnest training in this and similar tools, entranced by the promise of metadata pulled down from a network, stored in a local database, and spit back out, effortlessly, into formatted endnotes. Oh, you wanted APA 5th, not Turabian? Hold on just a sec - (click, click) - here you go! Choose a style, any style: here are 1012 to choose from!

And yet, in my personal experience, EndNote endnotes are chock full of flaws. I’m not here to assign blame — maybe it was an incomplete OPAC record, maybe the library filter was off, maybe EndNote dropped a field — at the end of the day (rather, the night), citations are liable to look like nothing in that overstuffed, unloved red style manual (which is all but impervious, anyway, to the need to cite digital sources). Back to fixing, fretting, fudging. Only EndNote is liable to overwrite your corrections: surprise!

And yet the dream of escaping such frustrations through technology won’t die — and shouldn’t. It seems only fair that our Babylonian predicaments be ameliorated, at least somewhat, by computers–our vast interconnected ever-churning never-complaining prostheses.

George Mason’s Center for History & New Media (a seemingly ever-inventive group) has had a promising tool chugging down the pike for some time that offers a new glimmer of hope. It manages citations and other research information in a web environment. When first I heard about it , they were calling this tool Firefox Scholar – now it’s been rebranded to Zotero: a term loosely based on the Albanian word for acquiring/mastering. Whatever – let’s trust that this promising project will prove to be less obscure than such an etymology.

From what I can tell from the description of Zotero, bennies include:

• Ability to capture & store PDFs, files, images, links, web pages in a browser platform.
• A range of organization options, including folders & tagging & ’smart’ collections.
• iTunes-like interface.
• Spotlight-like search-as-you-type.

…and, most relevant here:

• Ability to sniff out a citation on a web page & capture it to your library
• Citation export.

Zotero works with Firefox to sense when you are visiting a page with full bibliographic data (like an OPAC) and offers a little book icon; click it, and citation material comes flying into your computer.

Since suddenly there’s a profusion of browser-based store-organize-share tools (SOS?) for scholars, Zotero will be all the more valuable if it can be jiggered to play with academic social software like Connotea or the aforeglimpsed CiteULike – and, while we’re dreaming, if it can feed stored items into networked repositories. Since it’s free and open source, one can imagine any kind of evolution for this “next generation research tool.”

Will researching and citing on the web actually get a little easier? We’ll see – Zotero is in private beta now, but should be in public beta by the end of the month.

…the trumpet that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler.

That’s Thomas DeQuincey, mourning the shift of nineteenth century mail delivery from horse to locomotive. The definitive social history of mail — which has yet to be written, as far as I can tell — will doubtless ride DeQuincey’s essay The English Mail-Coach, or, The Glory of Motion. It’s an incredible and reckless piece, connecting war, class, nostalgia, sublimity, and disaster into an ever-quickening system of transmission.

I’ve never read anything quite like the passage in section II when, riding on a night mail coach that is being driven by a one-eyed coachman who has nodded off — and whacked out on laudanum himself — DeQuincey trips out helplessly as the mail coach drifts into the wrong lane, bears down onto a little carriage carrying two lovers, smashes into it, *and keeps going.*

Though DeQuincey is enthralled by the inexorable post horses, and seems to deplore the trains that replaced them, in truth his horses are mechanistic in the first place–prosthetic beyond control–representative of human will that can’t be reigned in. And if steel rails prevent loverslane smashups, they facilitate all the more the inhuman speed that makes delivery a sublime business.

So transmission keeps quickening. Now it’s so fast, the very notion of delivery is starting to creak. Trains supplanted horses. Planes outpaced the trains. Email outmoded mail. Now, at least for the hungry generation treading us down, instant messaging is nudging out email. Ever notice that it’s not ‘instant mailing?’ When delivery time is whittled down to instantaneous, we seem beyond mail altogether, and we’re even more and even less in control.

Whenever I used to hear a graybeard greet the idea of email with bafflement or hostility, I would be baffled in turn: who wouldn’t want to cut out the stamps, the delays, the deferred gratification of snailmail? Email is free (ok, free with an internet connection and the time it took to set up an account), archivable, portable — email is good.

But now, confronted with instant messaging, I feel like a graybeard. I don’t want to be that accessible. I want windows of privacy, I want time to react, I want to consider considered replies. Combining IM with work has always made me feel rather like an outsourced customer service drone, forced to click a screen within 15 seconds to prove I’m paying attention. Combining IM with friends has always felt wasteful — too many snappy words whose wit wilts as fast as they’re replaced.

And yet, truth be told, just as DeQuincey’s horses and trains were stages of the same rush, so are email and instant messaging. Now that my mail swims a networked world, it made eminent sense to move my email to Gmail’s excellent platform (privacy qualms and data hostage threats notwithstanding). Exporting email that was hitherto locked up on my Mac was a chore, but doable, and now I can call up most anything that was ever sent to me, no matter where I am. Whenever I’m online a gentle Growl notification flashes a snippet of incoming mail, and Google has added chat right into their Gmail page.

So… I’m directly patched into a live network whenever I’m online. Yes, IM directly patched. Everything is imminently available. Growl: response. All this mechanized speed — Gmail is my latest surprise machine — and if I’m not careful… if I reply rashly… if I bungle an address…. Or if Google vaporizes my account… or if Gmail should crash altogether ….

The perilous instantaneous — I leave you with a bit from Jeffrey T. Schnapp’s fine essay “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)” (Modernism/Modernity 6.1 (1999) 1-49):

Whether in the logic of amusement parks, modern transportation cultures, revolutionary movements, news media, or the cultural-political avant-gardes, thrill must follow thrill. Which means that accident must follow accident. De Quincey moves from mail-coaches to opiates; Marinetti from cars to airplanes to war; the thrill rider from attraction to attraction; the revolutionary dreams of permanent revolution.

Anyone looking for a snapshot of the way digital communication is accepted (or not) as a viable part of the traditional scholarly process should hie, forthwith, to Ulises Ali Mejias’s discussion on his Ideant blog: “The Blog as Dissertation Literature Review?” and a followup post.

Mejias is a doctoral candidate specializing in education and technology, so it’s quite understandable that he chooses to ponder the academic value of social software on his blog. And the payoff is vivid: he draws two critical comments from the authors of the article he most engages, “Scholars Before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation” (2005).

The argument is lively enough — mercifully light on eduspeak — and I won’t spill cyberink retracing it completely. Mejias thinks about the function of that fine old ground-clearing of dissertations, the literature review, and argues for the efficacy of doing it within the framework of a blog. Why? Blogs are dynamic, flexibly tended and amended, self-catagorizable, dynamic, widely accessible, and open to (please can’t this word die?) feedback. Moreover, bibliographic lists can be interlinked with critical assessments of their worth (as Mejias demonstrates).

The responses of the two authors of the study that Mejias cites throughout the post, a librarian and a professor, are fascinating.

The librarian deplores the slippage of standards — she seems most exercised that she was not properly cited in Mejias’s post, but she also airs concerns that a digital environment is too unfixed — To fulfill the role and purpose of a dissertation, the literature review by nature is temporally bound and must reflect the work of an author at some point in time — and too open to comment and reaction from beyond the walls of academe — Who is his audience? Do they have the requisite authority to vet his work? By definition, a doctoral student’s peers are his or her fellow doctoral students, yet a doctoral candidate is writing for academicians to gain acceptance into their community. The heart of scholarly publication is review of the work by recognized authorities in the field.

What stands out for me here is this respondent’s treatment of a blog as uniquely uncontrollable — as if parameters of audience, commenting permissions, and posting timeframes were beyond anyone’s control. Sure, many a prof will resist spending the time it takes to learn about a new communication technology and how it can be adapted for traditional ends (that’s not yet what rewards professors), but this resistance to digital communication should not be confused with the defense of standards. Here is what seems like a promising recipe for dissertation literature evaluation to me: a blog bundled with citational management software, with levels of access and commentary defined, and — we’re dreaming here — integration with next-gen citation indexes and visualization tools. Who would argue that a broad discussion with a thesis advisor about core texts, pertinent categorization, and the scope and value of outside “feedback” would not be a fine way to kick off a dissertation project?

The professor respondent engages in some higher level handwringing: he rues that Mejias seems to be writing off the ’social’ reach of traditional scholarship. As I think about my own graduate education and beyond, I see much of the same activity you claim to be novel on your blog – I drafted and circulated manuscripts for classes and colloquia, I presented papers at conferences large and small, I sent my papers to experts in my fields, and I submitted them to journals for review. Along the way I developed my ideas and, if I was lucky, got critical feedback on them. (Technologies come and go, but it seems we’re forever stuck with feedback. ) It’s a shame, this professor suggests, that grad students only imagine themselves as writing just for a dissertation committee, rather than contributing to broader endeavors, and squandering whatever faith they may have in social dynamics into blogs: I accept the possibility that blogging may help novice scholars and researchers as they seek to become socialized in their field. But I will assert that blogging, by itself, is nowhere near sufficient for this purpose.

Of course, Microsoft Word (or, to frame this in parallel, word processing) is nowhere near sufficient for that purpose either — yet I suspect many poor grad students use this tool to assemble elements of their dissertation. I fail to understand how an advance in organization and dissemination — in content management — turns into a true threat to scholarly standards. I’m under 40 (not by much, but still), yet I can remember typing college papers (now mouldering in some box) by hand, and researching my dissertation by writing reams of notes (now mouldering in some box) by hand. I can also remember the long lines outside a superstar professor’s office — the hurried and sometimes random consultations — the way one’s fate is held hostage by overloaded advisors.

Who would seriously begrudge a better way to store, retrieve, and air ideas? Is the process of writing a dissertation not bolstered by reaction from other scholars online, from peers at one’s stage of development, from Aunt Tillie in Florida who is the world’s last opponent of the dangling participle? Do advisors really believe that their hold on students is so tenuous that mere statistics — page views, machine-counted citations — and outside exposure will debilitate their control of a project? Is the portability of a student’s research into future assemblages of material for teaching and beyond-the-diss projects not worth consideration? Distributed learning and evaluation is barreling down the pike (see, for example, Biology Direct interesting peer review process - the subject of a future post). Do we really want to discourage students from acclimating to such an environment?

I’ll climb off today’s soapbox with a nod to that workhorse library term, the “crosswalk.” Just as efforts like METS tries to usher MARC bibliographic standards into a more digital friendly metadata scheme like DC, educational technologists, professors, and librarians need to define certified crosswalks between the traditional apparatus of scholarship and the blessings of digital publication.

Will Mejias get credit for sparking a dialogue so intrinsic to scholarship? Only if the credit-givers look at blogs — and accept the possibility.

If you were to invent del.icio.us for academics, how would it work? It would allow for bookmarking, tagging, and sharing. It would pull metadata from academic resource databases. It would allow me (the layprof) to organize collected essays and citations with a minimum of clickage. And it would do all these things in a browser, from on or off campus, independent of platform. In short, it would be quite like CiteULike.

This is a little story about my first pass into CiteULike, and if it’s not entirely a happy story, we should still bear in mind the possibilities, the promise, the 2.0ness of it all.

I abjectly learned about CiteULike just recently (designed by Richard Cameron over a year ago). Sitting through some screencasts made by Tannis Morgan at UBC , I saw how this social bookmarking tool could be useful not only as a way to track journal contents, specifically tagged articles, and other academics’ bookmarks — through RSS — but also as a means to build a library of collected resources — available anywhere and to all.

Holy digital hotness! said I. I’ll try it for myself! And here’s where minor chords start to well up in the background.

Creating an account on CiteULike was childsplay; in ten seconds I was ready to bookmark and collect. Stunned a bit by the possibilities, and revived a bit by narcissism, I decided to start a collection with articles I’ve written. Tough luck, bucko. Though CiteULike offers to browse through some 6500 journals, this roundup doesn’t include the ones that have sponsored my thoughts. In fact, many of the journals seem to be science-related. As ever, the humanist is the redheaded stepchild of resource sharing ventures.

That’s ok, said I. I’ll find some article that’s at least in my field. I saw that Nineteenth-Century Contexts was one of the proffered journals, and scanning a recent edition I saw listed an article about Mary Shelley by Diane Long Hoeveler. Very good, said I. I’ll collect that:

Two links offered to let me ‘view the article online’. Excellent idea! But these links led me to publisher sites, one of which offered a “free sample,” the other demanded $33.67 plus tax. Much disturbing mention of shopping carts. This will never do, said I. Since I am off campus, what I seem need is a way for CiteULike to create paths into Bowdoin’s collections.

So I added the citation to the mysterious Hoeveler article to my own collection, tagging it in the process. Only one-word tagging, please.

A couple of cool features to notice here: I (or anyone) can track my collection through RSS. And metadata from this collection can be gussied up for EndNote with just one click (note how my tags turned into keywords in this EndNote record):

But the problem remained: how to actually connect to the article? I dug around in CiteULike’s FAQs and felt more assured that offcampus proxy access to articles would make those shopping carts disappear. For this functionality, CiteULike pointed me to a COinS Browser Extension written by Dan Chudnov at Yale .

In order to install this little extension, I had to first install Greasemonkey in my Firefox browser — not too difficult, but, trust me, we’ve lost the layprofs by now. The COinS extension allowed me to designate my own institution’s OpenURL resolver, and plug that resolver into OpenURL links now ‘discovered’ in my browser. That way, theoretically, one could click on a resource link on any site and actually access that resource through one’s own institution. You can see this in action here: note the new link that invites me to “Check availability @ Bowdoin”.

But, alas, here’s what happened to me when I clicked that invitation to check availability@Bowdoin:

Note that none of the metadata for the article has been passed through except for the article’s date. At this point I had neither the time nor the skill nor the patience to figure out where the glitch was; I only knew that I was off campus and out of luck accessing an article I found on CiteULike.

Never give up, I told myself. With one last bit of inspiration, I decided to see whether the little bookmarklet that CiteULike distributes (”Post to CiteULike”, rather like del.icio.us’s “Remember this” bookmarklet) would work going the other way. That is, suppose I’m signed into Bowdoin’s databases, and I run across an article I’d like to post onto the CiteULike. That’s just a click of the button, right?

The FAQs warn me that automatic metadata export into CiteULike would only occur with supported databases, which are: AIP Scitation, Amazon, American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, Anthrosource, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) portal, BMJ, Blackwell Synergy, CiteSeer, HighWire, IEEE Xplore, IngentaConnect, IoP Electronic Journals, JSTOR, MathSciNet, MetaPress, NASA Astrophysics Data System, Nature, PLoS Biology, PubMed, PubMed Central, Science, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, Usenix, Wiley InterScience, arXiv.org e-Print archive. (See what I mean about the humanities?) Well, JSTOR seemed my best bet, so I rooted around in Bowdoin’s library site until I found an article on Mary Shelley in JSTOR. Here was one from ELH: “Narratives of Seductions and the Seductions of Narrative: The Frame Structure of Frankenstein” (Ok I see what you mean about the humanities).

When I clicked my bookmarklet to Post to CiteULike, here’s what happened:

Hmm…. that really didn’t take the drudge out of drudgery, did it? I mean, yes, some barebones metadata is passed through, but all to the title field; I have a fair amount of tending, cutting, and pasting to do if I want this to be a real citation. If I feel like more work, I can download a PDF version of the article to my computer, then upload it into CiteULike so I can privately retrieve the article wherever I am. I can’t share the full text with other Mary Shelley aficionados, though: they have to try their own luck tunneling into their own publisher-paying institutions. Otherwise, you know, that’d be stealing.

I believe wholeheartedly that around the world, from within and without institutional walls, academics are happily collecting and sharing resources with CiteULike. I can see this happening minute by minute on the home page:

But at least right here & right now, I can’t fully play. And I feel swamped by “everyone”. How many of “everyone’s” tags link to articles I can understand, much less evaluate and collect?

Once the mechanics were ironed out, this would be my next wish for CiteULike: the creation of discipline-based communities, so I could track the tags of colleagues pondering British literature — and feel less intimidated by clustering geophysicists.

Did you find last night’s State of the Union speech unwatchable? Try looking at it another way. Once again, style.org offers a nice way to visualize the spin: the State of the Union Parsing Tool. Enter in a couple of terms and see maps of their occurrence across all of Bush’s SOTUs. Compare a Bush SOTU against ones by Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, and Clinton.

To get you started, here’s a screenshot of Bush’s SOTUs mentioning Iraq (red) and oil (blue). Click on it to visit the tool, and then try tracking your own terms:

What this tool won’t do is tell you how often assembled lawmakers hauled themselves out of their chairs for standing ovations. But some things are best left unvisualized.