socialscience@web2.0

I am designing the web page for a new reader on the geographies of technoscience, Locating Technoscience, a draft of which can be found here. The reader will be, initially, entirely web-based, and I’m keen to try and include the ability for readers to comment and build on the papers involved. One of the key features of traditional readers is that they introduce people to key papers, concepts and researchers in the field. The vast majority of these are now available in some form on the internet, particularly to those in academic institutions with Athens access. This raises the question of competitive advantage – the success of the reader has to be based not simply on its research content, which can already be accessed through journals in the most part, or the websites of researchers like Bruno Latour or Maarten Hajer. Instead, it will need to incorporate links to new research, lucid introductory passages and the availability of commentary through which discussions can develop.

To provide links to new research, I’ve established a Locating Technoscience group on Citeulike, the online reference manager, to which anyone can post papers they feel are of interest to the website. An automatically updating rss feed from this page is then displayed in the sidebar of the reader. In the future I may try and expand this to display only those papers tagged as relevant to that particular section of the reader, but at the moment they are unsorted in the sidebar, although sorted on the citeulike page. I would encourage anyone interested in the reader to join the Locating Technoscience group on Citeulike. This resource, developed alongside the reader, provides a way of developing from bibliographies such as John Law’s excellent Actor Network Theory Resource at the University of Lancaster.

One problem is that I’m not sure if the reader, unlike journals on Sage, Ingenta or Sciencedirect, will show up in Google Scholar, increasingly the main way in which papers are found. Other pdfs stored on university servers do seem to though, so this is one to work through

Technically, I’m doing this with a static homepage, which mirrors the cover of the traditional paper reader, and then developing interactive content using WordPress with scribd ipaper embedded in the posts that will display the papers. This allows comments to run below the papers, which could in theory eventually be included in a paper version of the reader. WordPress’ tagging features may also allow the development of a ‘folksonomy’ by which papers dealing with similar themes can be drawn together, even though they are in separate sections of the reader. I’ve toyed with the idea of introducing things like the ‘Sophie’ software being developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, and with different content management systems, as well as a static webpage, but have finally come back to the flexibility and breadth of features available on a WordPress site.

Any comments or suggestions much appreciated