As I’ve posted about before, there are a number of online office applications that give almost all the functionality you could need. However, Zoho and Google Docs both require you to register to edit the document. For one-off or irregular use, this is a hassle. So I’m currently in a quest for collaboration without registration.I’ve thought about using a wiki, but ideally want something more WYSIWYG-y that allows you to import straight to Word. Again, hassle avoidance. If anybody happens to read this and has any suggestions, it would be great. If I have an epiphany, I’ll add it in

The last post has prompted some more, unformed but interesting thoughts about the ways in which the pressures of open-access publishing are re-shaping academic publications. UCL have recently introduced an ‘e-prints’ scheme, which aims to provide free, pre-publication copies of papers by UCL academics. Similarly, a number of researchers have taken to circumventing the firewalls of closed academic journal publishing by making pre-publication copies available online. Given that many of these papers turn up on Google Scholar, increasingly the main way of searching for papers, it is not inconceivable that they will achieve a much greater circulation than the actual published paper. While I’m in favour of open-access publishing, the ‘halfway house’ provided by publishing research articles in less than finished form seems to raise as many questions as it solves. If these papers are suitable for dissemination by the university, what then is the purpose of the journal review process? Who is to have the final say in what is worth publishing? University administrators or journal editors?

It has been a long time since I’ve added anything here, caused by moving house and the usual panic about not having written enough thesis. The thesis is still underwritten (although not in an insurable sense), however I came across this website, which I couldn’t resist posting about.

Home : Nature Precedings

The brilliantly named Nature ‘Precedings’ provides pre-publication access to studies submitted to the journal or, as described in last June’s press release is “a new free online service, which will enable researchers to share, discuss, and cite their early findings prior to publication. What is interesting is that it comes with a disclaimer - these studies are not peer-reviewed. This has prompted me to a few, as yet unclear quesions. What is the place of this website in the academic publishing world? Nature papers are among the most prestigious, yet these papers have not yet gone through the review process, and presumably are still in need of some tweaking. My first thoughts are that this represents an interesting academic response to the pressures of press conferences and the ‘non-academic’ publication path. In addition, by opening up ‘preceedings’ to public view, the peer review process itself is opened to more scrutiny, although the relationship between review and the ‘votes’ that Nature encourages onn papers is left unclear. Voting is described as “an informal way of showing support for a researcher’s work”. What happens if a paper accumulates a huge number of positive votes, yet fails peer review? Is this extended peer review or an appeal to popularism? Perhaps more cynically, who will vote if the votes don’t count for anything - are scientists as prone to wanton voting as BBC website users, or, as the website seems to be copying, Digg users? Time will tell.

Through a series of blogs, and videos like the one by Mike Wesch which I introduced elsewhere, anthropology appears to be setting the pace in terms of social science engagement with the internet and the possibilities for collaboration and group work.

As well as the excellent Savage Minds blog, the new ‘Remixing anthropology‘ blog, linked to a 2008 AAA session, provides space to discuss a ‘new form of heteroglossic anthropology’ which examines the possibilities and challenges of new ways of ’sharing, organizing, discussing, critiquing, creating and remixing information’. In turn, this is an excellent example of how social science can use the relational and social nature of the net to generate ‘new forms’ of research, and could be productively drawn on in science studies. Hopefully we can achieve a move towards something like that with the forthcoming ‘Locating Technoscience’ reader, (draft here - may move), and stimulate some productive critique and discussion.

About a year ago, caught in a seemingly endless spiral of finding more and more references, reading about more and more sports matches and generally being increasingly unproductive, I spent some time on ebay (obviously) considering buying a typewriter. An old one. With no electronics.

The general idea was to remove all the fancy things that my laptop can do, and trim it back to basics, then scan my writing back in for formatting and editing. Thankfully, I didn’t plunge in and don’t now spend my days covered in black ink and wrapped in tangled ribbons, and do actually manage to get some writing done.

However, faced with an article in the Wall Street Journal, which argues that an inability to avoid faffing on the web is inherent, inate or genetically determined, whichever you decide (which I will pass over for now), and a test match series between England and New Zealand, I began to think about it again. A path between the Scylla and Charybdis of hi- and ultra lo-tech was provided by Dark Room, an application which, when you’ve really got to write, clears everything clickable out of the way and lets you do it. In bright green on a black screen. An excellent idea.

From Harvard, H20 is an initiative to bring together teaching, course syllabi and students from around the world.

It works around the idea of playlists, in some ways similar to using groups in Citeulike or Connotea, but with the emphasis much more on teaching and the use of a range of media. As their website says “An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.” Savage Minds looked at it long ago in 2006, and decided that “H2O looks like a great (and simple) way to create a community sharing reading suggestions”, since when its moved on, although is still in beta form.

The whole site looks well done and well resourced, so this looks like a good and potentially succesfully innovative use of the internet in school and university teaching. Not only that, but its got a very jazzy video and its incites you to ‘go with the flow’. Why not?

Video plays automatically. To stop it, right click and deselect ‘play. It might entertain you the first time, but eventually the music will grate

Video removed as it grated too much, but it’s still available at the H20 website

I’m a big fan of podcasts, not least for trying to learn something new while I’m on my bike or the bus. There are an increasing number of great resources available in and around science studies.

An excellent introduction is available in the CBC ‘How to think about science‘ series. Particularly interesting are discussions with Simon Schaffer, Brian Wynne, Bruno Latour, Ian Hacking, Andrew Pickering and Ulrich Beck, with more to come.

UChannel, hosted by Princeton, is brilliant at collating audio and video recordings of lectures from all over the place on all kinds of topics, including recent talks by John Denham, British secretary of state for universities and innovation; a discussion between Craig Venter, Sarah Franklin and others about synthetic biology at the LSE and a multitude of others. The BBC’s ‘In Our Time‘ and ‘Thinking Allowed‘ programmes are also excellent and often include topics relevant to STS.

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

Somewhat unbelievably, but extremely usefully for students interested in developing web resources (or lecturers interested in persuading students to do so for them…), Microsoft has started giving away some of its fancier software to ‘validated’ students in the UK, US and Europe. This is done through its Dreamspark website based on the same kind of authorisation as the Athens system for academic papers. It seems to be an excellent deal, so I’m not sure where the catch is, although the Washington Post thinks it is to compete with opensource software. Worth checking out.

Microsoft DreamSpark

Somehow, this post got lost somewhere between typing and publishing, which would seem to imply I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing.

There is a nice guide (and accompanying lecture) from Princeton which describes how to avoid having to trawl through Google results and instead get searches to work, including how to search only academic or government websites. Perhaps equally impressively (for the easily impressed), it describes how to use Google’s calculator, conversion tools and weather forecasts. I’m not sure how many universities provide this kind of information, but it must be among the most useful to give to todays students and researchers.

And more help and guidance can be found here (pdf)