Science Friday, Digital Scholarship, and the End of the (Academic) World as we Know It (with apologies to REM)

                         

If I didn't listen to NPR, I think I'd never come up with blogpost ideas.  This time, it was listening to Science Friday that did it.   Ira Flatow was interviewing Michael Nielsen, whose book, Reinventing Discovery:  the New Era of Networked Science appears to be something I should get my hands on.   During the interview, Nielsen discussed the Galaxy Zoo, a project that allows non-scientists to get into NASA's Hubble Space Telescope archive, and help classify galaxies by shape.   So far, more than a quarter of a million people have participated in the project.  That's scaling up something fierce, and something that would not have been possible without the kinds of digital tools we now have at our disposal.  It's also a kind of crowdsourcing. a kind of knowledge production made particularly possible and accessible by tools like wikis, blogs, etc. 


Crowdsourced knowledge is trusted by Digital Residents (so far as we can tell) far more than by Digital Visitors, who still seem to insist on institutionally produced knowledge as the authoritative standard.  Some fields, such as Bioinformatics, have scholars working with projects so novel that the peer-reviewed literature just has not been produced in enough quantity to be helpful to researchers when they are actively engaged in their research--they turn to blogs, tweets, emails, phone calls, and face to face conversations to keep up with the field--the latter two happening, I suspect, only after quite a bit of the first three take place.

My own library has launched a Digital Scholarship Lab, and while we expect that at first, there will be a large Digital Humanities component, I think it's no accident that we are naming it Digital Scholarship, and Nielsen's book makes me think my hunch is a solid one--these digital tools are, as he said in the interview I heard, fundamentally transforming the ways we construct knowledge, broadly defined.  This transformation is not limited to a particular field or discipline, it is global, and it is utter.

 
It is also frightening and destabilizing to many traditional academics, who see in digital tools as a way to trivialize, ignore, or fail to achieve the insights gained through traditional scholarship with old fashioned tools like books, paper,  images, and manuscripts.  Peer-reviewed journals are increasingly threatened by Open Access, blogging, and twitter, as primary ways to share and discuss scholarship.   Twitter and blogs make it possible to have a "conference" at any time, no matter where you are in the world--we do not have to wait for a national disciplinary conference to engage in scholarly exchange, nor do we want to wait anymore.

Nielsen pointed out that junior scholars and senior scholars tend to be happy to get on board with radical changes, and I can see why:  junior scholars are a part of the changes, they are fish in the water already; senior scholars are in a position to actually make change happen, and they are senior scholars, so less is at stake for them.  Scholars in the middle of their career, either trying to get tenure, or just post-tenure and now with even more work to do, may well feel that they're being told to change doing everything that, up to this point, had been working out just fine for them.  It might be like coming up to someone halfway through their dissertation and insisting that they try this new reference management system.  Or making someone who is writing a book switch word processing software just as they are writing their conclusion.

I don't have a conclusion here, just a string of thoughts that have come to an end (for now). 

SOPA Protest Outcomes, Activism vs. Everyday Life

Several high-traffic sites were down yesterday, on a kind of a strike in protest of the so-called anti-piracy legislation that was working its way through congress (SOPA in the House, PIPA in the Senate).  The momentum of the legislation has significantly slowed, thanks to the counter-lobbying carried on  yesterday by users of the internet, and people who produce some of the content that ends up on the web.  Up until yesterday, apparently, the voices being heard by Congress were primarily those of publishers and other people who profit from the content of the internet.

At any rate, it was something I was curious about--to what extent would the website strikes actually affect the everyday lives of people who use the internet?  So I sent out an email, I blogged, and tweeted.  I got the most responses via email, from people I know face to face (my collaborators in the V&R project would have something to say about that, I'll bet).  For the most part, there was very little impact--I heard back primarily from faculty, who said that they could, for the most part, do the things they'd intended to do online yesterday.  Those things included using their university email, Google, Google Scholar, and Google Books, Twitter, and university library websites and databases.  A couple of professors occasionally use Wikipedia to help clarify terms for their lecture prep, and they had to google for alternate sources.  A couple of colleagues were stymied in non-academic activities by the lack of Craigslist and Wikipedia, but for the most part, the academic work of the experts in their respective fields was relatively uninterrupted.

One faculty member reported that her graduate students who rely on Wikipedia for clarification of technical terms were suffering a bit yesterday.  The most suffering probably was experienced by undergraduates and high school students, if this twitter stream is any indication. 

But many people took time out of their day yesterday to call their legislators in protest against SOPA/PIPA.  Even though sites like Google were up, they included links to information and petition sites.  I initially wondered what the impact of the strike might have been if Google had shut down, or Twitter, or (*gasp*) Facebook.   Why not really take things down, scare the hell out of people, make them feel what they'd be missing where it would be really obvious (in a way that copyright concerns seldom are in everyday life)?

Here's what I think:  the content that flooded Twitter, Google, and FB yesterday was largely about SOPA, PIPA, what was at stake, and how to fight it.  If those sites had also been down, a powerful platform for activism would also have been unavailable.  I don't know if this was by design, but leaving the big SMS and Google up was a really effective way to both show a little bit of what the internet would be like under the proposed legislation, and to really flex the internet's ability to facilitate activism on a grand scale.

For now, it looks like it worked.

SOPA Protests and the Impact on your Everyday Life

I've circulated an email to some of my key contacts in my particular corner of the academic world, and thought I'd see if I could get a response via blogpost, just for kicks.  So, here's what I'm asking:

So, with the SOPA protests online, I’m curious the extent to which you think it’s affecting your ability to do the things you want and/or need to do today, for academic or non-academic purposes.

If you’ve got the time and inclination, would you please tell me:

1)  what were you planning to do today that involved being online?

2)  were you successful?

3) if not, why not?

4) if so, could you do it as you originally intended, or did you have to come up with a work-around?

Would you like to answer the questions?  Please do so in the comments.

More on Visitors and Residents

This video (it's about 20 minutes long) gives some more of the history and rationale behind the V&R project I'm working on, in collaboration with these two scholars, Dave White (Oxford), and Lynn Connaway (OCLC).

Nice still shot of Dave there--if you're interested, it's worth watching.  This project is trying to break down assumptions about how, when, and why people of all ages look for, acquire, and evaluate information.

Beautiful University Libraries and Thinking about Space

So, this lovely series of photos from stumbleupon shows a lot of university library reading rooms, primarily from old, historic libraries such as reading rooms at Oxford, UK, or in historic American universities such as Harvard, or UC Berkeley.

I'm struck by how few people there are in these photographs.  I understand that the photographer was probably more focused on the beauty of the spaces, but it seems to me that the true beauty of a library is in what the space provides in terms of the potential for people to think and work. So, yes, some of these lovely spaces do that.  But we can't see that in action in these spaces.

We are getting new spaces in Atkins, and I'm curious to see how they facilitate student work on campus, and what kind of work ends up being done.  The new north entrance to Atkins will be more than just a new doorway, there will be a large group study/conference room, and open spaces designed for collaborative work as well.

We've got spaces on the ground floor that have experimental furniture in them, and it's still unclear if students are using the furniture (like this mediascape table) in the way it's intended.

There are also spaces on the 1st and 2nd floors in particular that are still relatively unconfigured--we haven't really decided what we want to put in there long-term, so students are arranging those spaces themselves.  I am going to be starting the New Year trying to investigate what students want out of these open spaces--what kinds of things are they trying to do, what kinds of things are they successful in doing, and what informs that success?

Finals are nearly over--where are you doing your best work in the Library?  What do you wish these new spaces to do for you?

Information Literacy and deciding what is "good"

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education is the latest discussion of the woeful information literacy skills of contemporary undergraduates (a topic about which I have blogged already).  No fewer than six of my friends and colleagues sent me the link to this article, because it's also an excellent presentation of the ERIAL library ethnography project.  My colleague Andrew Asher was one of the anthropologists participating in this large-scale study, which aimed to ground what we know about students and their interactions with libraries and library resources in their actual behavior, through open-ended interviews, participant observation, and other research instruments like photo diaries (all methods I engage in as a part of the Atkins Ethnography Project here at UNC Charlotte).

Particularly highlighted in the Chronicle's coverage of the ERIAL project (and its upcoming publications via ALA) is the surprise that so-called "digital natives" could be so terribly unskilled at evaluating information.  I don't think we need to be surprised by students capable of googling not being aware of how to pick which source to use, any more than we would be surprised by children kept away from books all of their lives being unable to figure out what to do with all of those large blocks-full-of-paper things in the library.  Digital literacy has never been the same as information literacy, and all of the digital toys in the world will not render our students (or anyone else's students, for that matter) capable of distinguishing a reliable source from an unreliable source.

Persistent, consistent instruction in information literacy is what will give our students that skill set.  And it cannot begin at university--this skill should be taught and exercised throughout K-12 education (and beyond).  The testing culture of our current educational system makes critical thinking far less valued than retention and regurgitation of facts, and we are paying for that emphasis with the lack of preparation we see in our undergraduates.  The idea that an undergraduate degree is "to get a job," rather than a basis for becoming a thinking and contributing (not just in economic terms) member of society, also gets in the way of educators advocating for critical thinking in the classrooms.  Some students get frustrated by it (being asked to think critically about class content, society, life in general) because they are not necessarily used to being asked to do it, and professors are frustrated by students' frustration--why did they come to college if not to think?

I am collaborating on a project now that involves interviewing and observing high school seniors and college freshman as they look for information, academic and otherwise.  My research partners and I are beginning to analyze the interview data now, and among the many striking things is the standard by which students judge information to be "reliable:"  repetition.  Several students say things like, "if I find it more than once on the web, I know that it's reliable information."  Why do they think this?  Where are they getting this standard of reliability?  Is it possible that they're not being told any other standards?  Or are they simply assuming that the most popular Google link is popular for a fact-based reason?

I think about how students evaluate information when I see their interest in the library website providing reviews of books, articles, and other materials that they can access in our collections.  They want an Amazon.com-style service whereby they can see what previous users of the materials have said about the materials, so that the students can make an informed decision about the utility of the materials for their purposes.  If you think about the Amazon-style reviews, (see, for instance, the reviews of this Economics textbook), you see that the reviewers writing the "most useful" reviews are explicit about what they wanted out of the book, how the book met their needs (or didn't), and allow the reader of the reviews to evaluate the extent to which the reviewer's standards are the reader's own.  Something is given stars based on whether or not it met a particular user's needs, therefore context is necessary in a review, for other users to be able to effectively evaluate the potential of an item.

What is "good," therefore, is a subjective, shifting thing.  Students who are writing five-page essays might review books as "too long" for what they need to do, and articles as "just the thing."  Graduate students working on dissertations might review books according to their theoretical perspectives.  Reviews on a library web site might give students the ability to get in virtual form the kind of feedback that they already ask their peers for in person (or on facebook, via text, or via emails) about the materials they need for papers, exams, and other coursework.

Students already evaluate information in non-academic settings.  They read (and act on) reviews of movies, cars, live music shows, and restaurants.  They take into account who is doing the reviewing, and whether that reviewer's perspective is relevant and informed (or not).  It is not that they are utterly incapable of critical thinking.  It is that they are not doing it in academic settings.  They have not been trained to do it.  Neither have they been told by our educational institutions (writ large) that critical thinking is terribly important.

Beefing up information literacy programs at the university level, and at K-12, would be an important first step towards remedying the problem.  But the problem has other deep structural reasons for its existence, and those problems require fixes that come from outside of the educational system.

History's Detectives and the Way the World Searches

I haven't watched History's Detectives (on PBS),  in a while, so when I caught up on an episode the other night, I was struck by something I hadn't really noticed before.  For those of you who've not watched it (because you are not a history/anthropology geek like myself), History's Detectives is a sort of spin-off of Antiques Roadshow.    But instead of people bringing their stuff to the Roadshow for experts to tell them about it, the experts  come to people's houses to inspect the item, and take it away with them for a thorough investigation as to its history and meaning.

It's fun, if you like that sort of thing (which clearly, I do).  This time around, I particularly noticed how the beginning of the process of investigation was represented.  After taking the object away with them to their study/office, the expert sits down with their laptop, and immediately fires up Google.  When Wes Cowan was beginning his investigation of a WWII propaganda leaflet, he typed almost those precise words into the Google search box, and worked his way through the links that came up.  He actually said for the benefit of the camera, "I don't know anything about this," before he started Googling.

It looked just like what any student does when they are asked to write a paper about a given topic.  Or what a faculty member does when they want to have a general sense of what's being written about a topic before they teach a class on it, or write an article about it.

Here's what marked Mr. Cowan as an expert:  he didn't stop with the Google search.  He's not on this show to do televised Google searches.  He moved away from the general overview that Google searching could give him, and started reaching out to professional contacts, snowballing his sources until he'd found the answers his client was looking for.   He moved from secondary sources to primary source documents in the process, spoke to people who knew the artist who produced that particular pamphlet, and was capable at the end of all of that work of crafting a finely detailed story of the artifact in question.

Students writing papers have different goals, and how far they go beyond the Google search (or, a browse-type search on an academic library web page) is very much up to the kind of assignment.  If they are writing a five page essay, the post-Google process will look different from that which goes into a 10 or 20 page paper. There is no one perfect search, because all searches happen in a given context.  What may be sufficient for one assignment is woefully inadequate for another (and will be reflected in one's grade for that assignment!).

What does that mean for academic libraries, and those who work with students on their assignments?  It's more important than ever to get a grounded sense of why students are looking for information, not just the fact that they need information on "X."  The reference interview for a 5-page paper has compelling reasons to look different from one for the 10 page paper.

Demonstrating that we know the difference, and translating it into practice in the form of a reference interview gives us more credibility, and makes it more likely that students will come to us for help in the future.