Ray Siemens (http://web.uvic.ca/~siemens/) is Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, in English and Computer Science. He is founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies and his publications include, among others, Blackwell's Companion to Digital Humanities (with Schreibman and Unsworth), Blackwell's Companion to Digital Literary Studies (with Schreibman) and Mind Technologies: Humanities Computing and the Canadian Academic Community (with Moorman). He directs the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and Vice President of the Canadian Association of Humanities and Social Sciences, and recently served as Chair of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations’ Steering Committee.
Meagan Timney is an information architect and user experience designer in San Francisco, CA. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor for the SSHRC MCRI-funded Editing Modernism in Canada Project and the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory at the University of Victoria.
Cara Leitch is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Victoria and a Research Assistant at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab.
Corina Koolen is lecturer at the Book and Digital Media studies programme of Leiden University and a PhD candidate at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (University of Amsterdam).
Alex Garnett is a Data Curation and Digital Preservation specialist at Simon Fraser University, and a Ph.D. Student in Information Science at the Universty of British Columbia. He has experience loving and munging data big and small (in the private and public sector, respectively), and has particular interests in the fields of natural language parsing and network analysis.
This is the source
The two annotated bibliographies present in this publication document and feature pertinent discussions toward the activity of modeling the social edition, first exploring reading devices, tools and social media issues and, second, social networking tools for professional readers in the Humanities. In this work, which is published conjointly with the LLC piece
Web 2.0 meets the scholarly edition
In the very early days of the world wide web, but well into a period in which our community understood the positive and transformative impact that computational technique has had on scholarly editing, we were reminded that literary studies are, and always have been, focused on engagement with texts regardless of interpretive theoretical predisposition. In digital literary studies, that textual focus manifests in a number of theories about the nature of the text in general and the electronic scholarly edition in particular, and has developed to the point that we can begin to construct, in a relatively straightforward manner, a basic typology of electronic scholarly editions via the approach each type takes in handling and engaging with its textual materials: from edited electronic text plus analytical tools for its readers (dynamic text), to text plus a static set of additional supporting materials in digital form for reader navigation and subsequent analysis (hypertextual edition), to text augmented by both dynamic analytical means and hypertextually-linked access to fixed resources plus automated means of discovering and interrelating external resources (dynamic edition). Such a typology, reductive as it may be, allows us to look forward – as many leaders in our field have encouraged us to do, variously – to what lies ahead in our treatment of the texts, and the textual editions, that sit at the core of our contemplation in literary studies and similar disciplines.
Well into what is often called the new age of the internet – becoming immersed as we are in a generation of online tools facilitating collaboration, information sharing, and interoperability; becoming immersed as we are by social media interaction on the web – it is worth noting that the types of electronic scholarly editions we see prominently today were largely developed before the ubiquity of the web that we now enjoy, and do not accurately reflect the full range of useful possibilities present for academic engagement and interaction around the textual materials that are our focus. While the electronic medium is most certainly a productive space in which to present and analyse editions, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the influence of new and emerging possibilities for the electronic scholarly edition in the current phase in the social formation of the web. As such, our understanding of the electronic scholarly edition in its current form requires reconsideration in light of the collaborative potential of already extant and newly-emerging digital technologies; put another way, we need to extend our understanding of the scholarly edition in light of new models of edition production that embrace social networking and its commensurate tools. Toward understanding the scholarly edition in the context of new and emerging social media, our work – which comprises the article
In this work, we consider a typology of electronic scholarly editions adjacent to
activities common to humanities scholars who engage texts as expert readers, noting
therein that many methods of engagement both reflect the interrelated nature of
long-standing professional reading strategies and are social in nature; extending
this framework, the next steps in the scholarly edition’s development in its
incorporation of social media functionality reflect the importance of traditional
humanistic activities and workflows, and include collaboration, incorporating
contributions by its readers and re-visioning the role of the editor away from that
of ultimate authority and more toward that of facilitator of reader involvement. The
two annotated bibliographies present in this publication work to document and feature
pertinent discussions toward the activity of modeling the
A selected, annotated bibliography carried out by Corina Koolen and Alex Garnett for the ETCL’s work independently and with INKE and PKP [-2011].
This survey supports those interested in exploring the development of collaborative work in academics, leading up to and including the use of the Internet and Social Media (SM). From a situation where the Internet had just become open to the mainstream public, up until now, we have seen great changes in the possibilities and ways of thinking that concern collaborative academic work. In this list, the focus shifts from collaborative work mainly to support student learning, to general collaborative work. This is perhaps logical, as collaboration on a greater scale, including sharing of information online – as opposed to in-university collaboration – has only begun to materialize fairly recently. The materials will reflect the relative novelty of the application in academia and offer a wide range of topics that can be explored further.
From two sections that provide a base in the history of collaborative reading, current practices are presented: reflecting on how often and in which fashion Social Media are currently used and consecutively providing a number of small-scale experiments and recommendations to engage more widespread use. Referencing and soft peer-review are also included as these are important issues in the changing world of academic scholarship because of the influence of Web 2.0.
Prior to the advent of online Social Media, several attempts have been made to offer students, teachers and researchers digital environments to facilitate the research workflow. These three – mostly theoretical – articles have been influential in academic research on digital (shared) annotation.
In this article, the authors first give an overview of the field of
annotation systems, starting with offline software such as MS Word. It
gives insight in a wide variety of annotation tools with different
underlying principles, most of which are now obsolete. A number of these
systems were meant for online use, and some of the systems described show
how the hyperlink was still a point of focus in academic research. The
authors then report a qualitative survey on paper annotation, one of the
findings of which is that scholars primarily highlight and write in
margins (as opposed to writing on top of the text or between the lines
for instance); another result was that reasons for annotation are to
remember, to think, to clarify and to share. Sharing is seen as least
important by the authors and is of secondary importance to their
research, as the authors claim is not typical of the academic environment
to do so and more of interest for business purposes. The authors suggest
a taxonomy which classifies annotations with respect to their content,
form and functionality. Consecutively, based on this taxonomy Annotation
Technology (AT) is developed, a set of
recommendations for software design
An influential study on the annotation behavior of college students in
their (paper) university textbooks. The author studied used textbooks
from a campus bookstore, with as many samples of the same edition of a
textbook as possible. Student selection criteria concerning the
annotations as they bought used textbooks were also taken into account.
Annotations are generally seen as private, whereas in this case students
would sometimes select the books on the quality of the annotations. The
annotations in the selected books were then classified by form and
function. The author classifies a total of six functions, among which
aids to memory and records of interpretative activity. In the final
section implications for annotations in the digital library are
discussed, where the author notes that in the design of new facilities,
four conditions should be supported: annotation
This article is focused on annotation to aid student learning. In the first section, the author provides a description of the use of annotation in medieval manuscript culture, explaining how digital annotation can provide these same functions and more. The goal of the article is to provide a review of current tooling, but to prevent the information of becoming outdated too soon, the author has described different groups of annotation tools, discerning them through context: annotations readers make to themselves; annotations readers make and are meant to be shared with the author; annotations readers make and are meant to be shared with other readers; annotations from the author, intended for readers. This division is perhaps no longer as relevant as the social web has rendered the distinction between these roles less important, but it is nevertheless an interesting starting point to consider the different functionalities tools provide. The author then describes seven factors in which tools can vary, including input, anchor, storage and searching and filtering. The four types of context are then analyzed, providing first possible strategies of form and function by reviewing literature on the topic, followed by examples of annotation tools. The author has included a wide variety of tools. Examples in the first group are a dedicated reader, XLibris (http://www.fxpal.com/?p=xlibris), that has flexible annotation options, including linking of a single annotation to several text fragments and Animal Landlord, a tool for classroom video annotation. In the second group, MS Word 2000 and iMarkup are discussed. In the final section, the author discusses difficulties for research groups and companies in developing and maintaining their tools. An interesting example is mentioned, ThirdVoice (1999), which gave readers the opportunity to annotate web pages, resulting in law suits from companies who did not care for unpermitted comments. The more recent Google Sidewiki (http://www.google.com/sidewiki/intl/nl/index.html) faced the same problem. The author sees future possibilities in stylus-based annotation and sharing and suggest that a reader/annotator might want to be able to switch between interfaces, when either annotating themselves or reading another person’s notes for instance.
From academia, there have been (and still are) numerous attempts to build social platforms for shared learning and reading, which has eventually developed into a distinct discipline (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) — stressing the value of shared information processing through the computer. Two influential earlier systems are described in this section, CoNote which makes use of the web and CSILE which works on a local network. CSILE eventually developed into the still available Knowledge Forum (http://www.knowledgeforum.com). Both make use of restricted groups in an educational setting.
This article shows an interesting conceptual model for collaborative work through annotation, offering anchored discussions in documents. The authors present CoNote, a collaborative system that is based on shared annotation. First the system is described. CoNote is an online system that requires no additional client software, and functions on HTML and ASCII text. The annotations are anchored — although horizontally separated from the base text and thus interrupting the annotated text — and comments upon comments can be made. The annotations function much like a discussion forum: the annotations appear as links in a structured tree; the links contain meta-data: the title, author and date of creation; and creation of annotations is done by filling out a form. The annotations took the shape of questions and answers. The authors then briefly describe the conceptual model behind the system. The system can for instance be used by a group with a shared set of documents and users can have different roles. In the fourth section a trial during an introductory college computer science course (Fall 2004) is discussed. Findings were that students who performed less were helped by the annotations, that the students could answer each others questions correctly, that they expected fast responses because of the connection to the Internet and that the students conducted much work at home. Future research is said to be directed at refinement of the system and implementation in other settings.
This article shows nicely how education has been changing over the last decades, due to the widespread adoption of digital media. The authors first provide a theoretical background in education and software. They sketch the current educational situation and stress the importance of knowledge building over knowledge reproduction. They argue that the desktop metaphor of the personal computer, because it is intended for business use, hinders the educational possibilities of the machine. Consecutively, a framework for knowledge building is sketched, according to a constructivist view, where coherence and completeness are central concepts, built through social activity. In this global perspective, six features are added, such as source referencing in order to facilitate situating of information. The authors then describe their implementation of a second-order computing facility, computer-supported intentional learning environments (CSILE). The system itself is not based on documents provided, but allows students to make texts and comment on one another. The process is not described (or shown) in much detail however. CSILE was implemented in local networks of several grade schools and proved to be successful for the goals the authors had formulated. Note: CSILE eventually evolved into Knowledge Forum, which still exists: http://www.knowledgeforum.com.
In recent years, a number of articles and reports have been published on
scholars’ attitudes and practices towards Social Media and Web 2.0. Some
small-scale, others spanning five years of study, these show a largely coherent
and perhaps not surprising image: a small group of academics is experimenting
(in all academic disciplines), but most scholars are still apprehensive of the
possible downsides and prefer
Report issued by Emerald Publishing Group to CIBER on Social Media use
among scholars of several disciplines. The researchers focused on
retrieving the survey from users of Social Media (n=1923) but compared it
to a set of non-users (n=491), all geographically dispersed and from
several disciplines. The findings suggest two broad kinds of Social Media
user: one who conjointly uses microblogging, social tagging/bookmarking
and blogging (and who is also likely to own an iPad); one who uses SM for
sharing documents, organizing meetings and their calenders. The former is
the least established; the newest Social Media are the least popular in
general. Findings are similar to that of the Research Information Network
(2011): interinstitutional collaboration is an important incentive
(reported as peer pressure outside of the institution); SM acts as a
700+ page report on a five-year qualitative research among scholars of
mostly North-American elite institutes in seven disciplines (seven case
studies in the report, chapter 2 through 8; reading chapter 1 is enough
for a general overview). The scholars were selected through snowball
sampling. The goal was to map scholars’ uses, wants and possible models
for (future) scholarly communication. Over all disciplines, according to
the authors, scholars tend to hold onto traditional publishing values,
looking onto peer review as Churchill’s democracy: it is seen as the
least worse measure of quality and a filter for the amount of research
available. Young scholars are the most rigid. The authors as a result
have identified five key areas that need attention according to the
interviewees
Association of Research Libraries research conducted by Ithaka on the use
of digital scholarly resources. It is based on in-depth interviews with
humanities, social sciences and STM scholars in the US and Canada. The
researchers identified resources of which scholars report use, but limited to resources containing born-digital content by
and for a scholarly audience
, among which E-only journals,
preprints, blogs and discussion forums; social tools for the general
public like Facebook or Diigo were excluded. The article describes these
eight types of resource, their role in academics, providing description
and images of examples in all three academic areas. The scholars report
that the resources need to 1) give access to current research 2)
facilitate exchange among scholars and 3) supply useful co-location of
works. STM scholars focused on the first, humanities and social science
on the second. The authors draw several conclusions from the interviews,
including: digital innovations are taking place in all disciplines;
digital publishing in academia has a long tail (many niche publications);
for a digital publication establishing credibility is important — many of
the more frequently mentioned publications existed at least several
years; and sustainability is a general problem. The authors conclude with
a brief section on how librarians can use this information in their work
of selection of materials.
Findings of a report funded by the Research Information Network (RIN),
based on qualitative and quantitative research among UK academics on Web
2.0.
Full report on which Procter et al (2010) have published results. Although conducted among UK researchers only, this report provides a wealth of information on scholarly communication and Web 2.0. It is well-structured and freely available online in a well-designed screen-friendly version. The report first defines contours of adoption. The authors signal that although scholars remain loyal to traditional forms of publication, they are not hostile towards the digital possibilities. Adaption is most likely when stimulated locally and when needed for interinstitutional collaboration. Social Media are seen as a supplement rather than a replacement for traditional research and publishing. Then the authors describe five case studies, among which arts-humanities.net (http://arts-humanities.net/) and PLoS (Public Library of Science, http://www.plos.org/). These indicate that their uptake is now in the hands of a small group of enthusiasts. The authors signal that growth of these platforms is important for their survival, but sustainability and stability need to be safe-guarded beforehand. In the final chapter, the implications are discussed for universities, funders and researchers, making recommendations for further adoption. University computing and information services are explicitly mentioned as important possible stimulators for the uptake of Web 2.0 tools.
As the general research reports on scholarship and Social Media and Web 2.0 show that uptake in universities is in its infancy, a perspective from the tools that are available currently might provide insight on future possibilities of supporting the academic workflow and communication. These originate in academia (Zotero) but more often in the trade or non-profit sector (Diigo, Twitter) or through collaborations (CommentPress). Trials have been conducted and research has been performed within universities and libraries that can unveil new opportunities for digitally supported research.
Discusses the Zotero Project (http://www.zotero.org/) developed by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. The author describes that the goal of the project was to combine the benefits of stand-alone applications with those of web applications in order to facilitate the academic research workflow. The author then discusses the benefits of Zotero and its development into the tool it currently is. He states that Zotero is built on the principles of academic research in general, integrative and part of a network of thought. The author stresses the underlying principles of Zotero — open source and open to external connections and intervention — as a facilitator of its success.
The authors start by describing general characteristics of Social
Bookmarking Systems (SBS), selecting Diigo (http://www.diigo.com) as the best
tool to facilitate teaching and learning and to support academic
research. Diigo is an acronym for ‘Digest of Internet Information, Groups
and Other stuff’. It allows users to bookmark and tag websites, video’s
and other items, comment upon them and share this information with
specific groups. The authors describe how Diigo facilitates individual
and team work, its applications for learning and research; give examples
of academic use — including a table with a sample of case studies; and
compare Diigo to other SBS. The authors are extremely supportive of
Diigo, which makes one of the most interesting parts of this article a
SWOT-analysis
The author discusses a different model for digital publishing. The argument is built up from the perspective that experiments have relied too often on the metaphor of the codex and the incorrect notion of the single, isolated academic author and reader. Instead, the author states, the metaphor of the network, allowing for dialogue, is more efficient, with the blog as a good starting point. This has materialized in CommentPress, an open source Wordpress theme and plugin. The author then describes several experiments with the model, conducted with the Institute for the Future of the Book: G4M3R 7TH30RY (the web version of the book
The MediaCommons version of the article has not solicited many comments, perhaps because for first-time commentators they were moderated before being published; the comments are interesting however to scan: some are content-related, others involve for instance practical problems in installing CommentPress. Many are by the same author. An interesting detail: an error which still resides in the published paper is commented upon in the comments section of the MediaCommons version (Section
The article discusses the benefits and downsides of social bibliography
sites or social bookmarking sites for education purposes, specifically
CiteULike (http://www.citeulike.org) and Diigo (http://www.diigo.com). Benefits
include a greater insight in one’s own scholarly
attitudes and practices
In 2005, a new class of social bookmarking tools was arising that catered
more to academic needs, which meant the inclusion of metadata. In this
article, such bookmarking tools are discussed. After a brief discussion
of the origin of links, including taxonomies and bookmarklets, the
authors describe the nature of tagging (participatory, bottom-up instead
of a top-down process, a flat structure instead of hierarchical) and the
reason for tagging — most tools discussed are bookmarking sites where
users tag content by others intended for personal use. The authors then
briefly identify benefits, such as being able to locate information in a
smaller pool than the whole web; and a few issues, among which privacy.
The authors have built link lists in Connotea (http://www.connotea.org/) to
demonstrate the usefulness of the tool. These provide invaluable
information by following them now — several years after publication. The
authors had used a complex tag to accompany the article to prevent others
using the same tag for different topic. However, the tag they have chosen
to accompany the article is not unique (anymore) and spamming appears to
be an issue. The most useful lists in the current day are those that
combine the tag with the references restricted by poster, in this case
the references that were tagged by one of the authors of the article.
This indicates the usefulness of a filter. The authors end with a summary
of elements usually present in social bookmarking tools. An accompanying
article focuses on one of the bookmarking tools mentioned, Connotea:
The author first describes previous research on the motivation for blogging, which is a small base of research, often auto-ethnographic. The author states that it was possible to identify recurrent themes however, among which information or knowledge management, social purposes and expressing opinions. A qualitative research method was then employed, by conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews with twelve Swedish, Dutch and Danish blogging researchers in 2009, from a variety of disciplines, including humanities and STM who were selected through snowball sampling. The author has also used the blogs themselves in analyzing the interviews. From the material, six functions were distilled: disseminating content, expressing opinions, keeping up-to-date and remembering, writing, interacting and creating relationships (although not every blogger mentions them all). The author elaborates on these functions, using ample quotes from the interviews. Motivations for blogging were then extracted from the interviewees’ statements on the functions: 1) sharing with others, 2) providing room for creativity and 3) feeling connected. Sharing (1) is not reserved for academic peers, especially in the STM sector, where people from the industry also follow the blogs. The mentioned creativity (2) originates from fact that the bloggers can write with less restriction than in articles, and can thus be used to develop and organize ideas. The bloggers mention strong personal motivations for keeping their blogs, even though they are not part of their academic publishing record and the researchers do not think it will aid their careers in the near future. A table shows the interplay of the functions and motivations and the intended audience (self or others).
The authors conduct bibliometric analysis of Twitter (http://twitter.com/) feeds by a sample of 28 academics (faculty, postdocs or doctoral students) from the humanities, social sciences and sciences, selected through snowball sampling. 2,322 Tweets that contained direct or indirect links to a peer-reviewed scholarly article online were isolated and analyzed by both authors using open coding. The direct citations are called first-order, the citations which linked to an intermediary web page are second-order citations. The authors also conducted qualitative research by doing interviews. Reasons given for not citing directly are workflow and the existence of a paywall, which was supported by the quantitative data. Citing in Tweets is reported to be seen as part of an ongoing conversation. The participants favored the speed with which articles spread (also supported by the quantitative data). Moreover, the platform aided their daily academic process: Twitter functions as a filter and helps point to interesting articles. The authors conclude by stating that Twitter citations could be a valuable part of bibliometrics to supplement traditional citation analysis.
The authors describe the possible benefits and downsides of using Twitter
(http://twitter.com) as a
digital backchannel at conferences and show how the use of Twitter as a
platform can enable better participation and communication among
community members, thus to support communities of practice. As the
Digital Humanities (DH) community is known as an early adopter of such
technologies, tweets from three DH conferences from June through
September 2009 were used. The Tweets were collected and archived by
Twapper Keeper (http://www.twapperkeeper.com). The database was analysed using
qualitative and quantitative methods. Automated analysis was hindered
because of the use of abbreviations, different spellings, etc. due to the
maximum length of a Tweet (140 characters). Tweets were categorized
manually according to types of jotting down notes
, indicating that sharing is more
important than collaboration. The findings also suggest that a minority
of users generates a great proportion of the Tweets, whereas many users
produce none or only one Tweet during the conference, indicating an
unevenness of use. Regulation by the organizers of the conference
(communicating a hashtag up front for instance) could improve this
situation according to the authors. Consecutively, the users with the
highest amount of tweets were sent an online survey, resulting in 11
responses, where the aggregation of proceedings for other attendees
(through jotting down notes
) was also mentioned as most important.
The authors conclude by stating, among other things, that the backchannel
of Tweets offer more than whispering in class
but that new, dedicated methodologies for the analysis and
understanding of Tweet-based corpora are necessary.
This article describes a Social Media tool that has been built in academia (within the discipline of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) to support collaborative learning, PAMS 2.0. An overview of earlier research in and outside CSCL is first given, including several approaches to collaborative and cooperative learning. Then, PAMS 2.0 is described. PAMS 1.0 was not Web-based whereas this version is. Some features that are mentioned: PAMS 2.0 makes use of the Web Services Resource Framework technology (WSRF), which is XML-based; readers can annotate on document files and web pages — although they the latter have to be imported; it allows for role assignment; and it provides synchronous discussion possibilities next to the read/annotation space. Consecutively, an experiment is discussed. Two groups of student volunteers — one using PAMS, the other not — read, annotated and discussed materials during a semester, which they were tested on in five iterations. The students using PAMS performed equally to the other group at the beginning of the trial, but performed better at the end. The authors hope to implement the system on the Web. This article not only shows the possible benefits of this system, it also provides an indication of the possible benefit of using (semi-)commercial applications in educational settings, for instance Diigo. Not much research as yet has been done on such platforms.
Some platforms have not been included in the previous list, but have interesting features and are worth looking into. The articles — which all but one originate from the trade sector — have been included separately in the bibliography.
Much academic research has been done on the use of e-reading devices and their
merit for academic work, but the relative novelty of
Report on a two-year study among students on e-reading devices. The study
was conducted at Sawyer Business School of Suffolk University in Boston,
Massachusetts. This research shows that when readers make long-term use
of a e-reading device, adoption becomes more likely. Annotation
possibilities were seen as an important aspect. Especially the tablet was
seen as an interesting option for reading — and these allow for
collaborative reading, although the study does not report on this
opportunity. Other researches mention the strain of annotation and
hightlighting — and thus never get to the social part of annotation — if
it was available at all in the chosen device at that time, see for
instance:
Six academics describe the use of their e-readers, which are in this case Kindles and iPads. All describe the Kindle as no more than a possibility to replace a stack of leisure reading with a single small device. The iPad is mentioned as having more opportunities for scholarly work, but still wants improvement. Collaboration or sharing is not mentioned. One researcher remarked that a barrier in doing research with the iPad is the impossibility to annotate copyrighted digital documents.
Six scholars evaluate the use of the iPad (first version) for scholarly purposes. Many mention note-taking and being able to synchronize documents to several devices. Collaborative work or sharing is hardly mentioned, although one scholar describes using Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com) and iAnnotate (http://www.ajidev.com/iannotate/) for receiving and grading student work (and then returning them through Gmail).
This is a blog post by an academic, Tricia Wang, which provides a nice case of the use of a device (the iPad) combined with several Social Media tools for performing research. The article contains several images of the author’s work process.
Peer review is central to academic recognition and it is one of the main concerns when Social Media and online publishing are discussed: how does one guarantee quality, that is to say filter information without it? This section includes an essay confronting this issue and an article that proposes to include Web-based metrics to obtain recognition.
An alternative model for measuring academic impact is suggested, including Social Media data but still built around single article reference. First, the authors offer a quick discussion of existing models, the most important of which is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) which is used by tenure committees but only measures the impact of journals as a whole. In the third section, tables are presented with practical overviews that can serve as a basis for scientometrics: 1) an overview of several types of Social Media, aimed at the general and specifically at the academic public (often in science); 2) an overview of research recommending and discussing webmetrics. The authors consecutively supply a list of data sources explaining why and how these can be used for scientometrics and what the pitfalls are. This list includes reference managers, comments on articles, microblogging and blogging. In the conclusions, the application of scientometrics is discussed cautiously. The main uses described are evaluation, filtering and study and mapping of scholarship. The authors end with a discussion of the limitations and opportunities, encouraging new research.
In developing the online scholarly publishing network MediaCommons (see http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/) with the Institute of the Future of the Book, the author was often questioned about peer review, as the articles shared through this platform will not be peer-reviewed in the traditional sense. The topic of digital scholarly peer review is addressed in this essay. The author first notes that on the Web in general, the shift in authority towards decentralization is accepted, but that in academia scholars are not willing to consider such a notion for intellectual authority, resulting in the risk of becoming completely detached from the non-academic world. The downsides of peer review are explained, for instance how the system sustains itself and the author then offers online peer-to-peer review as an alternative, where filtering replaces gatekeeping. The author concludes by stating her hopes that a community surrounding projects like MediaCommons can set the parameters for such a system in such a way that current systems can learn to adhere to this type of review.
Where in the use of the Web and Social Media many academics express concern, another opportunity is recognized: the possibility to engage a wider audience. In this second part of the bibliography, the possibilities of such an engagement are explored. First there is a theoretical focus where researchers — for different reasons — argue the benefit or even necessity of employing Web 2.0 strategies to include the public in the academic knowledge system. In the second section, examples of the employment of Social Media — thereby including the products and help of a wider audience — are given, including discussion on the benefits and downsides and possible strategies for improving these tools.
The articles in this section have different backgrounds which the authors have used as a base: industry, (global) education and university, but all have in common that they advocate a university model based on the Web 2.0 model and/or technologies in order for the university to survive as a knowledge producer in a fast-changing world.
The authors argue that because of the rising demand for higher education,
it is near impossible to meet the global demand in the future, at least
if this demand needs to be met by building brick-and-mortar institutions.
The solution is seen in access through the Internet, but more importantly
Web 2.0 technology: participatory resources that can support different
types of learning, according to the authors. The notion of social
learning is employed to support this claim, where 1) the way something is
learned — collaboratively — is becoming more important than what is
learned, countering the Cartesian view of knowledge and learning based on
knowledge transferal; 2) learning to be a
This (for many research universities daring) framework for institutional
change in university builds on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 strategies. The
author first sketches the environment of the developments: the economic
importance of knowledge, including the Lisbon strategy to forward Europe
in the global economy; the adaptation and integration of e-learning,
where the increase of ICT in higher eduction has led to new pedagogy
models and embedding of e-learning; current university models, where the
Corporate University is explained in more detail; and lastly, Web 2.0 and
Enterprise 2.0. Enterprises have acknowledged the importance of Web 2.0
technologies and have thus incorporated them, because these technologies
provide opportunities for company improvements in
the area of innovation, collaboration, knowledge sharing, using
collective intelligence and searching and discovering
In this essay, the author argues that universities need to rethink their
strategies to perform their core business of cultivating knowledge. Using
a nineteenth century article on the distribution of books through
railroads, the author distills the concept of peer
finder for institutional repositories
, which is of his own
making
Theoretical article that describes the often-used concept of Community of Practice (CoP). Although the concept was designed for use in business practices, it is particularly useful in describing online communities; the identity of the CoP is shaped by the contents of what the members share, thus by knowledge, and not by the institution or other official affiliations or even shared tasks. Although these communities grow naturally, organizations can influence them. Five strategies of nurturing the community are described.
Cambridge et al. (2005) have written a brief design guide to form and sustain communities of practice in Higher Education:
The prime author has done much research on the employment of
. In this
article, reCAPTCHA (now acquired by Google: http://www.google.com/recaptcha) is described, a system that
uses human processing power to help transcribe digitized textual archival
material where OCR has failed. CAPTCHAs (completely automated public
Turing-test to tell computers and humans apart) are used on websites to
prevent machines from automatically filling out forms. Computer-generated
strings of letters and digits, which are also distorted by the computer
to make them illegible for machines, are shown which the reader then
needs to replicate to prove she is human. In reCAPTCHA, next to one
string of computer-generated content, scanned words from archival
documents are inserted — which two OCR systems have failed to recognize.
Thus, free human transcription of words is provided. The workings of the
system are first explained in a clear and detailed fashion. Empirical
research proves that 1) archival documents can be transcribed with a
99.1% accuracy using reCAPTCHA; 2) reCAPTCHAs are better at preventing
computers to read their contents than (computer-generated) CAPTCHAs are.
This is a good example of the useful employment of non-expert knowledge
for problems that are generally solved by experts, but that can be
performed on a much larger scale than would have been possible without
such application.
A brief discussion of the downside of direct digital publishing during science conferences. The boundaries between researchers and journalists blur, as often anyone can get access to streaming video during conferences, Twitter feeds, etc and publish on this information. Raw data might become publicly available before intended. The author discusses means of prevention, but also points to the possible benefit.
In this conference paper, the author describes the use of virtual
communities to aid scholars in conducting research. Some examples are
mentioned that allow for varied engagement of non-academics. Digital
Humanities Now (http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/) for instance, is mentioned as
a platform where the social media buzz in Digital Humanities is
aggregated. More active engagement can be found in Galaxy Zoo (http://www.galaxyzoo.org/,
now the second version), where amateur astrologers identify galaxies and
planets. Steve (http://www.steve.museum/) is an amateur tagging tool used by
cultural heritage institutions for the tagging of art works. The author
mentions that communities develop without deliberate intention from
organizations themselves and that they can be very useful to research;
that is, for secondary products of
scholarship
, like classification and providing context
Through the concept of ITexts (the blend of IT and texts
,
introduced in 2001), including for instance e-mail and reading on a
portable device, the authors suggest a transdisciplinary approach to
problem-solving. This article gives an interesting example of the
application of Web 2.0 to facilitate large-scale collaborative networks
that include the general public. The authors first discuss the importance
of transdisciplinary collaboration for societal problem-solving.
Consequently, a two-day workshop on web-scale collaboration is described,
where three groups (each discussing an issue in STM, humanities or social
science) discussed the conditions of such collaboration and gave examples
of ITexts that could be of use. CommentPress and Wikipedia were mentioned
for instance in a group focused on the topic of scholarly data. All
groups defined five heuristics for suitable platforms, among which
providing incentives to attract user participation and mechanisms for
ensuring privacy and dedicating ownership. Three examples of IText for
transdisciplinary collaboration are discussed: Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/),
Galaxy Zoo (for identifying galaxies, http://www.galaxyzoo.org/,
now the second version) and reCAPTCHA (which aids in deciphering words of
difficult to read archival material
Although this article is not explicitly on academic and non-academic
The authors signal the potential wealth of Internet resources, which they identify as bibliographies. They have indexed a number of resources, including for instance Google Zeitgeist (http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/) , Yahoo Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com/) and Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/) upon which they have expanded a traditional conceptual model for bibliographies to include participation. The authors suggest several new research topics emerging from their work, including amateur bibliographers and professional intermediation.
The author briefly discusses two academic researchers, Martyn Poliakoff (Professor of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham) and Conor Gearty (Professor of Law at the London School of Economics) who have successfully employed social media to extend their audience to the wider public. The blog (Impact of Social Sciences by the London School of Economics and Political Science) provides other examples of academics reaching out to the public as well as discussions on the topic.
This article is aimed at reforming student composition education, where students generally are presented with an artificial distinction between research and writing (and between doing research and Web 2.0). The author uses a combination of four Web 2.0 platforms to show how students can be taught a more realistic image of composition: Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/), ARTSTOR (http://www.artstor.org) and del.icio.us. (now called
capable knowledge producers, using the affordances of Web 2.0.
The authors have conducted an informal online survey through the MediaCommons e-mail list and the Cultural Studies listserv on practices and attitudes towards engaging non-academic communities through online scholarly work. Some of the outcomes are described, for instance the gap between the interest in engaging non-academics and actual practices. Many scholars prefer to engage other academics and students first and are not completely comfortable with sharing unfinished work online, although 46% of the respondents report maintaining blogs. In the final section, possibilities for engaging the non-academic community are mentioned — including existing examples — and the authors stress the importance of making an effort to do so. The benefit of this engagement is mentioned briefly: education and perhaps in the best case scenario, aid from the non-academic community in knowledge construction. The authors find that the Web is starting to be used to disperse scholarly discourse more widely and encourage scholars to take risks.
The author has performed linguistic discourse analysis on the comments section of three health science articles in a newspaper to find whether experts, either personal or scientific, interact with one another. The small sample indicates that the origin of personal experience needs to be given or else is demanded, whereas scientific expertise is assumed with the use of a certain type of discourse. The author notes that the personal and scientific experts commented within their peer-groups and where they did interact (in one case), the personal experts ‘scientised’ their language use. Since the origin of scientific expertise was rarely explicitly mentioned, it is not certain whether the scientific experts are academics or not. It is an interesting article however, as it points to the notion that linguistic markers of (a lack of) academic education have a great influence on the interaction between commentators; and possibly disproves (although the sample is small) the fact that a shared discussion space automatically allows for connection between different communities of practice.
Supplementing the above, this review of electronic reading environments and tools
is meant to provide a baseline for understanding new e-Reader hardware and
software. Although it is striking in one sense how little seems to have changed in
a decade – for example, the vast majority of scholarly
The first
In November 2007, twelve years after they sold their first physical book over the internet, Amazon.com gave the e-Book a gargantuan, consumer-grade push, in the form of their Kindle. The device was only on sale in the United States until late 2009, when it was gradually introduced into hundreds of other markets worldwide. The Kindle's loudest boast, and perhaps its entire raison d'etre, was a screen made from the revolutionary Vizplex, brainchild of Cambridge, MA startup E-Ink. Without a backlight, Vizplex is easier on the eyes; with the help of a technique called electrophoresis, Vizplex displays can freeze, without any power consumption, until a user presses the ‘next page’ button. Now, a revision of Vizplex is used in every major commercial e-Reader, and is arguably the single greatest advantage of using a dedicated device.
Its other greatest innovation, and almost certainly its financial
triumph, is the ease with which it allows users to download and purchase
content on-the-fly without the use of a tethered PC. Amazon’s Kindle is
still the only device to provide free wireless 3G access to all users for
the purpose, and the only device
Because the Kindle was for a good while the market leader, it was they who addressed many of the growing pains of e-Readers, and in some cases – such as the provision of page and line numbers for scholarly use of texts, as would be present in physical editions – they still provide the best solution. In early 2011, Amazon released an Application Development Kit (ADK) for third-party developers to build software specifically for its dedicated Kindle device, though it remains in closed beta.
Barnes & Noble booksellers’
The Kobo, developed by an independent Toronto-based firm in 2010 and marketed primarily through the US
Apple’s iPad is, of course, a multifunction device, and not a true
dedicated e-Reader insofar as it does not use Vizplex display technology
(as would be inappropriate for other content displayed on an iPad). It
has, however, garnered an extraordinary amount of developer interest for
its novel form factor, and in fact all of the manufacturers of dedicated
e-Reader hardware now provide an iPad app
Per the current software market, supplemental reading tools such as annotation
are typically handled by third-party application developers
Google’s Android smartphones have generally received comparable development attention, and benefit from Google’s comparatively relaxed stance on allowing unlicensed content which need not originate from a trusted source. However, still more novel eBook applications which would be not possible on dedicated hardware are for the most part being developed only for the iPad, notably an interactive
Documents a shift in reading styles over two centuries away from sequential, complete reading and toward skimming and searching for relevant information, with increasing demand for need of more efficient methods of extracting relevant information from documents. Presents a new document reading environment, Readers Helper, which supports the reading of electronic and paper documents; it analyses documents and produces a relevance score for topics of interest, to help the reader decide whether the document is actually worth reading in full or skimming. Also automatically highlights topic of interest phrases, and presents an information visualization tool that presents a dynamic representation of the document to aid in navigation.
These two relatively early studies of electronic reading environments have an interesting commonality: they are both designed to help the reader get some information out of the way. Whereas Graham’s
This is among the earliest comprehensive work on asynchronous web
document annotation, reporting on the inter-office use of a Microsoft
Word 2000 plugin, and the majority of its points still hold up well
today. It is curious, however, to note that they claim virtually all commercial document-processing packages
(e.g., Microsoft Word, Lotus Notes) support some form of
annotations
. While this has indeed been true of word
processing software for the decade-plus that the authors claim, this only
serves to make more obvious the degree to which PDF and web annotation
have lagged behind. We have, however, hardly lacked for advancements in
eleven years. In a time before ubiquitous cloud server architecture, the
annotation environment described by the authors more closely resembles an
asynchronous chat log containing symbolic links to a particular document
than the want to happen
persuasion – in the
information wants to be free
sense – and any way that we can
sustain them is nevertheless useful. Indeed, the frequency with which
users annotated documents appeared to follow a common power law, as with
many other collaboration systems.
While not about electronic reading
This article, while not about a reading tool or tools
This paper reports on an ongoing project in automatically parsing and
embedding noun-phrase links in web pages, using Wikipedia as a reference.
Linking with Wikipedia – or, as the authors say,
This curious paper is unlike the majority of reading environment design
studies in that it rejects the notion that an optimal reading environment
is likely to be
This article, an extension of the author’s dissertation work, reports on
the electronic document reading, sharing, and interaction habits of
graduate students. He found that the vast majority of annotations fall
into just two categories – underlined or highlighted text, and anchor
points for some marginalia. Either selection of text (in the first case,
the original author’s; in the second, the reader’s) could be indexed by a
sufficiently powerful reading environment and presented to the reader or
readers as a table of contents of notes. One finding from this study
which seems all too logical and subverts a key assumption of open online
annotation systems is that many individuals do
The authors report on a study of user opinions on using the scholarly article reading tools embedded within the Public Knowledge Project’s
find more like thisoptions, usually because the article metadata which was mined for search terms was insufficient to compete with the relatively trivial alternative of readers formulating their own Google Scholar search.
This lengthy volume, while not about electronic reading per se, is a comprehensive single source for much of what we currently know about the reading process from the perspective of education. The book’s short first chapter deals with how controlled reading studies are best conductive, in both an ethnographic and computational context. After this, the book turns to focus entirely on the reading process itself: in the second chapter, through the life cycle; in the third, at various levels of linguistic depth; and in the fourth, in the teaching and learning of reading. The fifth and final chapter, also the most diverse, deals with many sociocultural facets of reading – such as how popular culture has altered our approach to language and literacy, how second languages are learned, and how literacy can thrive in informal contexts. The lattermost is perhaps of particular note for reading specifically non-academic content on the web.
This article, a polite lamentation of sorts on what it is we are gaining
and losing by migrating away from paper toward digital documents, begins
with a telling anecdote: a search of the Google Books corpus reveals that
there were relatively few published references to the wonderful smell of
books prior to 1990, after which mounting concerns about the
disappearance of this smell made them more and more prevalent. The author
reviews the abortive (and variously worrying, for still-relevant reasons
ranging from deprecated libraries to privacy concerns) attempts at
popularizing e-Books prior to Amazon’s Kindle, which is as much a device used to buy books as it is a device
used to read books
. She believes, however, that the somewhat
collapsed physical extension of e-Books – a brown
paper wrapper
on the bus, containing entire libraries – will
eventually speed the intellectual work of readers working across multiple
texts and wanting to copy and paste at will, though seems to believe
unequivocally that we are not there just yet.
Cathy Marshall’s
This very promising report on a prototype active reading system for tablet devices was presented at the 2011 ACM
This article recounts the trials and tribulations of the University of Washington’s Amazon Kindle DX pilot program for students. Like many articles reviewed here, it mentions the XLibris digital paper prototype (Fuji-Xerox, Palo Alto) of years prior as the high bar to beat in the field, despite the fact that it was never widely adopted. The authors of this article are quite critical of the Kindle DX, noting that the degree to which students expect to be able to skim physical textbooks is totally unlike their expectations of speed-reading PDFs which are usually read on screen, and the Kindle is not up to this task. In addition, the Kindle was found to be poorly-suited to both horizontal scrolling and annotation (both of which have been addressed in later revisions of the hardware). Kinesthetic clues such as flipping to a dog-eared corner halfway through a textbook were also badly missed, and some complex illustrations were evidently not rendered properly. The researchers conclude somewhat unequivocally that this incarnation of the Kindle is not nearly as well-suited to multimodal academic reading as its consumer success might suggest.
A whitepaper survey, carried out by Cara Leitch for the ETCL [-2009].
The key activities of professional readers in the humanities include: evaluating the scholarly value of research material, communicating with other scholars, and managing physical and electronic collections of research material. In our recent study of expert readers and their experience with the Open Journal System, we observed that participants were most satisfied with the online reading tools when they modeled existing reading strategies. Participants expressed dissatisfaction when the online reading tools proved less effective than their existing strategies.
As expert readers also become expert at using online tools, they will demand an even higher level of sophistication from an online reading environment. Professional readers are becoming increasingly aware of the potential of social networking tools as scholarly research tools. A successful online reading environment would integrate social networking tools in a way that extends readers’ existing strategies. The value of such an environment to the professional reader would be that he or she would not have to use a variety of disjointed tools. Instead, he or she would be able to perform the same tasks from within the reading environment. To date, no one social networking tool models all three main aspects of readers’ existing strategies.
software which supports, extends, or derives added value
from human social behaviour
underlying all the networking sites are a core set of
assumptions -- that there is a need for people to make more connections,
that using a network of existing connections is the best way to do so, and
that making this easy to do is a great benefit
Wellman et al. suggest that on-line relationships are based more on shared
interests and less on shared social characteristics
to turn an encounter into a connection, there generally
must be some common ground
third place
after home and work where people connect with friends, watch television, listen to music,
build a sense of togetherness with people across the world, and provide
expressions of ourselves . . .
may indeed be
used to support relationships and keep people in contact, even when life
changes move them away from each other.
Ellison, Steinfeld and Lampe
also note, in addition to helping student populations, this use of
technology could support a variety of populations, including professional
researchers, neighborhood and community members, employees of companies, or
others who benefit from maintained ties
The ability to create and maintain an online identity is one of the key
features common to social networking tools. Boyd writes
Social network sites are based around profiles, a form of individual (or,
less frequently, group) home page, which offers a description of each
member. In addition to text, images, and video created by the member, the
social network site profile also contains comments from other members and a
public list of the people that one identifies as Friends within the network
Pew Internet’s
one in ten internet users have a job that requires them to self-promote or market their name onlineand
voluntarily posted text, images, audio, and video has become a cornerstone of engagement with Web 2.0 applications. Indeed, beingfindable and knowableonline is often considered an asset in participatory culture where one’s personal reputation is increasingly influenced by information others encounter online
persistent and verifiable identity
what makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks
in this structure for presenting individual work, the standard for quality work naturally becomes higher. Work deliverables that were prior routine now become viewable, visible and available to a highly critical audience
Expert readers learn about new ideas and develop existing ones by engaging in
scholarly communication with their peers and colleagues. Online, these readers
participate in online forums, email listservs, and use commenting tools on
blogs and other social networking sites. Kathleen Fitzpatrick writes Scholars operate in a range of conversations, from classroom
conversations with students to conference conversations with colleagues;
scholars need to have available to them not simply the library model of
texts circulating amongst individual readers but also the coffee house model
of public reading and debate. This interconnection of individual nodes into
a collective fabric is, of course, the strength of the network, which not
only physically binds individual machines but also has the ability to bring
together the users of those machines, at their separate workstations, into
one communal whole.
Hoadley and Kilner write, knowledge-building communities are a particular kind of
community of practice focused on learning. Based on scholarly
communities, knowledge-building communities take as an explicit goal the
development of individual and collective understanding
Noah Wardrip-Fruin recently participated in an experiment using CommentPress and the blog
I soon realized that blogs . . . contain raw research, early results and other useful information that never gets presented at conferences
In a follow-up conversation between Wardrip-Fruin, Ben Vershbow from the
institute for the Future of the Book (creators of CommentPress), Doug Sery of
MIT Press (publishers of Wardrip-Fruin’s book) and Don Waters of the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, there is an attempt made to clarify the role of open peer
review in the publishing process. Waters writes, there is a sense in which the experiment is not aimed
at
The use of CommentPress as an editing tool suggests a number of applications
for an online reading tool. Larry Sanger writes, strong collaboration – which is made possible on a wide
scale by the Internet – goes one step further. Not only are there
multiple authors, and not only are those people each others’ editors, but
there is no set group of people who are the authors and editors of the
work
The ability to leave a paragraph-specific comment rather than a comment at the end of a text makes CommentPress a useful annotation tool. Authors could invite community members to clarify aspects of his or her work that reflect their field of expertise. This makes possible a fluid, up-to-date system of reference that goes beyond the citation of published material. Readers could use CommentPress to leave questions or comments that are tied to specific passages in a text. Multiple users could engage in multiple conversations around different points in the text rather than in one long, threaded conversation at the end of the text. This kind of communication system combines the reach of global community with the specificity of local conversation.
Searching, retrieving, classifying, and organizing research material is a primary activity of professional readers. Expert readers employ a variety of strategies ranging from simple filing systems to elaborate systems of classification and storage. Reference management tools such as Zotero, Citeulike, and Connotea allow users to find, store, and organize research materials online. This kind of organization system has the benefit of giving the user access to his or her research material from any computer connected to the internet.
The use of folksonomy tagging in reference management tools can improve on a
reader’s existing research strategies by providing him or her with a flexible
and easily accessible way of organizing research according to his or her own
criteria. These tools also allow users to share research collections with
colleagues and find material relevant to their interests in other collections.
Alexander describes the role of social bookmarking in higher education as a
tool for collaborative information discovery
. He
identifies a number of benefits to using social bookmarking: finding people with related interests can magnify one’s
work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations. . .
[and] the practice of user-created tagging can offer new perspectives on
one’s research, as clusters of tags reveal patterns (or absences) not
immediately visible . . .
One of the challenges faced by expert readers is that more and more of their reading and research is being conducted online. Rather than replace expert readers’ existing strategies, a successful online reading environment would extend and improve those strategies. The use of social networking tools would contribute to this extension and improvement, particularly in the key areas of evaluation, communication, and management of resources.
(http://www.citeulike.org) is a tool based on the principle of social bookmarking, aiming to promote and develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages (with Furl and del.icio.us) or photographs (with Flickr), scientists can share information on academic papers with specific tools (like CiteULike) developed for that purpose. The website is sponsored by the publisher Springer Science+Business Media. Richard Cameron developed CiteULike in November 2004 and in 2006 Oversity Ltd. was established to develop and support CiteULike. When browsing issues of research journals, small scripts stored in bookmarks (bookmarklets) allow one to import articles from repositories like PubMed, and CiteULike supports many more. Then the system attempts to determine the article metadata (title, authors, journal name, etc) automatically. Users can organize their libraries with freely chosen tags and this produces a folksonomy of academic interests. (From Wikipedia).
(http://www.f1000.com) is a research tool designed to help scientists find and assess scholarly articles. Individual scientists select, rate, and classify research articles. Those ratings are published alongside comments from the reviewers. Users of Faculty of 1000 can browse highly-rated articles, search using specific criteria, and sign up to be notified by email when new research is published.
(http://www.flickr.com) allows users to upload, store, classify, and share photos. Photos are classified using tags that make it possible for other users to search photo collections. Community is encouraged through the formation of interest groups.
(http://www.flock.com) is a web browser that integrates features of social networking tools. From within the browser, users can access information from a number of social networking sites, including Facebook, flickr, Twitter, blogger, and WordPress blogs. While using Flock, the user is connected to his or her social network without having to visit each site individually. The user receives constantly updated information about his or her contacts. In addition, Flock facilitates information sharing by allowing the user to email or message contacts, update a blog, and upload material from the browser toolbar. Flock is highly customizable; every user determines what information is displayed in his or her social browser.
(h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/home.do) is a service hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. The purpose of H2O Playlist is to facilitate the sharing of information in the form of course syllabi and reading lists. Educators and students using the site are encouraged to communicate with others in order to learn more about their field of study. Users categorize their ‘playlists’ using tags in order to facilitate searching.
(http://www.ileonardo.com) allows users to create online collections called Notebooks where they can store information in a variety of forms. Notebooks can be shared with other users and users can help create large, public repositories of information. Users can create and maintain profiles that show the user’s recent activity alongside personal information. iLeonardo is currently in private Beta.
(http://www.linkedin.com) is a social networking site geared to professionals. It provides an opportunity for networking within a structured environment. Users create a profile and a network made up of their business and personal connections.
(lyceum.ibiblio.org) works with the WordPress publishing platform to create stand-alone, multiuser blogs. A multi-user blog facilitates communication within groups and with those outside the group. Each user can create his or her own individual page and contribute to the group blog.
(http://www.myspace.com) is popular with young adults, and resembles Facebook in that it is a social networking site used primarily for personal expression and communicating with a social group.
(network.nature.com) connects scientists from around the world in an online environment that facilitates information sharing and collaboration. Users can create and maintain an individual or group profile, create connections to other users, communicate with other users through blogs, and access information about upcoming events. In addition to fostering global communication, Nature Network also focuses on creating local networks. Currently, there are local networks for Boston and London.
(http://www.noserub.com) allows users to combine information from a number of social networking sites into one application. Rather than a service or application, NoseRub is a protocol that can be adapted by the individual user and run on his or her own server. An example of what can be done with NoseRub is available on their website.
(http://www.pownce.com) is a social networking tool that allows users to share information, including images, text, and links. Unlike other social networking tools, Pownce is a desktop application. Users do not have to be using a web browser in order to use Pownce.
(www.worldpulsemagazine.com/pulsewire) is currently in development, and will provide an interactive community for women around the world. It is designed to facilitate information sharing and communication.
(www.rentathing.org) is designed to facilitate resource sharing by measuring and communicating information about a user’s reputation. A high reputation score tells lenders that the borrower is considered trustworthy. Users build reputation scores by providing collateral and references from other users.
(www.twitter.com)
is a ‘micro-blogging’ service that facilitates social networking through the exchange
of short status messages. Twitter has been adopted as a communication tool by
political candidates, demonstrating that a social networking tool can be expanded
beyond its original purpose. Rather than sharing personal updates (I am
hungry
), some Twitter users are now using the tool to share information about
upcoming events (Meeting Monday at 11:30
) and as a reminder service (Don’t
forget to attend Monday’s meeting
).
(www.writeboard.com) is an online writing environment that allows users to create, edit, and share web-based documents. Invitations to collaborators are sent through email. Users can track changes to a text as they edit as well as compare two versions of the same text.
(www.zotero.org) is an extension for Firefox that allows users to manage research collections from within their browser. One of Zotero’s most important features is its ability to automatically identify and capture citation information on a web page. Users can then capture citation information, classify it using tags, and generate citations. Future developments of Zotero will include the ability to share collections with other users and to receive information about new material as it becomes available.
On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog
On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog