Willoughby Seminar ‘08
Mark Wardecker
Fri. 8/8/15
9:15 AM

Scholarly Communication:

Delivery and Content


  1. Intro:  This week you have been exposed to several new digital applications and resources that fall under the “Web 2.0” heading, and on Tuesday and Wednesday, during the Wikipedia, Flickr, and information literacy discussions, we actually started to look at the bigger picture and touch upon issues of scholarly relevance and authority.  Now, I would like to spend some more time on this and outline some trends in scholarly communication that have been emerging as scholars and publishers begin to explore the potential of the digital medium and how the new resources available in this environment can be used to enhance the delivery and presentation of academic content that would have been previously impossible.  At the same time, I intend to use the framework of this discussion as an excuse to show you even more digital goodies that may be of use to you and your students.

  2. RSS (Delivery): For centuries, scholarly journals have been the primary channels for scholarly communication, often delivered quarterly, with each issue organized to highlight a particular theme the editor would like to emphasize. However, electronic publishing has made it possible for publishers to make articles available as soon as they have made their way through the editorial process, rather than waiting to compile them into quarterly issues.  This new method of delivery is often accomplished by the use of RSS feeds.

    1. Using an RSS feed to keep abreast of new articles:

      1. Brain and Language
      2. Google Reader

    2. If you would like to keep others (students) abreast of new content, you can easily embed a feed into your own blog, wiki, or web page:

      1. Grazr
      2. Blogger

    3. Sometimes, you can also create feeds for search queries:

      1. “Send” a PubMed search to an RSS feed.
      2. This can then be imported into RefWorks.

  3. Electronic Text (Content):  Though, even now, many publishers attempt to perfectly reproduce in PDF format the look of their printed texts with their digital surrogates, several are now making electronic text versions of scholarly works available, because of the ease with which text can be manipulated and analyzed. 

    1. To exemplify the manipulation of electronic texts, consider annotation, a persistent academic need:

      1. Google Notebook - downloading, installing extension, and creating a new notebook
      2. Stanford Ency. of Phil. - clipping, adding notes, and exporting to Google Docs

    2. Electronic text lends itself to analysis by using some visualization tools:

      1. Analyzing plain text:
      2. TAPoR (used to create those simple word counts that used to be so popular), Many Eyes, and VISL
      3. More and more, other data is being included in electronic articles and texts.  In fact, scholarly datasets have become the fastest growing part of the digital content layer and even Google has begun archiving them: http://mndoci.com/blog/2007/08/09/scifoo-google-and-large-scientific-datasets/
      4. Many Eyes can be useful for visualizing these, too.

  4. The Result:  Such changes in delivery and content have resulted in some journals, though they are preserving the peer-review process and attention to scholarly bibliographic detail, breaking away altogether from the traditional print format.

    1. JoVE is an example of a scientific journal that uses video to present its content, scientific experiments.  In this way, it hopes to make experiments more easily reproducible.
    2. JoVE’s founder addresses the SciFoo Campers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNJz7U_L6tU

  5. Conclusion:  It is important to note that all of these trends reflect the themes we have encountered over the last few days in the Web 2.0 technologies we have explored, such as freeing content from its formatting and a greater sharing of content and resources.

Recommended Reading:  Borgman, Christine L.  Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet.  Cambridge, Mass:  MIT Press, 2007.