Epistemographer

Inspired by a post by Jean Burgess, a tag cloud visualization of my book manuscript, (currently being copyedited):

(via TagCrowd)

The CES Swarm went swimmingly (there’s really something to this idea of collaborative research), and now I’m back home starting to fit the pieces together and figure out what I make of them. Some fragments:

• Going into this year’s show, I had a few established interests: the relationship between amateurs/enthusiasts and professionals, the role of conventions as social spaces for communities to cohere, and the fetishization of technology.
• One of the things I kept hearing prior to and during the show was an underlying narrative questioning the relevance of CES as a show. In several press accounts before the show, you had retailers asking themselves whether it was even worth attending the show, given its cost and sprawl, a sense which was echoed by a few of the attendees I spoke with.
• There seems to be a core contradiction in the gatekeeping mechanisms for the show – CES bills itself as the world’s biggest technology trade show (a claim which bears no small resonance with earlier World’s Fair hype), and there’s a sense that the sheer size of the trade show floors and numbers of attendees are some of CES’s greatest assets (the show is measured in square feet and bodies), thus more attendees = better. However, perhaps in response to the aforementioned relevancy questions, the registration process repeatedly emphasized that attendees (who could register for free up to a week before the show) must be affiliated with the consumer electronics industry, implicitly restricting attendance (and going against the bigger = better rhetoric by which the show is advertised).
• This tension is, of course, ultimately bunk…one of the worst-kept secrets around CES is how ridiculously easy it is, in fact, to get an attendee badge. My favorite interview of the show was with a guy who fabricated a video store two decades ago, and attends every year with his made-up business cards; most don’t go to those lengths, however, and one could argue that it would be pretty difficult, in this day and age, for an interested party to find a consumer technology relationship, however tenuous, with his or her own work.
• Which leads me to the relative unusefulness of “Consumer Electronics Industry” as a category, consumer technology being so vague and pervasive that virtually anything might conceivably fit under its umbrella.
• On the press coverage: while the registration and gatekeeping mechanisms were all about keeping the public out, the media narratives were all about simulating the experience of being an enthusiast visiting the show. Press coverage bypassed the “Industry” part of the show almost entirely, except in the sense that manufacturers were displaying their wares…from the vantage of the television cameras and newspaper reports, retail and distribution were functionally invisible.

• Another axis: the main CES foci were screens and mobile devices. That said, the really big announcement of the week didn’t even come out of Vegas, but hundreds of miles NW in San Francisco, where Apple unveiled both the iPhone and AppleTV. On the CES floor, there was only a very small sense of impact, but in the Press Room on that Tuesday morning the buzz was all about MacWorld, and a cursory look at press coverage seems to bear that assessment out.

As I wrote a few days back, one of the threads underlying much of my thinking over the past year has been how we might use technology to nudge “scholarship” in a more publicly engaged direction. As a good STS do-bee, however, I’m the first to say that the technology isn’t what effects change, but rather it’s the people using it. That in mind, I’m heading off to the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this Sunday for a group experiment in new modes of scholarship.

The original idea came out of an ECHO workshop that I ran at GMU a year and a half ago. A few of us (Julian Kilker and Alex Russo, to be precise) were talking about the general isolation of research and writing in the humanities, and wondering if there were some way to set up a more collaborative research project. Somehow (I can’t recall exactly how), we hit on the Consumer Electronics Show as an intriguing site, one which was way too big for any one person to tackle as a researcher. What if, we thought, we could get a bunch of scholars from across the disciplines together in that one place, turn the pack loose on the site and then bounce ideas off of each other? What kind of scholarship could that produce?

Over the next year and a half, the idea mutated a bit; at some point, it took on the name “Swarm Scholarship.” We looked into funding, but nothing really panned out. Finally, at this year’s SHOT meeting in Las Vegas, we decided to do something about this for real, on the cheap. Julian could line up housing and some space on campus through UNLV, and the only other costs for participants would be airfare and food. In the span of a month and a half, we circulated a proposal (see the full proposal below) via a few mailing lists and word of mouth, and received dozens of expressions of interest.

So, on Sunday about 15 scholars from around the country will be meeting up at Julian’s house in Las Vegas. We’ll compare interests, coordinate schedules, and then spend the next two days immersed in CES. Afterwards, we’ll spend the better part of a day giving from-the-hip “talks” on our ideas-in-progress, then head home to write. The goal is to get this published in some form or another sooner than later, aiming for something with the substance of scholarship but the latency of feature journalism.

And I’m sure I’ll blog more about it sooner than later. (more…)

Finally (after three months of “I’ll get to it one of these days”) switched this site over to Dreamhost. If you find anything that seems buggy, please let me know…

I’ve been thinking a lot about the various strands of work I’ve been cultivating over the past year (while working on a series of round-up posts), and there seems to be an underlying thread of reinventing scholarship, particularly with regard to transparency of the research process. With that in mind, I found Chris Anderson’s recent posts on Radical Transparency extremely resonant:

Six tactics of transparent media 1) Show who we are. All staff edit their own personal “about” pages, giving bios, contact details and job functions. Encourage anyone who wants to blog to do so. Have a masthead that actually means something to people who aren’t on it. While we’re at it, how about a real org chart, revealing the second dimension that’s purposely obscured in the linear ranking on a traditional masthead? Upside: Readers know who to contact. The organization is revealed as a collection of diverse individuals, not just a brand, an editor and some writers. Risk: Competitors know who to poach; PR people spam us even more than usual.

Read: public websites / blogs for scholars.

2) Show what we’re working on. We already have internal wikis that are common scratch pads for teams working on projects. And most writers have their own thread-gathering processes, often online. Why no open them to all? Who knows, perhaps other people will have good ideas, too. Upside: Tap the wisdom of crowds Risk: Tip off competitors (although I’d argue that this would just as likely freeze them; after all the prior art would be obvious to all); Risks “scooping ourselves”, robbing the final product of freshness.

This is the trickiest thing for humanists and social scientists to get past – the idea that describing your work in public before it’s “published” (whatever that means anymore) leaves you open to idea theft, where what it really does is allow you to marshal the community behind your project (shades of Latour) and allow you to claim the territory early.

3) “Process as Content”*. Why not share the reporting as it happens, uploading the text of each interview as soon as you can get it processed by your flat-world transcription service in India? (This may sound ridiculous, but it’s exactly what wire services such as the AP have long done—they update their stories with each new fragment of information). After you’ve woven together enough of the threads to have a semi-coherent draft, why not ask your readers to help edit it? (We did it here, and it worked great). And while you’re at it, let them write the headlines and subheads, not just for the site but also the punchier ones for the RSS feed and the one that has to work with the art for the magazine. Upside: Open participation can make stories better—better researched, better thought through and deeper. It also can crowdsource some of the work of the copy desk and editors. And once the story is done and published, the participants have a sense of collective ownership that encourages them to spread the word. Risk: Curating the process can quickly hit diminishing returns. Writers end up feeling like a cruise director, constantly trying to get people to participate. And all the other risks of the item above.

We’ve got plans afoot for syndication of research streams via Zotero – I want a sidebar alongside this blog that would let colleagues see what I’ve been reading, and arguably how I’ve been fitting it together as I move through a body of work. Add in the ability go generate feeds based on tags or particular projects, and things get really interesting. Let me do this collaboratively, on the level of topical projects or discipline-wide organizations, and you’re reinventing the role of departments and associations/societies.

4) Privilege the crowd. Why not give comments equal status to the story they’re commenting on? Why not publish all letters to the editor as they’re submitted (we did that here), and let the readers vote on which are the best? We could promise to publish the top five each month, whether we like them or not: “Harness our tools of production! Make us print your words! Voting is Power!” Upside: Maximizes participation. Risk: If we don’t deploy voting tools or (sigh) a login system, trolls may rule.

Two words: peer review. We already do it, we’re just not calling it that.

5) Let readers decide what’s best. We own Reddit, which (among other things) is a terrific way of measuring popularity. Why should we guess at which stories will be most popular and give those preferential treatment? Why not just measure what people really think and let statistics determine the hierarchy of the front page? Upside: A front page that reflects reader interest better. Risk: A more predictable and lowbrow front page.

The risk here is particularly problematic for academics, though anything that drags us into more engagement with the world on the other side of the ivory walls is useful; the way to get past it is to allow for the creation of many “front pages” – one for History writ large, one for American historians, one for historians of 20th century American technology. Have people join whichever communities they choose, and vote there and there alone.

6) Wikifiy everything. The realities of publishing is that at some point you push the publish button. In the traditional world, that’s the end of the story. It is a snapshot in time, as good as we could make it but inevitably imperfect. The errors (and all articles have them) are a mix of commission and omission—we hope for the best yet brace ourselves for the worst. But what if we published every story on a wiki platform, so they could evolve over time, just like Wikipedia itself? The original story would be the foundation of what could eventually become a version expanded and updated by readers (our Fortune 500 blogging wiki was an experiment in this). If you want to see the original version, just push the “original” button, or see any changes in-between by looking at the version history. Upside: Stories live and grow, remaining relevant long after their original publication (at no cost to us!) Risk: Stories get progressively less coherent as many cooks mess with them. Whatever brand authority the Wired name brings is diminished over time as the stories become less and less our own work.

There’s a lot of exploration that needs to be done here, particularly on the tension between allowing wikified editing and granular commenting – the latter preserves the authorial voice but requires a shift in how we read (seeing a text as the site of a discussion rather than a univocal lecture). I’ve been hearing a lot of murmurs about commenting and annotation lately, and I think that’s going to be the solution once we get past the initial experimentation phase.

Kevin just tagged me with the latest blog meme (actually, I think this one’s been going ‘round for a while) – while it’s kind of fluffy to break my recent blog-silence with something as trivial as a meme, maybe it’ll get the juices flowing again:

1.Grab the book closest to you

Had to reach for the shelf, as I just spent the better part of today reorganizing my home office-area (consider it a bit of purge-cleaning after sending my final manuscript off to MIT Press for copyediting and page proofs earlier this week).

2. Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence

Yup.

3. Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog

“‘The food is unfussy and ingredient-driven, usually constructed around a main course that’s essentially an iealized version of your standard ‘meat and two veg’ combo – one night it might be an aged Niman Ranch shell steak with spring peas and truffled mashed potatoes; another night it might be a Hoffman Farm chicken stuffed with wild mushrooms and greens, served with Chino Ranch carrots , turnips, leeks, and a horseradish sauce; and still another night it might be Laughing Stock Farm pork cooked in the fireplace with cardoon gratin, served with black kale and rosemary roasted potatoes. You might smirk at the menu’s relentless use of proper-noun pedigrees, but the overall Chez Panisse experience is, in a word, unpretentious. Yet, paradoxically, no restaurant in America has inspired, yea, invited more cultuish worship and precocious food-crit overdrive.”

4. Name the book and the author

The United States of Arugula: How we Became a Gourmet Nation, by David Kamp

Guess it’s my turn to point the meme onward: Sam, Sandy, Jeremy

(First off, let me say thanks to the powers that be at McCarran airport for offering that electronic manna from above, free wifi access. Seriously, it’s a classy gesture – “Sorry we took all your money and left every permeable substance you own smelling of stale smoke, but here, check your e-mail before you get on the plane home. Just ‘cause we care…”)

Anyhow, I’m heading home from the Society for the History of Technology annual meeting, this year held at the lovely (*cough*), luxurious (*cough* cough) Imperial Palace, which will likely be rubble within a year or two, at which point I will celebrate its demise by raising a glass in memory of its inscrutably tangled corridors, impossibly unrecognizable celebrity impersonators, and best of all, torrential post-rain river running through the parking lot. (Seriously. I couldn’t make this up.) (more…)

As I said in my last post, I’ve spent most of the past year working on tools of various kinds. Today, I’m pleased to say, the private beta of one went live. Zotero is a next generation research tool that…well, just go read the quick start guide for the details. I’ve been a co-director on the project with Dan Cohen but the lion’s share of the credit falls to the development team of David Norton, Simon Kornblith and Dan Stillman, about whom epics will someday be written (very geeky epics about XUL and data architecture, but heroic epics nonetheless).

And I know, I know, it’s just plain mean to link to the site without letting you actually try the software, but the public beta’s just around the corner; I’ll let you know as soon as it’s up and ready for (quasi) public consumption…

It’s been a good 5 months since my last even vaguely-substantial post and more than a year since I’ve posted deeply and regularly, and I’ve been mulling over the reasons why. Have no fear – this is emphatically not one of those “I’m sorry for not posting” posts (after having written a few of those over the years, I swore I’d never do so again). I’m not apologetic about my absence, just curious as to its root causes. As someone who’s very vocal about the utility and importance of scholarly blogs, I figure it’s worth thinking a little deeply about why I’ve stayed away from my own for so long.

So, this semester I’m actually teaching at GMU for the first time: Clio Wired .

And yeah, it’s been a little while since I’ve posted. I’ve been shamed properly. Luckily, I’ve been busy while letting the blog lay fallow; more on all sorts of wondrous things shortly.