Discourse Or Document? Issues of adopting Emerging Digital Genres for Scholarly Communication

Discourse or Document? Issues of adopting Emerging Digital Genres for Scholarly Communication Dr. des. Cornelius Puschmann, M.A. Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de Scientific Writing and New Patterns of Scientific Communication 5th International Conference on e-Social Science Maternushaus, Cologne 24 June 2009

My prior research and this presentation ● I study linguistic aspects of scholarly communication (blogs, microblogs, wikis) ● this presentation addresses ● conceptualizations of paper-based vs. digital communication ● how differences in these conceptualizations are linguistically reflected ● what the implications are for scholarly communication

Initial observations ● scholarly communication shaped by the technology ● digital scholarly communication at the moment largely imitates pre-digital forms (“e-journals”, “e-books” etc) ● we are increasingly shedding the constraints of pre-digital metaphors (Web 2.0) ● but cultural conventions follow technology only slowly (“cultural lag”)

Terminology: digital natives vs. digital immigrants It is amazing to me how in all the hoopla and debate these days about the decline of education in the US we ignore the most fundamental of its causes. Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. - Prensky (2001)

Terminology: the long tail For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution. The main problem, [...] is that we live in the physical world. - Anderson (2004)

Terminology: conceptually spoken vs. conceptually written language conceptually spoken language conceptually written language ● prototype: face-to-face communication ● prototype: paper document ● conversation ● reference works ● phone call ● legal texts ● instant messaging/Twitter ● newspapers ● planned speeches ● academic articles ● … ● … = prototype is medially spoken, co-spatial, = prototype is medially written, non-co- synchronous, dialogical spatial, asynchronous, monological Koch & Oesterreicher (1994)

Terminology: conceptual metaphors There is a cognitive and cross-linguistic tendency to interpret new, abstract, complex and non- physical concepts in terms of familiar, concrete, simple(r) and tangible concepts. An example: THEORIES (AND ARGUMENTS) ARE BUILDINGS ● Is that the foundation for your theory? ● The theory needs more support. ● The argument is shaky. ● We need some more facts or the argument will fall apart. ● We need to construct a strong argument for that. - Lakoff and Johnson (1980)

A (very brief) history of scholarly publishing

Science blogging: UsefulChem To clear up confusion, I will use the term Open Notebook Science, which has not yet suffered meme mutation. By this I mean that there is a URL to a laboratory notebook that is freely available and indexed on common search engines. It does not necessarily have to look like a paper notebook but it is essential that all of the information available to the researchers to make their conclusions is equally available to the rest of the world. Basically, no insider information. - Bradley 2006

Lab wikis: OpenWetWare OpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering. - OpenWetWare.org

arXiv and Twitter mashups: Tweprints Tweprints aims to collect and organise the arXiv papers mentioned on Twitter. - orbitingfrog.com/arxiv

Video abstracts: Journal of Number Theory “The WWW allows us to personalize our papers in ways never before possible... you can present the motivational history of the research contained in your article.” - David Goss, editor

Visualizing and embedding data: ManyEyes/Wordle Rather than representing the end result of the experiment, the data from my experiments inspired more sharply focused readings of the texts. A visualization like the Wordle image of under- and overrepresented words should not, and really cannot, stand as evidence in proving a hypothesis. The visualization is simply not empirical in nature. In a way, word clouds, as visual representations of criticism, can be seen as art useful in representing other modes of art. And, as with any instance of artistic representation, they remain open to interpretation. - Steger (2009)

How can we characterize what is happening? In comparison to paper-based scholarship, digital scholarly information is... ● disseminated more rapidly and in smaller chunks (e.g. Twitter) ● more strongly personalized (e.g. blogs) ● more strongly contextualized (when/by whom is smth. created?) ● more likely to be non-textual (audio, video, interactive models, ...)

From the Object Web to the Social Web 1990s 2009

Object Web metaphors vs. Social Web metaphors Object Web metaphors Social Web metaphors ● page ● profile ● site ● friend ● browse ● follow ● “on” the Internet ● poke ● “go to” a website ● “X says in her blog...” ● … ● … = Web is a physical space filled with = Web is a socio-communicative objects interaction between people

What has motivated the shift of metaphors? Object Web Social Web ● bound to specific devices and ● Internet no longer bound to PC and limited contexts work settings ● limited Internet connectivity ● Internet connectivity is ubiquitous ● communication is asynchronous ● communication is synchronous ● “conveyer-belt interpretation” ● content is created and lives online ● Net speeds up existing practices, ● new practices arise doesn't change them

Speaking vs. writing “speaking” “writing” spontaneous planned discursive monologic qualified constative transient persistent contextual non-contextual

Frequencies words in academic papers and blogs Academic papers in linguistics: the, of, and, in, a, to, is, that, universal, this, for, implicatures, inferences, not, read, scalar, as, are, choice, free Academic blog entries: the, to, a, and, of, is, in, that, I, it, are, on, as, be, but, for, not, with, you, this (both registers are much more diverse than this simple example can show, but:) ● lexis in academic papers is complex and abstract ● blogs assign discourse roles (“I”, “you”)

At the heart of scholarship: authority ● scholarly communication is dependent on authority ● paper-based scholarly communication supports authoritative voice, because ● traditional publishing is mandated by institutions ● printed texts are permanent and immutable ● long, uninterrupted monologues naturally create authority ● author can be linguistically distant from his writing (no first person, no personal verbs etc) ● writing fosters specific conventions and code (formulaic language, jargon) that are exclusive to a group ● control, permanence, objectivity, exclusivity are so far crucial to scholarly authority

Issues ● especially those disciplines where “the data does not speak” (=Humanities) are potentially challenged in their authority ● impact on research and publishing practices likely to be significant in those disciplines ● more collaboration ● more stringent methodology ● more empiricism, data ● new ways and skills needed to establish authority

Likely future forms ● less uninterrupted monologue ● pastiches of media and voices ● meta-information likely to be encoded and exploited (who/when/where) because it simplifies writing and reading ● permanent, “interpersonal-style” narrative? ● Google Wave?

Thanks for listening! Thanks for listening!

Discourse or Document? Issues of adopting Emerging Digital Genres for Scholarly Communication Dr. des. Cornelius Puschmann, M.A. Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de Scientific Writing and New Patterns of Scientific Communication 5th International Conference on e-Social Science Maternushaus, Cologne 24 June 2009

Discourse Or Document? Issues of adopting Emerging Digital Genres for Scholarly Communication

by Cornelius Puschmann on Jun 24, 2009

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Discourse Or Document? Issues of adopting Emerging Digital Genres for Scholarly Communication — Presentation Transcript

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