The Promise of Authority in Social Scholarship

The Promise of Authority in Social Scholarship Laura B. Cohen The Charleston Conference November 8, 2007

Evaluating content in The Good Old Days
Simple Web sites were the targets of evaluation
All were basically the same phenomenon
Librarians developed a standard set of criteria to evaluate quality – source , authority , timeliness , comprehensiveness , bias , etc.
Quaint! “Authoritative bias”

Toward a notion of authority
Today’s Web is far more varied
Extremely participatory
We first need to consider two small questions:
What constitutes scholarly publishing?
What constitutes reviewing?
The two questions are intertwined, increasingly social and technological
 social scholarship

Social scholarship: a definition Social scholarship is the use of networked social tools to publish and interact with scholarly output.

Sample parameters of social scholarship
Content
Metadata
Books, articles, etc. openly accessible
Wiki pages, edits
Blog postings
Comments, discussions
Annotations
Reviews
Quoted excerpts
Social bookmarks
Semantic labels (tags)
Links
Downloads
Votes, rankings
Prestige of authors, commenters, reviewers, bookmarkers, etc.

CommentPress plug-in for WordPress

“ Soft Peer Review”
Explicit: annotating, commenting, voting, ranking
Implicit : tagging, bookmarking, downloading, viewing
All of this can build a case for quality  authority
Dario Taraborelli, “ Soft peer review? Social software and distributed scientific evaluation ” (University College London)

For example …
You’ve published an article and
It get lots of positive (or negative) blog postings from academic peers, lots of excerpts
Readers discuss, debate
It’s bookmarked and tagged like crazy on Del.icio.us, CiteULike, Connotea
It’s linked to and viewed umpteen times online
Confers a verdict = new metrics of authority

Social Scholarship
Text + conversation + metadata
Conversation demonstrates the value of chatter
Metadata demonstrates the value of use
Put these together, and you begin to create a matrix of authority

A journal community model
George Siemens, “ Scholarship in an age of participation ” (University of Manitoba)
New open source e-journal in the works on emerging trends in educational technology and pedagogy
Collaboration of North American and European academics

Hybrid publication process
Blending of traditional peer review with an informal, open review process
Article can move between the two paths
All articles that pass the formal review track and are published enter the social review process for annotation, rating, and discussion

“ A journal is an opportunity to move beyond content or information consumption. While ‘community’ and ‘journal’ may not appear to fit together well, journals typically bring together the prominent thinkers and interested stakeholders of a discipline. Enlarging the conversation of journals to include deep discourse on articles and annotation throughout, sets the basis for a democratic, social model of scholarship.“ George Siemens

“ Authority 3.0”
Michael Jensen, “ The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority ” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6/2007 (National Academies)
Identifies 17 computer-processed metrics that add up to authority
Relies on open digital publishing and its accompanying metadata
In 10-15 years, Authority 3.0 will dominate scholarly publishing

Challenges of Authority 3.0
Identifying the metrics
Dealing with the huge potential variety and scale of these metrics
Figuring out how to gather and interpret this data to derive measures of authority

One example
UC Santa Cruz Wiki Lab
Wikipedia Trust Coloring Demo
“ Content-driven reputation” of authors computed by text analysis
Compute a “text trust” based on authors whose contributions are preserved or built-upon vs. revised

What librarians can do
See ourselves in the forefront of new publishing models that are shaping the future of scholarly communication
Track developments in social scholarship
Practice social scholarship ourselves
Adjust our pedagogy

Train faculty and students to practice social scholarship, as producers and consumers
Host, promote social scholarship platforms for our faculty and students
Control, quality, stability, preservation

Dialog with publishers
Ask publishers to host publishing models that support social scholarship
Ask publishers to do R&D – cooperatively with other publishers and academic institutions

http://www.slideshare.net/lcohen/ the-promise-of-authority-in-social-scholarship/ [email_address]

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The Promise of Authority in Social Scholarship

by lcohen on Nov 03, 2007

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