Quick Notes on Digital Scholarship
15 Jan 2008
I had a truly pleasurable conversation with some faculty members recently about the possibilities that Web x.0 has for academia. I'm sad to say it was far to short to really delve into the endless possibilities that are out there, and for all the enjoyment I had, I also left feeling terribly dissatisfied at how little we were able to even scratch the surface.
So, if you'll bear with me, I am just going to throw an off-the-cuff list up here right now so that perhaps next time I get the chance to have such a great chat, some of these things will be more at the forefront of my mind and I will be able to pluck at them more quickly without grasping....
- Network growth
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Tools that allow you to discover like-minded researchers you may not have previously known about.
del.icio.us, vanity searches, any site containing "who links here" (Technorati, RSS subscriber lists, etc), blogs, mailing lists, Citeulike
- Network maintenance, solidification
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Tools that allow you to connect with existing contacts and strengthen your professional bonds.
social networking, facebook, friendster, blogs, mailing lists, RSS
- Research tools
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Anything that makes research - both online and off - more efficient, easier
Amazon bib-builder (Turkel) and other sites containing "users who looked at that also looked at this" functionality, Zotero, Citeulike, spiders, RSS, metadata, standards, programming, data viz, Yahoo Pipes, mashups, Swivel, intelligent agents, automated searches, distance collaboration
- Public service
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Tools that make work accessible, transparent, and meaningful to the public.
Upcoming, Google Calendar, blogs, YouTube, alternative publishing, Second Life, mailing lists
- Reputation building
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Technically, any of the above! If people know you and you are producing good work, your reputation will increase. This means not just churning out papers, but also putting yourself in the public eye and playing nice with colleagues, collaborating with folks at other institutions, and providing work for the benefit of the public. What good is a brilliant paper if no one else knows it exists?
I know this barely touches on all the possibilities, but it's a down and dirty list of what came to me in the last 10 minutes. There are, of course, dozens or likely hundreds of other possibilities.