Academic Productivity

Online reference managers are extraordinary productivity tools, but it would be a mistake to take this as their primary interest for the academic community. As it is often the case for social software services, online reference managers are becoming powerful and costless solutions to collect large sets of metadata, in this case collaborative metadata on scientific literature. Taken at the individual level, such metadata (i.e. tags and ratings added by individual users) are hardly of interest, but on a large scale I suspect they will provide information capable of outperforming more traditional evaluation processes in terms of coverage, speed and efficiency. Collaborative metadata cannot offer the same guarantees as standard selection processes (insofar as they do not rely on experts’ reviews and are less immune to biases and manipulations). However, they are an interesting solution for producing evaluative representations of scientific content on a large scale.

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How much time do academics waste chasing down references and managing them right now? The ceremony of fishing, saving, organizing and inserting references may be taking a significant percentage in any academic’s time allocation table.

James Howison & Abby Goodrum make a very good point about how little use we currently make of metadata. Why music and images gets tagged, but not academic papers? It seems that you can do a search by artist name easily, but not by author name when using pdfs (not natively at least)In my case, I try to make up a filename that contains all the key terms, author names, etc that I anticipate I may need. Then, I index the filenames only (not the full text) using a desktop search program (locate 3.0).  This is definitely a lot worse than the way my music is organized my music and I didn’t dedicate much time to it since it already came tagged or was easily mass-tagged using a program that talks to amazon or CDDB.  I wonder how we got to the point that even after  dedicating ten  more times more resources to organizing references than music they are still harder to find and handle.

Howison ventures to say that the experience of managing mp3s is far more fluid than managing any other documents, certainly more than managing pictures, word documents, and of course, academic papers in PDF form. This is just because music files have embedded metadata that travel with the media, while academic papers don’t.

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Have you used wikis as a mean of collaborative work with colleagues? Have you been frustrated by the current implementation, thinking that some ideas are just hard to put into wiki format? Gerhard Fischer, at the University of colorado, Boulder, has received a grant to improve existing wiki technologies for academic use. From the article:

The proposed research will create environments that go beyond existing Wikis (being primarily focused on hypertext) to permit the integration (not just attachment) of other forms of media ranging from movies and animations, to sharing of datasets, to the creation and utilization of social network information to support community interaction, to conceptual mind-mapping media.

I’m really interested in how several researchers collaborate on the same topic. Currently, most people I know simply email back and forth a word document with ‘track changes’ enabled (which can get messy after a few iterations). Not many people write papers using a ‘wikified’ document, and this could partly be just because hypertext (and all the symplified wiki markup languages) are not appropriate for the task. I wonder if the new additions would change current practices much (I’m really curious about the integrated mindmapping part).

Link to O’Reilly Radar > NSF Looking for a Better Wiki

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I don’t need to do much photocopying these days, as my trips to the library are rather infrequent. However, if do venture that way I bring along my compact digital camera. I used to have a 3 megapixel camera phone, but darn it, lost it, so its my trusty casio instead, and avoid those long photocopying queues. Rather than photocopying chapters or journal articles, I now just photograph them. Its free of charge, its quicker, I don’t have to find a photocopier, and I end up with a digital copy which I can read on my computer. print, or even run OCR if I was so inclined. 

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