Print: The Chronicle: 6/15/2007: The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority - The Diigo Meta page

• 04 Apr 08
  

  Yesenia Hernandez

  bibliometry journals open-access Open Access Journals Web 2.0

• 14 Dec 07
  

  Kevin Gaugler

  maristfreaks

• 23 Sep 07
  

  Barbara Lindsey

  When the system of scholarly communications was dependent on the physical movement of information goods, we did business in an era of information scarcity. As we become dependent on the digital movement of information goods, we find ourselves entering an era of information abundance. In the process, we are witnessing a radical shift in how we establish authority, significance, and even scholarly validity. That has major implications for, in particular, the humanities and social sciences.

  web 2.0 scholarship authority metrics

  • Web 1.0,
  • garbed new business and publishing models in 20th-century clothes.
  • fundamental presumption is one of endless information abundance.
  • micromarkets
  • Flickr, YouTube
  • Abundance leads to immediate context and fact checking, which changes the "authority market" substantially. The ability to participate in most online experiencesvia comments, votes, or ratingsis now presumed, and when it's not available, it's missed.
  • multiple demographics

  • Web 2.0 is all about responding to abundance, which is a shift of profound significance.

        
  • Chefs simply couldn't exist in a world of universal scarcity

  • a time when scholarship, and how we make it available, will be affected by information abundance just as powerfully as food preparation has been.

      
  • Scholarly communication before the Internet required the intermediation of publishers. The costliness of publishing became an invisible constraint that drove nearly all of our decisions. It became the scholar's job to be a selector and interpreter of difficult-to-find primary and secondary sources; it was the scholarly publisher's job to identify the best scholars with the best perspective and the best access to scarce resources.
  • Online scholarly publishing in Web 1.0 mimicked those fundamental conceptions. The presumption was that information scarcity still ruled. Most content was closed to nonsubscribers; exceedingly high subscription costs for specialty journals were retained; libraries continued to be the primary market; and the "authoritative" version was untouched by comments from the uninitiated. Authority was measured in the same way it was in the scarcity world of paper: by number of citations to or quotations from a book or article, the quality of journals in which an article was published, the institutional affiliation of the author, etc.
  • Google
  • Google
  • Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote, by Page A, for Page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important,'"
  • The challenge for all those sites pertains to abundance:
  • It has its limits, but it also both confers and confirms authority because people tend to point to authoritative sources to bolster their own work.
  • Such systems have not been framed to confer authority, but as they devise means to deal with predators, scum, and weirdos wanting to be a "friend," they are likely to expand into "trust," or "value," or "vouching for my friend" metrics — something close to authority — in the coming years.
  • ecently some more "authoritative" editors have been given authority to override whining ax grinders.
  • In many respects Boing Boing is an old-school edited resource. It doesn't incorporate feedback or comments, but rather is a publication constructed by five editor-writers
  • As the online environment matures, most social spaces in many disciplines will have their own "boingboings."
  • That kind of democratization of authority is nearly unique to wikis that are group edited, since not observation, but active participation in improvement, is the authority metric.
  • user-generated authority, many of which are based on algorithmic analysis of participatory engagement. The emphasis in such models is often not on finding scarce value, but on weeding abundance
  • They differ from current models mostly by their feasible computability in a digital environment where all elements can be weighted and measured, and where digital interconnections provide computable context.

  • Authority 3.0 will probably include (the list is long, which itself is a sign of how sophisticated our new authority makers will have to be):

     
     
    • Prestige of the publisher (if any).
      
    • Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any).
      
    • Prestige of commenters and other participants.
      
    • Percentage of a document quoted in other documents.
      
    • Raw links to the document.
      
    • Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered.
      
    • Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion.
      
    • Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted.
      
    • Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status?
      
    • Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community.
      
    • Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s).
      
    • Significance of author's other work.
      
    • Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc.
      
    • Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read.
      
    • Length of time a document has existed.
      
    • Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations.
      
    • Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

  • In the very near future, if we're talking about a universe of hundreds of billions of documents, there will routinely be thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of documents that are very similar to any new document published on the Web. If you are writing a scholarly article about the trope of smallpox in Shakespearean drama, how do you ensure you'll be read? By competing in computability.

      

    Encourage your friends and colleagues to link to your online document. Encourage online back-and-forth with interested readers. Encourage free access to much or all of your scholarly work. Record and digitally archive all your scholarly activities. Recognize others' works via links, quotes, and other online tips of the hat. Take advantage of institutional repositories, as well as open-access publishers. The list could go on.
  • Most technophile thinkers out there believe that Web 3.0 will be driven by artificial intelligences — automated computer-assisted systems that can make reasonable decisions on their own, to preselect, precluster, and prepare material based on established metrics, while also attending very closely to the user's individual actions, desires, and historic interests, and adapting to them.
  • the new authority metrics, instead of relying on scholarly publishers to establish the importance of material for them.
  • cholarly publishers
  • They need to play a role in deciding not just what material will be made available online, but also how the public will be allowed to interact with the material. That requires a whole new mind-set.

  • Traditional models of authority will probably hold sway in the scholarly arena for 10 to 15 years, while we work out the ways in which scholarly engagement and significance can be measured in new kinds of participatory spaces.

      
  • Many of the values of scholarship are not well served yet by the Web: contemplation, abstract synthesis, construction of argument.
  • if scholarly output is locked away behind fire walls, or on hard drives, or in print only, it risks becoming invisible to the automated Web crawlers, indexers, and authority-interpreters that are being developed. Scholarly invisibility is rarely the path to scholarly authority.

  31 more annotations...

• 07 Sep 07
  

  Geoffrey Bilder

  publishing strategy trust authority

• 23 Jun 07
  

  Katie Day

  Web 2.0 research education academia

• 19 Jun 07
  

  georgiakharper

  goes into web 2.0 and 3.0 implications for the new authority he predicts scholarly communication will be dealing with in 10 to 15 years. Seems like a long time, but in academic terms, it's really not.

  scholarly_publishing scholarly_communication Web2.0

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