The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles. The Author Addendum is a free resource developed by SPARC in partnership with Creative Commons <http://www.creativecommons.org> and Science Commons <http://science.creativecommons.org>, established non-profit organizations that offer a range of copyright options for many different creative endeavors.

This special section of Profession addresses the evaluation of digital scholarship in the humanities, an issue that has been discussed both within the digital humanities community and at symposia on the future of scholarly publishing, in university departments’ and deans’ offices, at professional conferences, and in scholarly journals as well as mainstream media.

Why, for example, are philosophers housed in philosophy departments? Should groups of two or three philosophers be placed in departments across campus, to draw out the philosophic aspects of chemistry, economics, and business? Why is there no "lab" or "field" component for philosophy courses? Given the transformative nature of contemporary science and technology, in areas from synthetic biology to nanotechnology to climate change, are there opportunities for philosophic research--and employment--within the public and private sectors? Why are we not training philosophers to work at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the National Park Service, and a similar set of places across the private sector?

This essay forum strives to build an integrative discussion for what is a fragmented interdisciplinary field of study on the public sphere. It is meant to accompany a mapping project we are calling the Public Sphere Guide and is co-sponsored by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. The forum provides a platform for discussions around current or emerging projects in this area and serves as a gateway to ongoing conversations around sub-themes that have resulted in other stand-alone forums or blogs at the SSRC.

One of the best experiences I’ve had in my career to date has been participating in a relatively informal group that meets irregularly at Bryn Mawr to talk about complex systems, emergence, and information theory among other topics. I’ve had a hard time making the meetings more recently due to my teaching schedule, but I still really cherish this group of people and the kind of conversations they’ve nurtured, and the entire spirit of the group. I think it’s not an accident that the group is informal and only subsidized indirectly by administrative funding. This is one of the points that I find myself making on a cyclical basis to foundation officers who want to help higher education change some of its practices of assessment or to embrace new models for organizing curricula and research. Frequently, the harder you try to make change happen, and the more formal your funding and structuring of such promotional efforts are, the less interesting and effective the results. If there isn’t some group of people already trying to do things differently, you can’t make it happen just with money.

I was musing a bit about the conversations that this group tends to get into, which have tended over time to circle back to some of the same themes and disagreements, as is to be expected any time people are involved in discussion over the long-term. So here’s one thing I was thinking about: what intellectual issues and questions by their nature require discussion between a very heterogenous group of disciplines and intellects for innovative solutions or some kind of forward motion to emerge?

Almost any problem or question could probably benefit from having more than one perspective or angle devoted to it, but for many academic questions or policy problems, the natural range of useful contributions ought to be fairly narrow. Clearly certain kinds of novel thinking about how to plug the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico are desperately needed, but I don’t think a conference room full of poets, evolutionary biologists, linguists and political scientists would have much to contribute to the immediate technical question of how to stop the oil from leaking or what the best interim strategy is for cleaning up or mitigating its damage. (Yes, they could help us understand the event, interpret its consequences, or talk about how political institutions should deal with such issues.)

Also, all disciplines need help from outside their own community to answer the question of why they should study what they study. No discipline can answer the question “so what?” self-sufficiently. But this is a different kind of issue. I’m focused here just on intellectual and applied problems where heterogeneity in methods, bodies of knowledge and perspective are a requirement for progress. A few examples, and I’d be glad to hear of more along these lines:

1) SETI.

Paul Davies’ The Eerie Silence is a persuasive critique of the intellectual and programmatic shortcomings of SETI to date. Davies points out that SETI investigations to date have a whole bunch of anthropocentric assumptions about information, communication, technology and evolution embedded inside of their efforts to pick up signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Against this critique, the conventional defense of SETI (that we haven’t listened to more than a miniscule fraction of star systems, using more than a miniscule fraction of the spectrum in which communication might be broadcast) seems pretty weak.

I don’t think Davies really goes far enough in trying to open up the issues involved, however–and I think part of that is the desire to keep the questions safely knowable through science, however speculative. That’s characteristic of these types of problems that need heterogeneity of some kind: the current “owners” of the issue are reluctant to turn the speculative dials all the way up to 11 because that seems likely to result in lines of investigation or discussion which aren’t useful or productive. For example, Davies raises old questions about SETI’s teleological understanding of technological evolution, which pop up in the last two parameters of the classic form of the Drake equation. As Davies observes, this is one of many places where SETI has been too intellectually narrow in its focus, too inclined to look in the mirror of a certain kind of mid-20th Century modernist-rationalist vision of human history and to write that across the stars.

But even Davies is reluctant to really open up those questions. He points out that we can rethink questions about the origin of life simply by asking whether there were multiple abiogenesis events on Earth itself, and thus “alien” lifeforms already within our biosphere. Ok, but similarly you can open up questions about what what information and communication are, what intelligence is, what the directionality (if any) of the culture of intelligent beings is over time, and about the multiple contingencies and accidents of technological history might be. Again, just using Earth and its history. To do that, you’d need historians, anthropologists, linguists, computer scientists, philosophers, translators, cultural critics, and economists in the room, and not just the usual suspects or people who are already inclined to buy into the conventional embedded narratives that lead people to SETI. If that conversation is to be at all useful at opening up the problem of alien intelligence and whether or how it might signal its existence, it has to explore the whole of the possibility space without rushing to “things we can plausibly detect or investigate”.

2) Artificial intelligence.

Here I think the lesson’s already been learnt. Go back to the postwar beginnings of AI research and look at blithe pronouncements by Minsky, Simon and other early scholars in the field about how human-equivalent AI would be relatively easy to create. It’s easier to convince people that fresh approaches and unsettling questions are necessary when they’ve hit a brick wall or when they’ve had to eat a few helpings of humble pie. This is not to say that the biggest possible tent for AI research is now buzzing with happy, collaborative discussions: there are a lot of long-standing epistemological and methodological rivalries, and it can be very hard to get some of those constituencies into a mutual and exploratory discussion. But when you look over the whole field as a noncombatant, it’s hard not to be impressed by the presence of multiple disciplines and perspectives.

3) Economic development.

It is really hard to create opportunities for people who want to raise skeptical or critical questions about the normative backdrop of development work or policy-oriented studies of development to be in the same room as policy makers, NGO administrators, or scholars who work within those normative boundaries. (Skeptics who have appropriate professional or disciplinary backgrounds, like William Easterly, get heard, but that’s about the limit of what’s seen as intelligible.) On the other hand, many theoretical, historical or ethnographic studies of development projects are remote from a whole range of pragmatic or lived choices and challenges. I think it’s past time to wheel the whole apparatus of development and aid into the workshed for some fundamental redesigns, the kind of reworking where every assumption and idea receives a mandatory dose of heavy skeptical review that ranges from basic points of philosophy and ethics to finely calibrated technical questions.

4) Education

Even more than development, education is a domain of study and policy where most of the main stakeholders need a time out, to go and work for a bit in a clean room with some unaccustomed partners and novel artifacts and resources. Maybe more than development, there is a substantial amount of existing heterogeneity to work with, even within education studies itself–but if an open conversation about development might consist of introducing several hermetically sealed groups to one another, when it comes to education, different groups and approaches are all too conscious of each other’s existence. I know that the stakes are very high, and the antagonisms between various players are really deep-seated, so this may not be a realistic hope.

5) Cultural creation.

I feel like there’s a lot that people who study or interpret expressive culture could add in a discussion of how to create culture, but also vice-versa. This is always the hope in literature departments that combine working writers or translators with literary critics, or art departments that combine studio artists with art historians and critics. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t–but I think the conversation could be even more productive with a much wider range of participants, including some researchers and intellectuals who wouldn’t even necessarily see themselves as directly doing work that has implications for producing expressive culture.

The Four Rules of Big Ideas: techniques the masters use to make that keynote more stimulating, that essay more likely to catch fire, all without doing too much thinking.
1. Tell stories and think by analogy.
2. Make the point catchy, but make it ambiguous.
3. Simplify and exaggerate.
4. Cast the anecdotes and your overarching theme in a rebellious and revolutionary light.

Dear friends and colleagues in American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Cultural Studies Departments,Your boundary-pushing work on queering the neoliberal mediaspshere, the subversive performance of transsexual migrants in the borderlands, the construction of masculinity in vampire movie fanfiction, and the sexualization of the child in nineteenth-century medical discourse is fascinating but totally ineffectual. More people learned about the social dangers of denying "girlie things" to a young female child in this installation of Life and Style than will ever read all of your work plus all of the work of your academic advisors combined. You scholarship is totally useless in the face of this sick, fucked up world that we live in. Just thought you should know.Regards,Mralarm

This is the peril of hermetic rigorism and abject professionalization: if you believe that whatever it is you have chosen to hypostasize—truth in epistemology, the class structure in economics, the drive for status in social relations—is the only thing ultimately worthy of discussion, you stand a good chance of finding yourself on the defensive, with fewer and fewer people to talk to and increasingly occult things to talk about. Whenever a discipline becomes too self-congratulatorily reflexive, when it thinks, for example, that the corrections to the blind spots of sociology will be illuminated in an infinite regress of ever more sociology, that discipline has become moribund.

By my count, we’ve now seen three law professors “do” The Colbert Report: Neal Katyal (Georgetown), Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard), and most recently Lawrence Lessig (Stanford, but signed, sealed, and all but delivered to Harvard).  Here are the clips, in that order:

For years, law professors have wondered whether blogging is a good idea in light of anxiety over tenure and promotion. They have wondered whether blogging should count as scholarship, or as service, or as something else, or as nothing at all.

Now that we can see the opportunity here, we can ask the same questions about The Colbert Report. Should law professors go on The Colbert Report pre-tenure?

Imagine, in other words, that Lessig doesn’t have tenure. He’s published a new book, popularizing some themes that he’s been writing about in more learned scholarship. To Colbert or not to Colbert?

On the merits, I have some questions about the Lessig interview. Remix, the book that he is promoting, is linked closely to themes that animate Creative Commons — the importance of borrowing and blending in culture, intersections between volunteer and for-profit economies, and above all the proposition that authorial control is an invariable baseline. For years, via Creative Commons and otherwise, Lessig has been arguing that both authors and society are often better off when they relinquish partial control over their creative works — but that authors should be able to choose not to do so.

In the interview, though, Lessig didn’t make that point. Colbert baited him with the proposition that Colbert might remix Remix. Lessig: That’s great (so far so good). Then Colbert turned the proposition around; don’t remix Colbert, he advised (this is Colbert the character, not Colbert the Comedy Central employee). Lessig: No matter; Lessig is a joint author (of the interview? where does that come from?), so Lessig can authorize remixing without Colbert’s permission.  So there.  And the segment staggered to a close.

Isn’t the right response that if Colbert doesn’t want to authorize remixing, then Colbert doesn’t have to authorize remixing? Creative Commons is voluntary, not coercive. Authors and publishers don’t have to play in that sandbox.

Wasn’t it absolutely expected that Colbert would make this move? Isn’t the actor Colbert on record as being a righteous self-interested “pry it from my cold, dead hands” capitalist?  Lessig scored some important points, but I think that Colbert got the better of him.  Lessig and Colbert turn out to be brothers in arms, not adversaries, but Colbert played him like the latter.

Not to Colbert, then?

That’s the not-completely-serious or not-completely-silly question and answer.  Here’s the more serious topic, riffing on the same data.

Is there a time and is there a mode in which law faculty might engage in scholarship in ways other than text?  Is it possible to imagine Colbert, or The Daily Show, or something entirely different, constituting part of a scholarly portfolio?  If so, what would that look(or sound) like?

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1999 interviews with Patrick Wilson.

A typical project is to adapt the critical approaches of structuralist semiotics to analyze the conceptualization of creativity projected (and enforced) by creative design software applications.

When I saw the title of an article in today's New York Times, The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire, I thought, "Sweet! Professors are retiring! Finally! Jobs all around for me and my PhD-seeking buddies!"If the charts accompanying the article are to be believed, there are a ton of crotchety profs out there, greying by the second, inching closer everyday to retirement:The article's key argument is that the turnover is "changing the face of academia." Not only is academia's face much younger and less wrinkly, it is also, supposedly, more politically moderate:Now, I like charts as much as the next gal, and these are certainly very attractive ones. I have to note, however, that they're also a bit misleading. Apparently, the political spectrum of academia today consists of only three categories: liberal, moderate, and conservative. Like many of the hot young profs in the "under-35" category, I don't consider myself a "liberal." But this certainly doesn't make me a moderate. Ew!I suspect these charts would look very different if their categories were expanded to include a larger array of political sentiment. With a bit more sleuthing, the author of the article might have found that a great many young profs in the humanities and social sciences devote their studies to the critique of liberalism, that they do so largely from non-liberal leftist positions, and that their political commitments are complex, not lacking. Why not write an article about that? Is there some kind of law against truly interesting, thoughtful articles written for popular audiences about the academy?I'd continue my critique, but thankfully, Mark from Kyoto already did so in the article's comments section.  I'm including the whole comment here because it's worth the read:Interesting enough. But one thing goes for the most part undiscussed in this article (and inadequately registered in its accompanying graphics): It is possible to speak of an "aging" faculty (especially in the humanities) only if by "faculty" we mean "full-time tenured or tenurable faculty." If by faculty we mean instead "the men and women who actually run classrooms" the case is altogether different: the "faculty" in this latter sense is by no means "aging" or "graying," nor is it "moderating" in politics (so far as I can tell). A few people interviewed, here, hint at this (e.g., by speaking of the way "market forces" are changing American academia). But Ms. Cohen might have addressed the matter more directly. I suspect that any changes in sensibility, tone, or posture among college/university teachers--insofar as these changes are measurable--is due as much to the gradual phasing out of the tenure system in favor of contingent labor as it is to retirement of professors who came of age in the 1960s & 1970s. It isn't that "liberal professors" are "retiring." The salient point is that tenure itself is being retired--with the result that, in many cases, the men and women who actually run our classrooms are not even listed in traditional "faculty" directories. There are plenty of activist-teachers on campus (for the most part left-leaning). You just don't find them available for interview in offices, because as often as not they have none. Just keep an eye peeled, as you walk around the university, for men and women pulling carry-on luggage of the sort you see in airports. I started noticing this about ten years ago when I worked at a university in Michigan: Education on the fly; education with low (or no) overhead; open-air (or coffee-shop) office hours; and students who have no idea what a "faculty" is.

I fully support open-access scholarship, but find danah boyd's recent post on boycotting "locked-down" journals naive at best, and offensive at worst.First of all, I think she overstates the "lock-down." I've published articles with Sage and Taylor&Francis, and was able to publish almost identical draft versions here. All I did was hand-write that provision onto my contract before I signed it, and no one ever objected. And while I agree that there is some sort of "black market" economy for exchanging articles, I'm willing to accept this as a viable tactic against an over-arching publication for profit strategy. In my experience, one of the quickest ways to alienate people from your cause is to invalidate existing acts of resistance because they don't fit your model. That's just scientific positivism applied to personal politics, and I don't like playing the "my politics are better than your politics" game.This brings me to my main objection: danah's overall tone is so patronising to academics that I can't help but feel insulted. I mean, really, how do unsupported claims like this one - "If scholars are publishing for audiences of zero, no wonder no one respects them" - help our shared cause of reforming academic publishing?Danah's position disrespects years of scholarship and community, and it dismisses outright the possibility that an academic might find genuine pride, or satisfaction, or joy in such work. Surely good ethnographers would want to ask a scholar what she gets out of a given practice before they tell her, or speak for her? And as an early career academic, I was most unimpressed by being given the option of becoming a "punk" or "conservative" scholar:"Young punk scholars: Publish only in open-access journals in protest, especially if you're in a new field. This may cost you advancement or tenure, but you know it's the right thing to do...More conservative young scholars: publish what you need to get tenure and then stop publishing in closed venues immediately upon acquiring tenure. I understand why you feel the need to follow the rules. This is fine, but make a point by stopping this practice the moment you don't need it."What is this, high school? I honestly fail to see how this "open" model gives me any more space to manoeuvre as a scholar, or as a human being.In any case, Mel Gregg also takes issue with danah's "capacity to diagnose the pitfalls of an entire industry and the motivations of all of us who choose to work in it" and I appreciated Jason Wilson's comments on how journal publishing actually works. But since I also really like constructive criticism, and I haven't provided any alternatives here, I'll second Alex Halavais' suggestion:"If you want to find the Achilles heal, the catalyst that would get things moving much faster, it's easy enough: follow the money. Pressure NSF, MacArthur, etc., to require open publication for all funded research. Get state legislatures to do the same for state schools: if you get a summer grant or fellowship, your work needs to be published in public, so that the public who paid for it can access it."I encourage Canadian citizens and researchers to contact the following organisations to voice your opinions on these matters:SSHRC | NSERC | Killam TrustsResearchers can also apply for funding from the Government of Canada's Intellectual Property Mobilization Program (IPM).Canadian Intellectual Property Office | HRSDC Learning and Post-Secondary Education | Provincial Ministries of EducationAssociation of Universities and Colleges of Canada | Canadian Federation of Students

The dissertation is a test of scholarship, not writing. A thesis isn't a book, it's an argument. Make it, get rid of the rest, and be done with it.

Text clustering, information retrieval, web mining, text processing, NLP.

WebCite® is an archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future.

Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI) is an initiative from Nature Publishing Group (NPG). It aims to enable scholarly publishers, among others, to disclose their full text for indexing and text-mining purposes but without giving it away in a form that is rea

The School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley invites applications for up to two ladder rank faculty members, one at the junior (untenured) level and one open as to rank.

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations

I-School professor whose research includes event gazetteers, narrative structures, and news archives.

Lifelong learning, design, meta-design, software design, creativity, social creativity, distributed intelligence, human-computer interaction, and design-for-all (assistive technologies).

Ithaka is an independent not-for-profit organization with a mission to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education worldwide.

The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) offers a course of study designed for a small group of dedicated students with a passion and appreciation for graphic novels, storytelling, writing, comics, and design.

Since its founding in 1929, Musashino Art University has been one of Japan's leading art and design universities.

The science of design can be regarded as a creative conceptual mechanism for flexibly reexamining design as a specialty in light of social changes.

The eScholarship Editions collection includes almost 2000 books from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction.

Short list of academic journals focusing on media work.

His research interests lie primarily in the area of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Knowledge Management, Computer Supported Cooperative Learning, Entertainment Computing, Human Computer Interaction, Participatory Design, and Organizational Computing

Design and evaluation of digital record-keeping, archival, museum and other evidence-based information systems; metadata for recordkeeping, preservation, and cultural information.

Two principal areas of research: (1) the sociology of digital technologies, particularly photography and Internet; (2) the sociology of ‘ordinary’ or ‘mundane’ technologies, particularly in domestic contexts.

His work explores the growing contributions of IT forms and practices -- most notably computer modeling and simulation techniques -- to the practice of democratic administration and governance.

Assistant Professor at the School of Information at UNC Chapel Hill. My major focus is the management and preservation of digital materials.

Textop will be a set of projects, managed by a strong collaboration among a global group of scholars, with the aim of organizing the information contained in books, dictionaries, opinionated essays, and news articles--and perhaps other sources--into a sin

We hope that this document will help you to write better grant proposals, and hence to be more successful in obtaining funds for your research.

What I hope to provide in the following page is a few of the Stupid Academic Tricks [tm] about reading that I've learned over the years.

GROUPTALK is an informal, student-run, participatory forum for addressing challenges in Berkeley research projects at the intersection of people and technology.

Research interests include the development of open content and collaborative efforts in journalism.

Mainly working on the ontology of mental attitudes and intentional agents in general.

Mission is to research and develop techniques and tools to automatically analyse and index digital video information and allow content-based operations such as browsing, searching, alerting, filtering and summarisation.

This call invites submissions for a special issue on ‘Convergence Culture’: the worldwide emergence of increasingly collaborative practices between media producers and consumers.

If the academic gift economy – where we offer each other intangibles and are tied to each other through vague debts of gratitude – were to be phased out entirely, the result would obviously be disastrous for the development of knowledge.

Sites, lists, journals, homepages and other information that is relevant for the study of discourse.

The NKDPS program is launching a series of funding opportunities to help increase the production, use and capacity for research to serve public-interest advocacy and organizing around media and communications.

Here are some good articles on how to write a book review.

Semantic Web, Knowledge Management, Metadata, Semantic Interoperability, Text Mining, Emergent Semantics, Self-organizing Information Systems, P2P.

Concerned with the design of appropriate logics to model the flow of information. Theory of IR.

Research interests include automatic content analysis and annotation of still images, videos and sound for content-driven multimedia archiving and retrieval.

Interests lie in the areas of databases, data mining, information retrieval, and the semantic web, as they apply to multimedia information.

Main interests are in the field of Computational Linguistics as well as Knowledge Representation.

The VlogTheory wiki is a work in progress (aren't they all?) to support research into the theory and practice of videoblogging.

William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School.

Research focuses on the ways in which communication and information technologies structure and extend human interaction, with particular emphases on processes of organizing and information evaluation and sharing.

Her research and writing focus on the social and cultural changes associated with information and communication technologies and the relationship between new technologies and knowledge.

Research interests are information technology and organizational behavior, social networks, and organizational theory.

Research in Elomedia focuses on the means of expressions and design, production and distribution processes and strategies of multimedia.

Research is about developing practices for open and distributed audiovisual productions.

How is information produced, consumed and embedded within different cultural, organizational and community contexts?

Analyzes changes in news organizations and journalistic routines that have emerged as a result of making online news for people who access the news online during their work day and at their work places.

Information society; social and cultural aspects of communication/information technologies; scholarly communication; communication and knowledge.

A specialist in the areas of media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities.

Current research examines workforce development and upward mobility in information technology in New York, Washington DC, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Professor Leonard focuses much of his research and teaching on the role of the press in society.

The Network aims to foster the exchange of information and coordinate research and teaching projects on the anthropological study of media. It also hopes to contribute to the theoretical development of this area of anthropological research.

Research includes Multimedia Producing Communities, Semantic Metadata Descriptions and Ontology, DRM, Payment Systems and Pricing Models on Distributed Networks, P2P Networks.

Live Labs is a partnership between MSN and Microsoft Research (MSR) that focuses on applied research for Internet products and services at Microsoft.

Dialogic mass media refers to a number of digital media technologies established over the past ten years, in which the receiver is also a sender and therefore able to engange in a dialogue.

The author's experiences as a master's and doctoral student at the UC Berkeley School of Library and Information Studies during a formative period in the history of information science, 1966-71, are described.

openacademia.org is an open source publication metadata repository for scientific communities.

Democracy and education, urban educational change and school policy, sociology of education, service learning and youth development.

THEN is a peer-reviewed journal that takes a humanities-based approach to research on technology in education.

One of Paul Dourish's students at UC Irvine. Research focuses on ambient displays.

The McLuhan Program's mandate is to encourage understanding of the impacts of technology on culture and society from theoretical and practical perspectives, and thus to continue the ground-breaking work initiated by Marshall McLuhan.

His writings emphasize the inadequacy of our current understanding of computation, and recommend viewing it instead as an unrestricted site in which to explore fundamental questions about the relation between meaning and mechanism.

The first i-Conference will bring together administrators, faculty members, and graduate students to celebrate our field and bridge disciplines to confront grand challenges of information-related research and education.

This Auburn University School of Architecture Wiki serves to protect the delicate collaborative environment of Design Studio culture, and to serve as a protocol and reference guide to keep these balances in check.

Conducts research in the social, ethical, and political dimensions of information and communications technology.

Main research interests are the social and policy implications of information technologies.

Author of Art Worlds and generally badass sociologist.

David Gauntlett is Professor of Media and Audiences at the Media School, University of Bournemouth.

I should check out some of the accepted papers at the 16th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia.