Cornelius Puschmann's Blog

It took me a bit longer to put these up, but here are the slides and video clip for my presentation in Osnabrück last week (in German). I was invited to speak at the ZePrOS (Center for Graduate Studies) at the University of Osnabrück on effective ways of communicating one’s research online. Alex Bergs gave a very flattering introduction after which I went on a long but practically-oriented rant on scholarly communication in the digital age. My audience was very patient and gave me some great questions to ponder.

I was grateful for the opportunity to present on this subject for several reasons. Firstly, I believe that a topic such as Open Access is best approached holistically, i.e. by taking on the researcher’s perspective. It makes much more sense in my opinion to embed a discussion of Open Access into the larger picture of communicating research results openly on the Web, instead of treating it as an isolated issue that is primarily about making publishing cheaper.

Another reason is that graduate education tends to neglect what are perceived as ‘peripheral’ issues, such as where/how to publish, the inner workings of the academic job market and why visibility (not just inside your own discipline) is important. We need to promote digital literacy among grad students, in the sense of teaching

• new methods, tools and infrastructure for doing research (e-science, e-social-science, e-humanities),
• new ways of presenting and making accessible one’s research (Open Access, self-archiving),
• new ways of communicating with colleagues and working collaboratively (tagging/bibliography-sharing, collaborative writing) and
• new approaches to teaching and learning (using video lectures, creating digital learning materials).

My impression is that the best way to achieve something like digital scholarly literacy is to take an integrative approach to these issues. E-science, virtual research environments, e-learning and social media tools for collaboration are hardly ever discussed in concert, but often treated as separate topics. While this may appear to be a more focused way of looking at things (especially if you’re a librarian, funding agency etc), all of these themes are connected in the daily lives of scholars. Cameron Neylon’s points on innovation in science blogging (“The natural unit of science research is the blog post”) go hand in hand in my view with Michael Habib’s observations on digital scholarly identity and a discussion of e-learning and e-teaching could easily be attached to this.

All of these things are part of digital scholarship as an integrated process – as opposed to analog scholarship with a few digital bits here and there.

Below are my OAW09 slides for last week’s presentation, held at the University of Cologne. We were a small but enthusiastic band of Open Access supporters and I greatly enjoyed the presentations, especially the one on ArcheoInf, which is a very impressive digital humanities/open data project in archeology.

I held this presentation earlier today at the Milestone Meeting of the Forschungsverbund Interactive Science. It briefly discusses Google Wave (I did a little demo in the middle, showing the most elemental features of Wave) and makes some general points about scholarly communication in digital environments.

Thanks to everyone who attended for their questions and comments!

I’m a little behind with posting my slides for recent presentations, but here is the material I discussed in my talk at Language in the (New) Media last week (once again on blogs).

Thank you to Crispin Thurlow and the organizers for inviting me and kudos for setting up a wonderful conference!

On November 2nd, I’ll be giving a talk at the University of Osnabrück’s Zentrum für Promovierende on how to communicate, network and present one’s research using social media tools (in German). It’s a very important topic to me, considering how much my research has benefitted from “making connections where none previously existed”, to quote someone smarter than myself. My in-advance thanks to Kristine Greßhöner for arranging the talk.

Promotion 2.0: effektive wissenschaftliche Kommunikation und (Selbst-)Präsentation im Zeitalter von Google

Das Internet ist nicht nur fester Bestandteil unseres Alltags, es verändert auch zunehmend die Wissenschaft. Während die Pflege intra- und interdisziplinärer Kontakte, Teamarbeit und Informationsaustausch seit jeher zur akademischen Praxis gehören, erlaubt das Internet als Präsentations- und Kommunikationswerkzeug den Aufbau von Netzwerken über traditionelle Foren wie Fachpublikationen und Konferenzen hinaus, auch interdisziplinär und mit Nichtwissenschaftlern.

Für den akademischen Nachwuchs ist die Vernetzung mit Kollegen auf nationaler und internationaler Ebene und die Präsentation der eigenen Forschung vor verschiedenen Publika extrem wichtig. Mit Hilfe von Werkzeugen wie Blogs, Sozialen Netzwerken und einer persönlichen Homepage, auf der man z.B. Vorträge und Publikationen anbietet, lässt sich auch bereits als Doktorand die eigene Sichtbarkeit maßgeblich erhöhen.

Mein Vortrag wird sich anhand von Beispielen (aber ohne technisches Hintergrundwissen vorauszusetzen) mit folgenden Fragen beschäftigen:

1. Wieso brauche ich eine persönliche Homepage, welche Informationen stelle ich dort zur Verfügung und wie erreiche ich, dass sie gefunden wird?

2. Wie und wo kann (und darf) ich meine Präsentationen und Publikationen online archivieren und wieso ist dies sinnvoll?

3. Wie lässt sich ein Blog effektiv für die wissenschaftliche Kommunikation einsetzen?

4. Welche anderen Web 2.0-Dienste lassen sich in den wissenschaftlichen Arbeitsalltag (z.b. für Veröffentlichungen, Recherche und Kollaboration) einbinden?

Der Vortrag richtet sich an Promovierende aller Fachrichtungen.

At last, and with quite a bit of lag, here are the slides for last month’s talk at the 1st European Summer School “Culture & Technology” in Leipzig. It was a fabulous event and I cannot praise Elizabeth Burr and her staff enough for making it happen and hosting us so graciously. Digital humanists are a wonderfully diverse and friendly lot and I can’t wait to get to know more of them at Digital Humanities 2010 and next year’s ESU-CT.

Ah, conferences!

Being here in Cologne at the moment for the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science makes me realize how solitary finishing my dissertation last winter really was by comparison. Not that writing and thinking in solitude for a sustained period of time is a bad thing, but it’s still great to connect to others doing similar research and to test your ideas in a public forum on a regular basis.

My presentation, somewhat akin to the one I gave in Spring at the VKS, was concerned with aspects of digital (scholarly) communication on the Net and quite ”conceptual”. In other words, I did not present the results of finished research or a systematic proposal, but instead applied more general ideas from linguistics and research into Web 2.0 to scholarship and scholarly publishing practices. I thought the response was quite positive and the imput will be helpful for my proposed research – a larger study of digital scholarly communication in several humanities and social sciences disciplines.

Below are the slides.

Here’s the workshop program. You can also follow some of the ongoing discussions on Twitter.

Thank you to Julian Newman and Esther Breuer for organizing the session and to the other presenters and attendees for a thought-provoking discussion. Ping at Nick Jankowski, Kirsten Schindler, Michael König, Janelle Ward and Kathryn Eccles with whom I had a wonderful chat about history, linguistics, academia and a plethora of other topics over post-workshop coffee.