Cornelius Puschmann's Blog

Microblogging services such as Twitter and FriendFeed appear to be steadily gaining popularity among academics for work-related purposes (communication at conferences, discussion of publications, casual conversation). As part of a larger project on the evolution of scholarly communication I am today launching a study of academic uses of Twitter across disciplines.

One component of this study will be a corpus of tweets by international scholars from different fields over the course of one year. This corpus will be assembled via the account @scientwists, an automated user controlled via the Twitter API, and made available in the public domain after completion. The @scientwists account will follow a list of scholars put together from several sources, starting with this list assembled by David Bradley.*

The corpus will be anonymized, i.e. user names will not be legible. It will also be possible to exclude individual posts from the corpus via use of the hashtag #exclude. However, if you receive a notification that @scientwists is following you and you would prefer for your tweets not to be included in the corpus at all, please simply block @scientwists.

If you have questions or suggestions, please be sure to contact me on Twitter or via email.

- Cornelius Puschmann, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (about me)

Note: if you are not an academic and are being followed by @scientwists2 you have been randomly included in the control group for this study. Please block @scientwists2 if you prefer your tweets not to be used.

To clear up confusion, I will use the term Open Notebook Science, which has not yet suffered meme mutation. By this I mean that there is a URL to a laboratory notebook (http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/Exp025) that is freely available and indexed on common search engines. It does not necessarily have to look like a paper notebook but it is essential that all of the information available to the researchers to make their conclusions is equally available to the rest of the world. Basically, no insider information.

http://www.zotero.org/coffee001/items/1855301

Between the most public and private forms of communication lies a wide range of channels and activities. Scholars communicate with each other not only through books and journals but also through manuscripts, preprints, articles, abstracts, reprints, seminars, and conference presentations. Over the course of the twentieth century, they interacted intensively in person, by telephone, and through the postal mail. Scholars in the twenty-first century continue to use those channels, while also communicating via e-mail, blogs, and chat. New dissemination channels for written work include personal Web sites, preprint archives, and institutional repositories. An information infrastructure to support scholarship must facilitate these myriad means of communication. (p.47)

http://www.zotero.org/coffee001/items/1854769

Most importantly, our weblogs became tools with which to think about our research, its values, connections and links to other aspects of the world. They altered the way in we approached online communication, and have influenced the writing of both dissertations. This is the motivation for this article: a need to look at what weblogs do to our academic thinking. (p.251)

http://www.zotero.org/coffee001/items/12736292