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.