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.
Der Misserfolg der Medientheorie, die geglaubt hat, mit der Exegese von ein paar Aufsätzen Walter Benjamins und der Wiederholung einiger ungedeckter Thesen Michel Foucaults schon etwas Tragfähiges zu den gegenwärtigen medialen Transformationen zu sagen, hat etwa auf der Seite der Geisteswissenschaften dazu beigetragen, dass ihr zu ihren eigenen realen Arbeitsumwelten nicht viel einfällt. Die Verlage haben zu lange darauf gesetzt, die bestehenden Publikationswege als die allein sinnvollen zu verteidigen. Die Wissenschaftsorganisationen neigen dazu, die Unterschiede der Fächerkulturen einzuebnen. Wir alle werden dabei von Google und Co. überholt. Andere Prozesse wie die weltweite Konkurrenz der Wissenschaftsstandorte oder die Metrisierung der Wissenschaften beschleunigen diesen Prozess. Wir stehen hier am Anfang einer Entwicklung, die keiner von uns überblicken kann.
I am proud to announce that my dissertation The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer-mediated communication: features, constraints, discourse situation will be published with Universitätsverlag Göttingen in the series Göttinger Schriften zur Internetforschung (Göttingen publications on Internet Research). The series is edited by Svenja Hagenhoff, Dieter Hogrefe, Elmar Mittler, Matthias Schumann, Gerald Spindler and Volker Wittke and has thus far featured five works investigating different aspects of medial change brought about by the Internet and digital technology, such as individualization in the media and new forms of academic communication on the Net. I am proud to be the first linguist to publish in this interdisciplinary series and it is also extremely gratifying to see my thesis published with a university press that has a modern approach to scholarly communication. All works published in the series are hybrid Open Access and print on demand publications, in other words, you can either choose to read them online (or download them to your computer), or to order the traditional dead tree version. Different channels of distribution are also supported, i.e. my dissertation will be on Google Books and Amazon.
I’d like to thank the editors and especially Svenja Hagenhoff for taking the time to consider my thesis for inclusion and Margo Bargheer for pointing the series out to me.
(Three cheers)
