User:Seth Ilys/Cronin

Blaise Cronin is dean of the school of library science at Indiana University, for the past 13 years; he has lots of impressive things on his vita. Most of his recent work is in the field of scholarly communication.


 * My notes, inital thoughts, further questions, are indented once. -- Seth Ilys 19:10, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * See also a blog post on the lecture with further thoughts. -- Seth Ilys 22:59, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The lecture
Writing in the academic world - the traditional model is that of the "lone wolf" - a dissconnected, passionate scholar. Monographs are, indeed, required for graduate degrees, for tenure. This is a romantic nation, but in reality, these are not social isolates.

What are our webs of sociocognitive connections?

High-energy physics. What happens when there are 600 authors; who is reponsible for the work; who is the guarantor?


 * Wikipedia has similar sorts of problems in terms of multiple authorship).

In the academy, this is relevant because they're tied to promotion, tenure, hiring (although some of Cronin's own work refutes that; see the salary curve)

There was a 20th century transformation of science; driven in part by professionalization/specialization, an artifact of institutional "Big Science"


 * What is the relationship between institutionalization and communication patterns?

Major collaborative projects: Manhattan, Apollo, Human Genome. These are international, cross-sector. "Industrial level collaboration" is a norm. We can now identify expertise and assemble a team of specialists.


 * Yes, but is anyone actually assembling this team towards one of Cronin's "epistemic goals?)

Whitehead Institute (Boston) - designed to "cause brains to collide" - physical path-crossing engineered into the design.

Place still matters profoundly, even in an age of hyperconnectivity. There's also complementarity between face-to-face and online interactions (the presence one prompts the others)

Coauthored papers are, statistically, more likely to be cited.


 * Yes, but why?

It's one thing for a lone scientist in a lab to mobilize 30 doctoral students; it's another to "organize" hundreds of researchers across disciplines worldwide.

There is, in these fields, a separation between product and producer, parallel to


 * Wikipedia has a much smaller separation between creators and consumers in one respect, a much larger separation in others because authors can vanish into anonymity.

The problems of "ghost" and "gift" authorships; gender biases in these, the artifacts of power relationships.

Returning to the classical notion, a lone romantic author. Isomorphic assocation between output and producer. Why not enumerate all the "contributors" by what their contribution is, explicitly?

"Post-academic science; post-traditional communitarian science."

Co-authorship is merely the most visible evidence of collaboration.

"Sub-authorship collaboration" - advising, inspiring, tehcnical support, data gathering, informal discussions (acknowledgements)

How many papers have this many authors? From 2003

About 500 have 50 or more; about 300 have 300 or more, about 50 have 500 or more.

These numbers make a *huge* leap around 1990-1993, and we all know what happened then.

Some papers even have names for "teams" like this -- the progressive "corporatization" of authorship.


 * We have a team, too; it falls under the "corporate" banner of Wikpedia

Biomedicine and physics are the subcommunities where this happens frequently -- what makes this different.

"Standard author list" for physics -- there are rules for who gets bylines. Some folks who worked with a team, even if they didn't work on the project, even if they weren't there for 12 months, can get an author line as part of the team. This doesn't create epistemic confusion because the rules are broadly understood.

Joint authorship has jumped at least 20% in most disciplines in the past 15 years (from roughly 40 to roughly 60 percent)

Prior to the '90s, 30% of collaborations on scientifc papers were single-site collaborations. This is now about 15% from the most recet decade.

"It's becoming almost perverse to write alone."

Looking at promotion and tenure documents, looking for explicit statements about tenure in lit&lang departments. In only two cases were e-journals or online publications mentioned. What is required? The single-authored, interpretive monograph.

Other data: International collaboration has doubled or more in the past 15 years (roughly 10% to now roughly 20-30%)


 * Yes, yes, we get it!

Increase in domestic collaboration has paralleled the increase in international collaboration.

"Glocalization"


 * Is this glocalization a result of the enabling tools? What might be useful is a detailed study of what ways academics actually communicate.

An artifact of this: the Edros number.

Looking at a single academic career (Rob Kling); plot of the co-authorship universe; co-authors shift from decade to decade; he takes people into his orbit. There is a real break when he came to Indiana; his two last co-authors (1998-2005) were Indiana faculty, and all others dropped off

How do you maximize interaction between researchers by shaping physical space?

Why does a great man not just find the greatest people?

They are, to use Heidegger's term, "at hand."

An example: In a paper with 6 authors, 29 people are credited. Scientists can't do what they do without relying on others.

"Co-opetition." In the business world, "informal know-how trading."

The science wouldn't be possible without those who inhabit the "limbo world." What would making these "silent scientists" visible do for understanding the way science is conducted?

What sorts of acknowledgements are there?

Most common are financial acknowledgements, then technical, then conceptual (6:3:2).

JACS - acknowledgements are financial (50%), technical (30%), conceptual (20%)

Mind - conceptual (70%), editorial (10%), financial (10%)

The first step at a citation index to these "goat's droppings" of academia.

It's not clear whether there's a correlation between citation and acknowledgements.


 * Why should we expect this? It has more to do with personality and personal networks than publication. It's those who spend time with others, and therfore spend less time on cool publications.

Ontological recasting of authorship.


 * Is the idea of author as producer of ideas an artifact of the concept of intellectual property?

Is the author going to be replaced by labelled collectivity? How can the modern tenure/academic processes deal with this? It breaks down. This model for evaluating performance must be revised.


 * In academica, assessment of accuracy is the domain of the peer-reviewed journal; co-authorship is a problem in the tenure process. In Wikipedia, assessment of accuracy is the major percieved problem.


 * Why didn't this multi-authorship (the perceived problem with Wikipedia) cause credibility problems in the scientific community? My guess it that it's because those who are evaluating the articles for credibility already understand the institutional culture and understand why this multi-authorship is necessary. It's those outside the institutional culture (in our case, non-Wikipedians) who have the biggest credibility issues.


 * Implications for this: Is it possible for the deliberation process on Wikipedia to be made more explicit? Would this help anything?

Questions
Good question: The last domain of the single-author monograph is going to be the doctoral disseration. Shouldn't this initatory experience be a microcosm of the world they're going to face professionally?

Another question: Does the rise of co-authorship and collaboration eliminate some of the need for tenure as a means of assuring academic freedom?


 * Wikipedia answers this question, in a sense. We have (essentially) no barrier to publication other than accuracy, and no real equivalent to tenure. Is the functional purpose of academia to secure jobs for academics, with the primary purpose of expanding knowledge diminishing into obscurity?