Science in the 21st Century - 2008

At a time when the great challenges facing our civilization are scientific in nature (climate change, sustainable energy, pandemic disease), improving the voting public\'s understanding and appreciation of science is more important than ever. I will argue that the Internet in general and weblogs specifically provide an opportunity to address this problem, both through bringing science outreach directly to the public, but also by humanizing scientists to the public. I will illustrate with examples from my own experience blogging about physics for a popular audience, including explaining quantum mechanics to my dog.

In the 1990s, the eprint arXivs fundamentally reshaped scientific communication in Math and Physics. In this decade, blogs, wikis and other, similar, tools are mediating an equally profound reshaping of scientific communication. I will talk about my own experience, as a blogger, software designer, and physicist, pointing to some of the successes and some of the challenges ahead.

This talk will review the public impact of developments in open access to research on education, professional practice, and public policy, with consideration given to legal, economic, and academic freedom issues, as well as to the very design of scholarly communication systems. The Public Knowledge Project has been conducting research on public interests in the new openness of research for a nearly a decade, and as a result, continues to explore how the creation of new reading environments for the online publication of journals and books can provide a wider range of readers with what might otherwise be the missing context for the work they are now able to discover online.

True open access to scientific publications not only gives readers the possibility to read articles without paying subscription, but also makes the material available for automated ingestion and harvesting by 3rd parties. Once articles and associated data become universally treatable as computable objects, openly available to 3rd party aggregators and value-added services, what new services can we expect, and how will they change the way that researchers interact with their scholarly communications infrastructure? I will discuss straightforward applications of existing ideas and services, including citation analysis, collaborative filtering, external database linkages, interoperability, and other forms of automated markup, and speculate on the sociology of the next generation of users.

Cartographic maps of physical places have guided mankind\'s explorations for centuries. They enabled the discovery of new worlds while also marking territories inhabited by unknown monsters. Domain maps of abstract semantic spaces, see scimaps.org, aim to serve today\'s explorers understanding and navigating the world of science. The maps are generated through scientific analysis of large-scale scholarly datasets in an effort to connect and make sense of the bits and pieces of knowledge they contain. They can be used to objectively identify major research areas, experts, institutions, collections, grants, papers, journals, and ideas in a domain of interest. Local maps provide overviews of a specific area: its homogeneity, import-export factors, and relative speed. They allow one to track the emergence, evolution, and disappearance of topics and help to identify the most promising areas of research. Global maps show the overall structure and evolution of our collective scholarly knowledge. This talk will present an overview of the techniques and cyber-technologies used to study science by scientific means together with sample science maps and their interpretations.

The rapid technological change around us supports the idea of general speedup in the tempo of life, the illusion that we are living \'on Internet time.\' Yet many changes are still taking generations, and that includes changes in scientific communication as well as in sociology of science. The evidence for wildly varying rates of changes, and the reasons for them, will be discussed.

\'The Medium Is The Message ... The Audience Is The Content\', Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. A \'wiki is a ... collaborative space ... because of its total freedom, ease of access, and use, [and] simple and uniform navigational conventions ... .\' \'[It] ... is also a way to organize and cross-link knowledge ...\', Ward Cunningham, Father of The Wiki (Leuf and Cunningham, 2001, 16). Most wikis provide the user with a set of navigation or utility tools such as the ability to create and edit a page, view recently changed pages, and rollback to previous page versions. In addition, many wikis include a discussion forum for proposed page changes. Among its many perceived benefits are its potential for facilitating a more creative environment and expanding knowledgebase, and a significant ability to harness the power of diverse point-of-views in creating collaborative works. In this presentation, we will speculate on the Wiki as a digital environment that not only supports current scholarly practices, but more importantly, offers a framework for their enhancement and transformation.

A wiki is an excellent tool for organizing and representing human knowledge. By building a personal wiki notebook, a scientific researcher may optimally organize past and current research notes. In this brief practical introduction I will provide a guided tour of an open scientific notebook -- physicswiki.org -- and discuss the design considerations, features, and content of this open source wiki.

Mendeley is a new \'science 2.0\' tool for managing & sharing academic papers. Its co-founder, Victor Henning, will highlight conceptual similarities between Last.fm and Mendeley to explore whether the ideas behind social music services can be applied to social software for researchers.

I introduce `The Periodic Table of Expertises\' (Collins and Evans 2007). The classification is driven by the idea of tacit knowledge. Its most important division is between the expertise of those who have acquired tacit knowledge pertaining to a specialism as a result of social interaction with the relevant specialist community and those who use only `ubiquitous tacit knowledge\' to acquire specialist `information\' through their reading. I ask whether electronic communication blurs this dividing line; it does enable a huge increase in access to information. I conclude that electronic communication makes no profound difference but I try to explain why it might be thought to change things. Electronic communication can be understood only if we also understand the prior social relationships of those using electronic media.