a thaumaturgical compendium

Just noticed the article Derek & I wrote is up on the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication site. In case the wording of the abstract makes you wonder: yes, we are both native English speakers :(.

An Analysis of Topical Coverage of Wikipedia

* Alexander Halavais (School of Communications, Quinnipiac University) * Derek Lackaff (Department of Communication, State University of New York at Buffalo)

Abstract

Many have questioned the reliability and accuracy of Wikipedia. Here a different issue, but one closely related: how broad is the coverage of Wikipedia? Differences in the interests and attention of Wikipedia’s editors mean that some areas, in the traditional sciences, for example, are better covered than others. Two approaches to measuring this coverage are presented. The first maps the distribution of topics on Wikipedia to the distribution of books published. The second compares the distribution of topics in three established, field-specific academic encyclopedias to the articles found in Wikipedia. Unlike the top-down construction of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia’s topical coverage is driven by the interests of its users, and as a result, the reliability and completeness of Wikipedia is likely to be different depending on the subject-area of the article.

The State of Connecticut has a list of criminal convictions since 2000 on the web for easy searching. Unlike other states, this one includes minor infractions like traffic violations. Nosy person that I am, I checked on some of my fellow faculty. Was hoping to find some dark secrets that would reveal something of their psychology: convictions for mayhem with suspended sentences, for example. No such luck: just some speeding tickets and the like.

(via Research Buzz)

In the interest of equal time:

As an aside, the idea of a Republican win, unthinkable only a year ago, is no longer so sure. Obama can beat him, I’m not sure Clinton can. And if the Democratic super-delegates put forward Clinton despite primary voters giving the nod to Obama, I think we are going to see a lot more people being pushed into the “undecided” category.

I’ve been tagged by Michael Zimmer with a bibliomancy meme. Regular readers know that I am a sucker for bibliomancy and “webomancy” of various forms. I was happy to participate in this theme’s grandfather over four years ago, and even created a script that did blogomancy.

So, the instructions are as follows: “grab the nearest book, open to page 123, go down to the 5th sentence and type up the 3 following sentences.” Simple enough, right?

Well, my office is a mess, and I have books strewn over my desk. Several of these are due for “discard,” as the libraries say, and other are related to my lectures for this week:

Try #1: Three Country Language Phrase Book: Japanese, English, Nepalese. Printed by the Toyama Prefecture; no date, but probably sometime in the 1980s. But it doesn’t have 123 pages.

Try #2: Defense Intelligence Agency, Warsaw Pact Ground Forces Equipment Identification Guide: Artillery, Rockets, and Missiles, February 1982. This is a great book to have around when watching Red Dawn , but since that happens very rarely, it’s not very useful. Page 123 contains a fuzzy photo of what appears to be a DDR soldier with an AT-3/Sagger armor-piercing missile. The caption reads “Ground mounted. Note the conical nose.” Which encourages a certain degree of ambiguity, since the soldier’s nose is indeed prominent and a bit round. But no 5th sentence.

Try #3: W. Cleon Skousen, The Communist Attack on US Police, Salt Lake City: Ensign Publishing Co., 1966. Too short by a single page.

Finally, by the fourth try, I actually managed to get my three sentences. This week, students from my course are reading from Michael Schudson’s Discovering the News. The quote:

Walter Lippman, in Public Opinion (1922), had begun to knock the “public” off the perch that the rhetoric of democracy had built for it. In The Phantom Public (1925), he was still more severe and critical of democratic ideals. “The private citizen today,” he wrote in the book’s opening sentence, “has come to feel rather like the deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake.”

I guess that’s cheating a little, since it sneaks in the first line of another book, but there it is.

And now I am supposed to tag others to do the same, but I do so half-heartedly; I will suffer no slight and you no misfortune if you do not carry this forward. Tagged: purse lip, square jaw, Kevin Lim, Adam Pacio, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and Jason Nolan.

Update: I also retroactively tag Eszter Hargittai.

danah boyd has posted a short manifesto declaring her intention to no longer participate in the production of journals that publish “locked down” content. First, let me recapitulate my comments on her site.

If we take a cynical view—and that is a very good idea when looking at academic publishing—journals are in the business of banking and distributing reputation; they are whuffie banks. Displacing trust in the “top journals” is a bit like making the Kennedys look bad. They can do an awful lot of bad things and still remain a dynasty because they have always been considered as much. Many of the top journals are dusted with a patina that is difficult to achieve in a new launch: whether open access or not.

Boycotting the broadly accepted top journals—which in our fields are generally not open access—guarantees scholarly marginalization. It will be very hard to make tenure or get a job at a competitive institution (or even a less competitive institution) without publications in these top journals. Moreover, the mechanisms of reputation do not distinguish between self-exclusion and exclusion-because-you-suck. As a result, if you limit yourself to publishing in second and third-tier journals that also happen to be open source, you virtually guarantee that these remain ghettoized. My recommendation, then, is to publish in open access journals, but also to publish in top journals. That is, you’ve got to maintain scholarly credibility in order to help drive both commercial and non-commercial publishers to open models.

I’m in strong agreement with many of her other suggestions.

If you are an established scholar, of course you should publish in open access journals. It’s an effective way of lending your credibility to the venture. However, I think you can have an even greater impact by lobbying public and private granting institutions—including NSF—to require publication in open access journals.

Perhaps the most compelling way to encourage open access journals is to cite them. It would be pretty impossible to boycott citing closed journals, but you can limit it significantly. You can also choose to cite self-archived or draft versions of an article. danah points to an early essay version of an article she has recently published in Convergence, and if I ever have the need or opportunity, I will cite her online version rather than the version in Convergence.

Now, while I criticized her boycott as a bit quixotic, I’ve been surprised by the comments on her blog and on the AIR-L list that seem to favor the current model. People seem to take pretty extreme positions, perhaps because she has staked out a clear position on one side. Some suggest that it is time to do away with all commercial publishing, and peer review as well. They see the publishers as rapacious, and one suggested that they were “flesh peddlers.” That kind of hyperbole just makes the open access model look silly.

On the other end were those who suggested that the work of creating and maintaining a journal could only be accomplished with the resources of either a commercial publisher or grants to support the time required for editing. While I appreciate the amount of work that goes into producing a journal, I think many of the examples of peer production currently available on the web suggest that such a view is far too conservative. The fact that a non-commercial, distributed model has not worked yet hardly convinces me that it is not possible. Indeed, if anything, it encourages me to launch my my own journal. You know, for the lolz.

The solution is probably somewhere in the middle. Clearly, software solutions like Open Journal Systems reduce some of the technical overhead, and more radical systems of peer review are already being tried. I am certainly interested in being a part of those experiments in a pro-active way, without cutting off the existing venues for research.

Allen, who took the snapshot to the right, emailed and reminded me of this short piece I wrote for our alumni magazine (Quinnipiac Magazine) last fall. Here it is:

Hello World! Technology opening classroom doors

University campuses often reflect the character of their community, and that feels especially true here in the shadow of the Sleeping Giant. That giant is stirring, and as Quinnipiac establishes two new campuses, and more faculty and students use online technology, it is natural to wonder what other changes this portends.

A significant part of that change involves opening up our campus and our students to the world. Like other great universities, Quinnipiac must take up a role that is national and global in scope, and build on a reputation of excellence in its new venues. This requires that we shift our focus from what happens on campus to how we affect and are affected by the broader national and global community.

The traditional view of the classroom as a place apart, largely isolated from business, politics, and the culture of the community is quickly falling away.

Being a student now bleeds into other parts of our lives—it is no longer a place, or a time, apart. To be an effective citizen, and to be at the leading edge of most professions, requires a commitment to learning that goes beyond the classroom walls, and beyond four years at the outset of one’s career. Rather than choosing to be a professional, a parent or a student, many of us are all three simultaneously, and the structure of education has been changing to adapt to this way of living.

Online learning is an important part of this, but even traditional on-campus courses now incorporate online components. In many of my graduate courses, for example, students keep public, online blogs in which they write about the field of interactive communication. Through these blogs—as well as a presence in online social networking sites, virtual worlds, and other venues—they often enter into conversations with the authors we are reading and practitioners at the top of their field, as well as students and professors in other universities. For most professionals, the ability to develop an online learning community that bridges from the University to other venues is vital to their careers.

Some think that opening the gated garden of a university reduces its value. On the contrary, some of the best universities in the world have embraced the idea of open access to knowledge. MIT’s OpenCourseWare program, for example, provides anyone with access to lecture notes, syllabi, exams and other materials from more than 1,700 of their courses. There are institutions that turn their back on the world, closing access to the intellectual work of a university, and treating education as a mere commodity. The gardens behind those walls do not flourish.

Quinnipiac is already contributing to a global conversation. The work of faculty, alumni, students, staff, the Polling Institute and the Albert Schweitzer Institute, among others, already places Quinnipiac in the public’s mind, particularly as it appears more frequently in the national media. As more of our course work and community move online, we will be opening doors to a greater diversity of students and faculty whose feet are planted firmly in both the academic and professional worlds.

Super(Fat) Tuesday has come and gone, and despite a growing tide in favor of Barack Obama, it was not enough to take him over the top. This is the year we can all have the opportunity to vote for a president that represents a real change for the better in Washington, but only if he can win out in the Democratic primaries. For that reason, I made my first donation to a presidential campaign this year, and I hope that you will join me. Together, I hope that we can put $2,500 in the coffers of Obama’s campaign, and do so soon enough that it will make a difference in our country over the next four years.

Is that difference worth the equivalent of a night at the movies for two, or your most recent Amazon purchase? Just a few dollars—from enough people—is all that is needed to make a significant difference. As Americans, we dream of a President who is honest and wise. We want a leader with courage and integrity who has known the struggles of an everyday American. A lot of people have stopped believing that may even be possible.

Oh, did I mention he actually “gets” the tech? Check out the differences in technology policies highlighted on TechCrunch. That’s one of the reasons Lawrence Lessig is supporting him (turn up the volume to listen to his 20-minute talk). The New York Times has recently suggested that he is the Mac to Clinton’s PC.

Please join me in supporting Obama by making a donation to my personal fundraising page. If every US citizen that visits my blog donated $5, we would blow out that $2,500 in a matter of days. It may take a little longer than that, but I hope you will help.