OII Blogging Round Table #1 or Why Should Researchers Blog?
14 Comments Published by tobias.escher May 18th, 2007 in *OIINEWS, bloggingGiven that the doctoral students at the OII (ie. Malte) have already organized the second OII Blogging Round Table (with our lovely visiting fellow Wendy Seltzer) it is about time to report on the first round table that took place in March already.
The main purpose of these round tables is to bring together people at the OII that are actively blogging or at least have an interest in doing so, in particular given the rather recent introduction of blogs to the OII (such as the one your are just reading).
The discussion at our first meeting did center around the purpose of having a blog as a researcher. Here are some of the perceived benefits of having a blog:
- getting feedback for your own research, generating interaction with like-minded people
- checking on your progress
- marking your territory
- learning how to present your research to the public
It was mentioned that for some of those effects you would not necessarily need a blog but could do with a static website as long as it is up to date (such as this example). The latter being of great importance: A blog needs a certain sustained commitment or it won’t interest readers.
However, despite the potential benefits there were also some doubts and criticism concerning blogging:
- blogs won’t help to get academic connections (because this happens by other means, eg conferences)
- blogs do not impact on academic metrics (just icing on the cake)
- there might be a perception of blogging about research as being not academic
- putting up your research idea might help others to plagiarise your work
A particular dimension is added by the fact that the OII blogs are somehow corporate, therefore bringing up the question of what is acceptable and unacceptable posting. While a blog is quasi by definition personal in nature there are obviously limits to sharing private stories on a departmental blog. Everybody agreed that the idea of distinguishing between the category OIINews (that is syndicated on people.oii.ox.ac.uk) as “official” and all the other categories as “private” does make sense – but the distinction is at times difficult to make.
Another issue arising from corporate blogs is a certain sense of obligation to blog as it might be expected from a proper Internet researcher. However, no one could see how forced blogging would produce any useful contribution to an academic institution or the Web at large.
It was also mentioned that it is difficult to find a certain tone of voice on your blog if you do not know who your audience is. To this end our web team shared some of the audience statistics for the blogs with us. They did so rather reluctantly as not to disappoint and kill off the enthusiasm because basically readership so far is very low. Given some inaccuracies in measuring they put the number to several 1000 visits a month with RSS feeds on top of that but without distinguishing for unique users or people from within the department. Most of the traffic goes to the director’s blog so external readership for the rest is pretty much tiny.
While size of the audience might not be as important as the quality of feedback there was widespread agreement that the the numbers would need to go up. This can be achieved by quality content primarily but there might also be some technical tweaks to increase audience. The first thing however will be to actually get a proper statistics package to obtain useful stats for the OII blogosphere.
So much my summary from a meeting about two months ago. Feel free to add and comment.
btw, who is summarising this weeks round table?
14 Responses to “OII Blogging Round Table #1 or Why Should Researchers Blog?”
- 1 Pingback on May 19th, 2007 at 11:09 am
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About
Since October 2006 I am both a DPhil student as well as a research assistant at the Oxford Internet Institute and here I share with the accidental reader my musings on different aspects of the Internet and society. Feel free to comment or simply ignore :-)
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Tobias Escher
Oxford Internet Institute
1 St. Giles
Oxford OX1 3JS
firstname.lastname@oii.ox.ac.uk
+44 (0)1865 287210
Good post Tobias, thanks!
Google Analytics is all you really need for user stats analysis – they’ve just redesigned the interface and it’s pretty *and* usable…
ps. I now feel quite exclusive being part of your ‘tiny’ audience!
Tobias,
I hope you read the replies. Otherwise, what is the purpose of them? Especially if you are interested in “generating interaction with like-minded people” as you indicate.
As a “like-minded” researcher, I am concerned that my 2001 model of blocking, filtering will be overlooked by the activist-encouraging, woodstock minded group at Harvard or worse yet — used without attribution.
After reading in 99-00 the US Computer Science and Telecommunication Board concerns about filtering/censorship I put the model in a 2001 paper that was revised for publication by the BFI (but it never happened). After a second revision, I put it on my website at Chotank.com/disneyrom.html.
I am guessing that your prediction was not valid that:
putting up your research idea might help others to plagiarise your work.
Hi Avon,
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of your study, and I just went to the url provided and couldn’t find what you were referring to.
Have we been in touch before? A quick email search doesn’t turn up any correspondence.
Best,
Jonathan Zittrain
Hi Tobias,
Just found your post through a good friend of mine.
I wonder if you’d be in York on September at the Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 conference. I’ll present there a communication called The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with research diffusion which exactly deals with what you’re explaining in this post. More info, here.
Concerning the doubts/criticism you point to, I absolutely don’t share them in any way.
I do believe you get academic connections, provided your blog is focused and within an academic/research framework. I know plenty examples, and not only among A-list bloggers.
About plagiarism, I actually believe the contrary: everything that is online is easy to copy, yes, but even easier to track, so the original source always shows up when searching for “related” papers. On the other hand, you got the idea, you publish it immediately: google cache, RSS feedbots, trackbacks, pingbacks, etc. will almost automatically put you as the reference.
Impact metrics and blogging not being academic is, all in all, the same thing. And I hope it is just a matter of time. On the other hand – and most of us do it – once we’ve got “good” knowledge on our blog, we cut it, we paste it, we give it the shape of an article, dissertation or communication and “validate” it through mainstream models. Enriched with peer comments.
I’d add more benefits, but… enough for just a comment
Best,
Ismael
Dear Ismael,
thanks for the excellent comments. It is great that this post has generated some discussion and I am glad you’ve added a more positive take on scholars taking up blogging. Indeed we see our blogging round tables as a venue to have exactly this discussion and your points will surely make it in our next meeting. Maybe you would even like to join us once via a web conference to share your experiences and advice?
Your paper looks interesting but I won’t read it now
as I rather take the opportunity to listen to your presentation as I will indeed be in York with my own research (more details shortly). I am very much looking forward to catch up with you and the other guys from Barcelona!
best, tobias
Hi,
Great that we’ll meet in York: I hope our speeches don’t overlap so I can listen to yours
And… yes, the idea of meeting online sounds interesting. Let’s find a way to make it happen.
I really enjoy your post and Ismael’s response. It wil be great to talk with both at York. I’ll be there too.
Best,
Paco
You have here quite an interesting point of view. Nevertheless, although it’s true that some people are concerned about the fact that putting up your research idea might help others to plagiarise your work, it’s also true that each day, more and more researchers use Creative Commons and other free distribution licenses. I think that the problem with plagiarism always exist, even if we don’t blog (scanners are cheap these days, and OCR are getting better and better), but worrying too much about our own creation copyright won’t help either. I once had a teacher that said that usually copying is plagiarism, but in research it’s investigation (not that i share completely this point of view, of course)
About how it helps to find more academic connections, I’m lucky that I found some interesting people outside of conferences thanks to some webpages and blogs (sometimes because of more luck than anything else). But I won’t say that it doesn’t help, it’s obvious that it’s quite easier to find people with same interests in this conferences, but the possibility o finding academic connections outside of them still exists.
Best regards,
Sergio
Sergio,
I think that this blog post and the discussion it has generated is already the best argument for a research blog. It has already connected me to a number of people, some of which I will meet later on this year at a conference.
However, I think the argument is not only whether a blog has the potential to be of benefit to a researcher – it clearly can be. The question is whether the amount of (sustained!) effort required will pay off.
On the plagiarism discussion: I think it connects to the overall academic dilemma of when to publish results and how to cooperate. On the one hand the whole field can only advance by sharing knowledge (be it through conferences, journals, etc) but at the same time everyone wants to stake his claim, preserve a certain area of expertise for him- or herself.
This has lead to quite distinct academic cultures in different disciplines: On the one extreme, there are for example economists who tend to work on their projects for years and years and will only eventually publish it once the whole theory is set out and there is basically everything proven. On the other extreme, there are younger disciplines such as Computer Science that have the same “release early, release often” culture as Open Source software development with papers being published every couple of months. These do not contribute a major theory but offer the little building blocks that can be used by others to develop their own ideas. Given the rapid advancement of CS research, maybe the latter is more promising.
Relating that to the blogging discussion, I think if you come out of for example a CS culture, you might be more ready to share your research on a medium such as a blog than if you come out of an academic culture that is used to work away alone for years.
At the end, I think you have a point Sergio: you cannot protect your idea anyway. So it might be best to claim it!
tobias
Hi Tobias,
I think that your question about whether the amount of effort required will pay off depends in two logical facts, the amount of effort, and which type of feedback you get from your work.
On one side, we could find a very complete blog, with many daily posts, and a huge research going on. This kind of blog would take more time than a typical one, and there would be times when the writer would think if his/her effort is worth it. If there is no feedback, no comments, no visits even, the author will probably think there are better ways to spend time than writing posts just the author will read. Nevertheless, I think that if a blog like this exists, it will finally attract some readers, and little by little, the blog will start having feedback, so in this case it would be quite a worthy blog. Quality attracts quality (at least most of the time), don’t you think so?
On the other side, if we don’t take a little time to write our posts, and the quality gets lower and lower, feedback will get worse. The benefit we get from writing a blog could even disappear in this case, but of course, ‘no pain, no gain’. If you don’t invest time in your blog, you can’t get too much from it.
The problem with ‘claiming’ is that some people have a concept of how to possess ideas too similar to material items. I mean, of course authors must be acknowledged, and the proper authority given, but trying to keep ideas in a closed closet won’t help anyone.
I think that CS research has speed as one of the most important factors. While I was working in logical process improvements, our company published it little by little, stating their authority over innovations, just in case any company was faster.
I think that that this abstract concept that is called ‘Web 2.0′ is helping to erase the old way of studying in academic entities. Most universities have forums, blogs and many ways for students and teachers to share their ideas and projects. E-learning is getting its way into official education too, and now it isn’t that hard to find online conferences and courses that you can take from your home. The way of investigation is changing as we are talking, and I think it’s doing so in a good way. The old image of some old man, working in a dark room, alone, without contact with the outer world is disappearing. Ideas are kind of globalized, they can be now accessed from almost anywhere, call it databases, blogs, or whatever type of content. It’s hard to find national borders for ideas if we are using the Net.
And of course, it’s nice to claim it, but the problem comes when some people just copy & paste it, overpassing the license you use, and that has happened even in some important free software creations (I’ve seen people just searching for some kind of open source program similar to what they want and simply erasing any reference to its original authors). I think that governments should protect and give their endorsement to this kind of free distribution licenses, since it’s in the interest of public access to culture.
Regards,
Sergio