Our first speaker at the iSchool this fall offered an interesting overview of the forms and pernicious nature of bias on the web. Some examples were truly eye-popping (try the Google translator for English to Turkish) but others seemed to conflate the idea of bias with judgement which I’m still trying to unpack. Food for thought, here’s a flavor.
Scholarly publishing and the mafia?
I receive innumerable invitations these days to publish my work. Nice eh? For a while I kept a folder of nutty requests from new journals or conferences that wanted me to speak. In the past two months I’ve been asked to consider joining such outlets as the Journal of Drug Design and Medicinal Chemistry, the International Journal of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, the wonderfully titled Probe: Computer Science and IT, among others. None of these actually are what they seem but on the surface of course, they sound good. If so inclined (and for a minute, I was), I could have given a keynote address in Berlin at an international Neuro-Psychiatry conference this year. Not bad for a professor of information.
The problem is, scholarly publishing and its associated conference circuit are now big business. And naturally, rogue publishers and conferences have sprung up. Most of these ‘journals’ seem to have no track record, provide an address in some industrial estate in the middle of nowhere, and a requirement that you pay for the privilege of publishing actual pages with them. Of course, as an editorial board member, they waive or reduce the charges for me, or you, or whoever is stupid enough to accept the invitation. I presume some of these succeed because well, some academics want to publish, quickly, to flesh our their resume with fine sounding titles. In an era of increased concerns about faculty ‘productivity’ and the stranglehold on academic publishing by a few (and growing fewer) large houses, one can understand the market for alternatives.
While there is a serious side to all this, I can’t help but have a little fun at the expense of these operators. After receiving two invitations, one a follow-up asking if I was really not interested in giving that keynote, I asked if they minded my talking about something other than Neuropsychiatry? I suggested that given my background, a nice talk about UX or HCI would be perfect. Nonplussed, the inviting agent came back with ‘yes, your talk about UX or HCI covers aspects of neuropsychiatry so we would be honored’. I really was tempted….I really was. Imagine going to the conference, being introduced as the keynote speaker, a renowned (allegedly) expert, and then talking about something totally unrelated to the conference. Yes, I know we can all recount some keynote speaker doing just such, but I mean doing it intentionally and making no effort to even relate to the subject matter of the conference. I actually wondered if anyone would notice or even care? I’d probably get an invite to keynote the next Agri-Business conference too.
All this comes to mind today when I receive my latest invitation, again in poorly worded English but surely revealing it all unintentionally from a group that goes by the name of ‘journals-mafia’. I know right? Here’s a sample from the invite:
Are you an editor of the journal or a member of editorial board?
If so, we propose a big profit for you and your journal.
The profit is from 1,000 up to 10,000 dollars per a month.It is necessary to publish articles.
The same work that you do, but you can get more money doing this with us.My company works in the markets of Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, China and Iran.
We publish a lot of articles.
There is much more demand than we can publish.
We do not have enough journals in which we can publish all the articles.That is why we are searching more and more journals for publication every day.
We will share our profits with you.An alternative option is to buy your journal.
If your journal does not bring you joy no longer, we will buy it.The scheme of our work is simple:
1. The author writes an article.
2. The author pays us for publishing an article in a journal.
3. We work with the text of the article; we review and edit this article making it of excellent quality.
4. We check the quality of English language.
5. We format an article according to the requirements of a journal.
6. We send an article to the editor of the journal.
7. The article is published.
8. We share our profit with the editor of the journal.Win – Win – Win.
All the parties are satisfied.
Ever feel you’re in the wrong business?
Let’s treat information space like the environment
In my Follett Lecture at Dominican University this week I examined the true nature of our information space and introduced the argument of considering information space in the same manner we conceive of the environment. To this end, we recognize the information space in which the majority of the world resides (and all will reside in soon) to be a new ecology that should be shared and managed on a global level to serve humanity. While I realize there are many criticisms we can level against the way our species has managed the planet, there is little disagreement that the environment needs protection, monitoring and the application of standards on how we use it. Can we start to consider the world of information in the same way?
To do this does require our taking more control. Large corporations cannot continue to be allowed to act in the interests of profit over people. Regulations of the kind introduced for data privacy in Europe are a model that we would do well to apply more widely. Technology that plays purely on the natural cognitive tendency to react to movement, change and dopamine loops needs to be understood for what it is, and alternatives developed. And consumers need to make their dollars count by purchasing better, more human-centered products.
Yes, this will require a sea change in governmental regulation, a willingness on politicians’ part to take more than campaign gifts from Facebook, Google and the like, and a massive educational effort in digital literacy (in the truest sense of the term) but we need to start. Universities need to lead the way here and offer intellectual leadership in helping the world to understand the benefits and pitfalls of technology choices, to increase our understanding of how the information world is structured and shaped, and to help craft appropriate policies for managing this new ecology into the future. Most universities like to make bold claims about addressing big challenges, and among them the environment is nearly always listed. Well it’s time to treat our information space equivalently while there’s still time.
New book on Info Design
I’ve put a couple of new chapters together in the past year on the nature of design knowledge in information. The latest has just been published in an impressively large volume edited by colleagues at the University of Reading in the UK for Gower, entitled Information Design: research and practice Find out more here
PPR talks now online
I greatly enjoyed this year’s Patient Privacy Rights Summit in DC. I usually do not get to attend the same conferences as physicians, policymakers, lawyers etc but this annual summit brings them all together, along with varied invited speakers, to discuss the emerging health information infrastructure. The organizers asked me to provide a closing address and while we had some technical set up difficulties, you can find it here. We need more people to speak up and agitate for our rights in the coming information world, and health is one area where we can all recognize the importance of privacy.
while here, check out the opening address from Deanna Fei, who provide an account of being on the wrong end of health privacy concerns that might shock you.
iSchool faculty in Top 5 UT Inventions of 2014
What is it? Ciaran Trace, assistant professor in the School of Information, and Luis Francisco-Revilla, research associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, created software for a large touch-screen, table-top computer called an Augmented Processing Table (APT). The APT helps archivists and curators to better access, share and process both physical and born-digital materials.
Tell me more: The invention garnered the first Archival Innovator Award from the Society of American Archivists in 2013, with the team’s work being described as, “groundbreaking, overcoming professional and philosophical boundaries, embracing innovative ideas and emerging technology, and rethinking current standards and commonly-used models for arrangement and description in modern archives.” Ultimately, APT Research Team’s work will not only help people in the field of archival science follow best practices for processing but also will increase and enhance access to “reliable, accurate and trustworthy collections of information.”
How to publish a paper in easy steps
It’s never been easier to be a scholar — just take a look at this invitation I received from a journal:
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Dear Dillon, Andrew, It’s a great honor to select out and read your article titled Inventing HCI: The grandfather of the field in INTERACTING WITH COMPUTERS from thousand of articles. The theme History; Brian Shackel; Foundations; Review of your article is very attractive. We wonder if you get any new progress of your research or do any new study in your research field. Till now, there are totally 380 Special Issues with varied topics presented in SciencePG: http://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/specialissue/specialissuelist.aspx |
The interesting points here: That paper of mine they like so much, was a memorial piece for a former colleague. Hard to imagine that I would have new research progress on this. Further down the invitation I learn that if I agree to edit one of their journals, I can publish two papers FOR FREE. And wait, there’s more….I can publish further papers after this at a 30% discount. Ah yes, scholarship meets commerce, is this what people want when they ask academia to be more entrepreneurial?
Open access publication grows in acceptance?
Taylor and Francis have just released their second annual “Open Access Survey, June 2014,” which gauges scholars opinions toward open access publication. The results reveal growing belief that open access offers wider circulation and higher visibility than publication in a traditional subscription journal, though some residual doubts that citation impact follows accordingly. There is still some strength in the view that open access journals might be lower quality, and on top of it all, there seems little doubt in scholars’ minds that academic papers will still be the main output of research in 10 years time. Plus ca change?
Anyway, lots of interesting data points in the final report, some attempt at significance testing of trends across both years of the survey, but very little synthesis or analysis of the resulting data beyond bald reporting. But hey, that’s big data.
Daily Texan article picks up this blog
Digital media changes reading habits, according to UT professor
Andrew Dillon, dean and professor in the School of Information, has been conducting research that suggests the way people read online impacts their ability to comprehend texts on paper.
Reading online is ruining my life….
Well not quite but not entirely untrue either. A couple of weeks ago I took a call from a rather persistent journalist at the Washington Post, who wanted to talk to me about the changes that might be occurring in people’s reading behavior as a result of the web. After what I thought was a thorough exchange for more than 20 minutes, I proceeded to forget about this until Monday, when the Post ran a story entitled “Serious reading takes a hit, researchers say.” In it, my comments were reduced to a grammatically questionable single sentence that seemed to suggest support for the idea that the world had changed. OK, any press is good press and if people want to know about this topic, I am happy. My request to have the sentence slightly edited (oh, what one extra ‘s’ can do to the clarity of one’s expression) was not successful but clearly the article was. Within two hours I was being interviewed on CBS Radio News and thirty minutes later, my words broadcast to the world. Curiouser and curiouser, that evening I am contacted by Al Jazeera America and before I know it, I am sitting in a studio in Austin being live broadcast to their network on Consider This. It’s not stopped since and today I am talking to NPR affiliate station KPCC in LA (where you can still listen to the show) then Education Week, and who knows who else later.
(EDIT — Video removed — Al Jazeera apparently only allow video to stay up for 1 week, after which it’s gone….)
The stimulus for all this seems to be the belief (or is it fear?) that human reading has altered radically with the introduction of the web and that the ability to read serious and extended prose is fading. Even adults who learned to read before the onslaught of web publications seem to complain that shifting from the daily routine of email/browsing/scanning of digital documents to the slower pace of book reading is becoming difficult. Couple this with emerging data from brain imagine studies which purport to show different patterns of excitation in the brain depending on your activities and the concern is being expressed that we might be changing our brains in unforeseen ways.
OK, pause and take a deep breath. What is really happening here? Let’s make a few points clear:
1) Reading is an acquired skill. It is one that most cultures place in high regard and in which they invest significant resources to ensure young members of their society acquire this skill. Like all skills, the brain does need to actively adjust to the task.
2) The act of reading is involves all levels of human activity: physical, perceptual, cognitive and social. We tend to think of it only as a perceptual and cognitive act but materials must be located and handled, and the forms of information we share reflect cultural and behavioral norms of groups which manifest as genres and types. Any significant act of reading moves seamlessly among these levels of engagement.
3) In reading, we do judge books by their covers, we do scan headings and layout, we do make multiple decisions on how to engage and we do most of this before we sit down to read an extended text (but please note, most of our routine reading is not really of extended text).
4) The type of publication formats we have known have been relatively stable: incunabula and Penguin paperbacks really don’t differ that much in terms of their affordances and ways of being handled. As a result, the skills learned early on in life for reading were, up until recently, very transferable across most forms of publication.
So what has changed? Well, we have witnessed a significant shift from paper to digital media but the shift itself is not really the issue. We know that text read on screens might be slightly slower to read than on paper and that comprehension might be impacted. Most people are willing to tolerate that for the convenience of carrying multiple documents on a single device. What’s really different however is the ongoing morphing of digital tools to the point that a simple comparison between paper or screen is not so relevant. With digital carriers and interfaces becoming smaller, cheaper, mobile, and capable of multiple functions, the type of information structures we can present digitally have changed and we are seeing different forms emerge that have no simple paper equivalent. As the technology moves, the content providers adjust and, since screen real estate and human attention are at a premium, shorter texts, increased use of animation and color, and a concern with getting the message across quickly all come to the fore. This is the new norm and you probably won’t be seeing too many people reading Proust on their iPhone anytime soon.
Now, what has changed for humans? There are a couple of important things to note. Our basic make-up, meaning our physical form and cognitive architecture, are not changing quickly. We still have finite attention, limited capacity working memory, a tendency to be distracted by movement, a perceptual span that limits the number of words we can read at a time, a desire for structure etc. In any full reading process involving extended text. we run through the range of responses to a document from short-term decisions to full, immersive engagement over time. With most of the material we read during the working day and online, we often aren’t willing to commit to the full range and stop after scanning. Content providers know this and produce accordingly. Add to this the delivery of digital material on a platform that is constantly refreshing, updating and allows users to multi-task across applications, and the results are a series of short acts involving the perusal and reaction to messages and short form texts that break up the normal progression through deep reading tasks.
Is this bad? Not if your goal is to keep on top of changing contexts and identify facts. Yes if you want to read a novel or really study a technical report. It’s not that we must use paper for the latter but we must create some time and isolation from distraction to do so comprehensively. That is a fact of our own psychological make-up; it is not really a limitation of the technology (ignoring some form factors for now). The problem that worries people now is if spending too much time with digital devices might somehow diminish your ability to read deeply, even if you make the switch to appropriate medium (e.g., a book) for deeper study.
We can add to this concerns with the adoption of new mobile tools in schools, and if this then distorts the education of readers by emphasizing one form of reading over another. The fear is that young minds never learn to appreciate the benefits of longer form documents and certainly are not required to develop the skills needed to exploit these benefits appropriately. There is talk a new bi-literacy, or bi-literate gap emerging and of course, older (if not wiser) heads worry that human civilization will crumble as the full reading of Shakespeare is replaced by students who can only tweet the odd phrase of a soliloquy. Or the related fear that nobody will remember anything anymore as they will convince themselves that it’s all in the cloud somewhere, and they only need to Google it for an answer.
Well, technology is always going to ruin us, so why should the web be any different? I remember only snatches of Hamlet’s speech now and I also recall students who felt that photocopying an article for their personal use was as good as reading it. Plus ca change. There is certainly a set of questions related to human reading that warrant our attention right now but the imminent collapse of culture as a result of digital scanning is not the one I would spend most of my time on. I do think however that we should try to be a little more self-conscious of our reading habits and remember that sometimes, to really get to the heart of the document, we need to give the reading process a chance to fully occur.