Because of the fact that I created a blog, thereby experiencing e-publishing as an author, my professor, Tula Giannini, suggested that I write something on user-generated e-content. I have embraced this topic, but it was still too broad for a brief survey. What remained was to choose an "angle," a way to frame my study so that it would have some cohesion and succinctness.
Another approach that was strongly recommended was that our projects be as interactive as possible, stemming from our real live experience in London, rather than write a traditional paper based on our reading of secondary sources.
With this premise, I decided to contact Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef. In his talk on the second day of the conference, Geoffrey addressed many of the issues I am interested in pursuing, even beyond the limits of this class. So I wrote him an email and he very graciously accepted to help me. We corresponded a few times, and he suggested some starting points for my work, and directed me to a few articles, a few books, a few websites, a podcast, etc.
In this survey I will list and link to the readings I have perused, adding some brief comments, and by the end I will have narrowed down my topic so that it is manageable. As I go along I will be forming and collecting my questions. The final part of the project is going to be an extended interview with Geoffrey, which we will conduct over the phone (he will call me from the UK using Skype!!!), and at the end of the interview I will add some of my own thoughts and conclusions.
= = = = = # # # # # = = = = =
When I wrote to Geoffrey I gave him a brief overview of what I was interested in, and in an exchange that spanned a half-dozen e-mails, he expanded on some of the topics he had touched upon in his presentation at the conference, helping me arrive at the crux of what we would discuss in more detail in the interview:
- Trust
- Trust metric(s)
- blogs
- "My Brain" subscription
- DOI's and how linkrot erodes authority and trust
- The role of librarians and publishers through their use of user-generated e-content
- Attack resistance
- The intersection/intertwining of user-generated, informal e-publishing and scholarly communication
- Vertical / horizontal trust in the context of this discussion
Here are some sources that Geoffrey suggested I read as a starting point, with my comments, as well as other sources I found on my own. Geoffrey suggested that I use, as a search term, the expression "trust metric".
An earlier version of Geoffrey's presentation at the Bloomsbury conference can be found at:
The Journal of Electronic Publishing. [JEP]
I enjoyed this article especially, because for one thing it's nice to read a fleshed out article as opposed to a PowerPoint presentation, but also because the concept of local/global trust and horizontal/vertical trust became much clearer to me through this second reading. The best part of this article, however, is that Geoffrey goes into great detail in discussing the various types of "social software":
- collaborative writing tools (blogs, wikis)
- social networking tools (Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn)
- social bookmarking or categorization tools (del.icio.us, Flickr, Connotea, Technorati, CiteULike, Furl)
And he not only discusses the basic principles according to which they work, but he goes into the methods they are adopting to transcend the local/global, horizontal/vertical trust issues. I strongly encourage anyone who is interested in the topics of social software and trust to read this article.
Geoffrey was also interviewed by Jon Udell on IT Conversations, Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators in a podcast on the topic of Winning the Battle Against Linkrot, in which he talks about CrossRef and how important it is to use DOI's that protect links from breaking if the original location of files is moved. Scholarship relies on citations, and citations are increasingly expressed through links to the articles that are being cited. If you go to read a scholarly article online and attempt to follow a link to its cited article and find that it leads nowhere, no matter how much you try to hold onto your trust in the original article or its author, that trust is somewhat eroded. CroffRef's mission is to keep these links alive no matter what.
In the course of the interview, Geoffrey also revisits the theme of incunabula, an analogy between the time of transition from manuscript books to printed books (Gutenberg, 1500's) and our current transition from print to online. In the time of Gutenberg, people were so wedded to the idea that only manuscript books were "real" and trustworthy, that the first printed books were illuminated by hand to make them look more like manuscripts. These illuminated printed books were called incunabula. Today we are trying to make our online documents look like print, so in a way we are recreating the incunabula of the internet age. The point Geoffrey was trying to make is that it is time to move on into a whole new way of displaying and interacting with our content, and to let go of print in the online environment.
In the course of his talk at the Bloomsbury conference, Geoffrey mentioned a book by Kieron O'Hara, called Trust: From Socrates to Spin. This book is the origin of his discussion about horizontal/vertical, local/global trust axis. To summarize this discussion: horizontal/local trust is trust that is based on acquaintance. I know you, I trust you, I trust the validity of your work/research. If you trust another friend of yours, I might be willing to extend a certain amount of trust to him as well. This kind of trust is horizontal in the sense that it is among peers and cannot therefore be imposed or coerced. It is transitive but only to an extent. I can trust your friend, but I would not be likely to trust a friend of a friend of a friend. It can only extend so far. Vertical/global trust is the kind of trust that exists in the scholarly world, handed down by higher authorities, and can be enforced. If you decide to adhere to a certain school, a certain society, a certain "club", you have to go along with their set of beliefs. If you don't you can be expelled, arrested, kicked out, etc.
Geoffrey's point overall is that the world of scholarly communication could stand to take a lesson from the practices of some of the virtual communities born around the social softwares we have mentioned above, whose trust metrics are allowing them to transcend the whole notion of local vs. global, horizontal vs. vertical, and the key to success is finding a way to automate this building of trust.
An interesting example is Outfoxed, which combines the Foxfire browser with a plugin and a simple server that has the object of trading trust information via RSS. Users would register with the server and they would be able to rate the trustworthiness of any online resource. When users go to a site that holds content that has been rated by another or other users, they would see the trust rating the content was given, and would therefore be able to decide right away whether to pursue the content and read it, or to discard it and move on. Geoffrey believes that this system has great potential, and I agree with him. He suggests how the system could be taken a step further, with the trust rating being embedded in Google search results, so that when a screen full of search results comes up, each entry would also display a button next to it with its "trusted" or "not trusted" rating. The members of any given network of users could therefore all work together so as to avoid duplication of efforts. It would not be necessary for everyone to vet an article or book, because one or a few members of the community would have done it for them. You could search for research you are interested in and find results that have been preemptively vetted and screened for you, saving you immense amounts of time and effort. You could then proceed to read only the content that has been deemed trustworthy and valid. I found this part of Geoffrey's theory to be fascinating.
In my research, I was interested in highlighting how these social software applications can help librarians and publishers get information out to researchers that will help them further their work without unnecessary "slogging" through mountains of material in search of substantive, authoritative work, and in bringing to light the ways in which content that appears in these "informal" settings (blogs, wikis, etc.) can itself be deemed trustworthy.
So I followed Geoffrey's advice and set out to learn about TRUST METRICS. The most simple definition of a trust metric is, as this Wikipedia entry states: "a measure of how a member of a group is trusted by the other members." An important concept that is introduced in addition to the trust metric is that of Attack Resistance, which is a measure of a trust metric's ability to ward off abusers of the network, like spammers, for instance.
I also found another interesting article on Trust Metrics, called: Trust Metrics for Social Networks, on Facebook. The article talks about implementing a trust metric to social networks in business, to help the members of the network apply the principles of Wikinomics in business settings. And another wiki on Trust Metrics, that outlines the basic principles of a network in a virtual community, speaks of the various issues of trust and attack resistance, and talks about local/global, and objective/subjective trust. It links to all the articles I have already read, so the circle is now closed, and I will move on to the interview with Geoffrey and my conclusions.
No comments:
Post a Comment