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Can Scholarship Show as Well as Tell

The Article of the Future – or is it?Anthony Watkinson

CIBER Research

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The Article of the Future – or is it?

This presentation has been constructed from an extempore offering and it is only intended to be a very simplistic approach to what I regard as an important question – though generally it would appear that it is not viewed in this way by many

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3. The Article of the Future – or is it?

The basic message of this presentation can be expressed in two assertions:

• The web has shown to be a vehicle for the visual as much as if not more than text and this was part of the expectation from the start

• Scholars, in particularly scientists but not exclusively so, have for many decades offered a primarily visual expression of what they are adding to knowledge

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4. The Article of the Future – or is it?

I want to unpack the second assertion of the previous slide

Many scientists at one time presented in seminars and conferences primarily in textual mode with any visuals as accessories or illustrations. Now many of the same scientists offer a video (for example) and speak to and around it.

The form of the scholarly article retains the earlier approach in the way in which it is constructed

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5.The Article of the Future – or is it?

Here is some history of the visual in the (scientific) article

“In article after article 18th century arguments reach a point at which words no longer suffice; only a table, a likeness, a schematic or a mathematical depiction will do. (They) are not merely illustrative: they all have roles crucial to the argument.”

Gross et al – COMMUNICATING SCIENCE p.104

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6. The Article of the Future – or is it?

More history: Gross and others conflate the growing recognition of the need for the visual with the formalisation and modularisation of the article.

“ During the 19th century the gradual rise of the science professional was accompanied by the gradual uniformity and formalisation of the article”

Gross (see previous slide) p.118

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7.The Article of the Future – or is it?

Gross and colleagues view the future as below in 2002:“ The basic units of the modular arrangement will

become even more self contained than they are now, as scientists come to recognise that they are writing what is, in essence, a hypertext document which will seldom be read front to back” (p. 232). He does recognise that “there will be visual images that move and make sounds” (p.233) but the context makes clear that they will be linked to the text from a separate module

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8. The Article of the Future – or is it?

Once upon a time the Amsterdam based physicist and information scientist Professor Joost Kircz was really interest in the visual but Google does not any longer reveal what he wrote about some time ago. He has set out what he calls modularity at some length in 1997 [www.science.uva.nl/projects/commphys/papers/kmodul.htm] and yes a visual output can be a “hypertexted” module but one of many.

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9. The Article of the Future – or is it?

Another way of looking at the transformation of the article, which has been around (personal experience) since at least 1993, is the idea of the dynamic rather than the static article. Christine Borgman in her Scholarship in the Digital Age (2014 p. 160) where she writes:

“Particularly counterintuitive is the fact that existing forms do not service scholars well. Yet the new genres that take advantage of the malleable, mutable and mobile nature of digital objects have been slow to emerge”

There is no evidence from studies of researchers I know of it that they have moved away at all from something static to link to unless it is researchers in the humanities – a relatively small group not particularly concerned with journals

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10. The Article of the Future – or is it

Let us go back again to slide 3. Pullinger and Baldwin in their book (2002) on the SuperJournal project – ELECTRONIC JOURNALS AND USER BEHAVIOUR draw attention to the fact that one of the main aims of the project was to enable “multimedia elements” (p.8). This was 1994. Many of those involved were keen on the visual having a central role. However the researchers were not at all interested: indeed none offered a video to the journals in the experiment. Not surprisingly the conclusions to the project do not mention the visual at all.

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11. The Article of the Future – or is it?

The actual article of the future emerged from the thinking of Elsevier 2008/2009. Kent Anderson of Scholarly Kitchen was typically scathing of the Cell prototype when it emerged - http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/07/21/the-article-of-the-future-lipstick-on-a-pig/ which is a little unfair as it was a prototype. However (slide 12) he did make some sound point which are highly relevant to this presentation.

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12. The Article of the Future – or is it?

Anderson contends as follows:a) Elsevier’s “Article of the Future” looks like an article from

the past, with some embedded hyperlinks, some AJAX tabs, two basic social media elements, and not much else.

b) Article 2.0 as a true experiment would mean that the authoring experience and tools would change, the fundamental data would deepen and become networked, and the presentation would be re-imagined based on the possibilities of Web 2.0. This would fundamentally change the genesis of a research report

Next we shall see what has happened (slide 13)

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13. The Article of the Future – or is it?

Conveniently the present stage of the Article of the Future has been set out by the primary architect IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg in LIBER QUARTERLY 23:4 2014 under the title BRINGING DIGITAL SCIENCE DEEP INSIDE THE SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE: THE ELSEVIER ARTICLE OF THE FUTURE PROJECT.

This article alone would justify concentrating on the Elsevier developments rather than similar moves by the Nature Publishing Group or the Public Library of Science

What is written here, showing a range of visual enrichments, meets most if not all of the criticisms of Kent Anderson as set out in slide 12.

But it only goes so far

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14. The Article of the Future – or is it?

The abstract makes clear what the article of the future in Elsevier thinking is and this thinking reflects that of other publishers both traditional and also open access: the Elsevier question is – “how do we find a balance between creating valuable contextual links without sacrificing the high-quality, peer-reviewed status of published articles.” The exciting experiments with visuals are essentially extras (“context”)

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15. The Article of the Future – or is it?

http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/10055/RP-15-2013_Supplemental_Materials.pdf and the site in general shows a not dissimilar problem with data. How to you handle data which is essential to the message and can be distinguished from truly supplemental data.

Thumbnails at the top of the article – common now in the articles from larger companies – does not make the micrograph or video central. Text is still supreme

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16. The Article of the Future – or is it?

My view is that the article of the future demands a more basic revisiona) There is no reason why the structure of the article now established for

many decades should not now be loosened up. For example the abstract may remain but be accompanied by a summary for public engagement, the methods can be considerably expanded to enable a reality of reproducibility AND the main discussion can be text surrounding a visual or a video.

b) In an online only journal there is no problem of spacec) Peer review is not lost: indeed it would be easierd) The demands made by the current compression on writing an

intelligible scholarly article would be lessened

These are some thoughts: others can work this one out.

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17. The Article of the Future – or is it?

Questions or comments welcome

Anthony.watkinson@btinternet.com

27 June 2014