Communications, Information Theory and Security

Summary

How does one write the story of a computer system? To trace a technical history, one must first assume that there is a technical ‘object’ to trace – a system or an artefact that has changed over time. This technical artefact will constitute a series of artefacts, a lineage or a line. At a cursory level, technical ‘evolution’ seems obvious in the world around us; we can see it in the fact that such lineages exist, that technologies come in generations. Computers, for example, adapt and adopt characteristics over time, ‘one suppressing the other as it becomes obsolete’ (Guattari 1995, 40). But are we to understand this lineage from a sociological, an archaeological or a zoological perspective? And what is a technical artefact?

I need to address these questions here for two reasons. First, because it is impossible to write a technical history without defining how that history will be constructed, and second, because these questions also concerned Douglas Engelbart, one of the early pioneers whose work we investigate in this book. The relationship between human beings and their tools, and how those tools extend, augment or ‘boost’ our capacity as a species, is integral to the history of hypertext and the NLS system in particular.

Traditionally, history has ignored the material dimension of technical artefacts. Historians are interested in tracing cultural formations, personalities and institutions, and especially the social ‘constructions’ they erect around themselves. Technical artefacts don't have their own history; they are perceived as the products of culture.

Summary

Everything is deeply intertwingled. I have always loved that particular Nelsonism (and there are many to choose from); it has stuck with me for twenty years. In this book we have looked at several early, pre-Web attempts to represent intertwingularity, to represent the deep connections that criss-cross and interpenetrate human knowledge. They were built at different times and from different technical components; two of them (Memex and Xanadu) were never built at all. As a series of machines, they are a motley crew. With the exception of Storyspace, they are also obsolete – had Bruce Sterling continued his Dead Media Project beyond 2001, they would belong properly to that collection.

There are, however, hypertexts created in the '80s that are still read and edited today. George Landow's Victorian Web, originally created in Intermedia, then ported to Storyspace and the Web, is one of the oldest scholarly hypertexts. It is still used as course material in Victorian literary studies. Numerous hypertexts created in Storyspace, among them afternoon and Victory Garden, are still read, studied and argued about in critical literature. We have inherited more than just technical designs from the history of hypertext – we have inherited works of literature.

The '80s was also a period of great critical foment for hypertext theory. Theorists began enthusiastically exploring hypertext from a literary perspective in the late '80s, claiming that the interactive nature of hypertext invites us to reconfigure our conceptions of ‘text’, ‘narrative’ and ‘author’ in a fashion more suited to the nature of the medium (Landow 1992, also Landow and Delaney 1995).

Summary

Dr Douglas Engelbart is a softly spoken man. His voice is low yet persuasive, as though ‘his words have been attenuated by layers of meditation’, his friend Nilo Lindgren wrote in 1971 (cited in Rheingold 2000, 178). I struggled to hear him, being partially deaf myself, but that didn't matter; he has been describing the same vision in great detail to journalists, historians and engineers for over 60 years. The words change slightly in each interview, but the vision remains clear and sweeping, like a horizon line on a bright summer's day. Engelbart wants to improve the model of the human, to ‘boost our capacity to deal with complexity’ as a species (Engelbart 1999).

To get what he means by ‘boost our capacity’ as a species, we must first understand his philosophical framework. This is important for two reasons. Firstly, this framework profoundly influenced his own approach to invention in the '60s and '70s. Secondly, it represents a fascinating (and novel) theory of technical evolution, a topic we have already started to explore in this book.

Engelbart believes that human beings live within an existing technical and cultural system, an ‘augmentation’ system. We are born with a particular set of genetic capabilities, and then we build on these innate capabilities using tools, techniques, skills, language and technology. There is no ‘naked ape’; from the moment we are born we are always already augmented by language, tools and technologies.

Summary

This book would not have been possible without the cooperation of its subjects. Like technology historian Steve Shapin and sociologist Thierry Bardini, I write in the ‘confident conviction that I am less interesting than the subjects I write about’ (Shapin cited in Bardini 2000, xiv). I have had the great privilege of meeting many of the people you will read about in these pages – except for Vannevar Bush, who died in 1974 – the colourful anecdotes, magical visions and prescient ideas you will find here have come directly from them or from their work. At times I felt like a media studies bowerbird, procuring brightly coloured memories, sticky notes and cryptic computer manuals from various computing science professors, writers and visionaries across the globe. In that sense, this book may be read as a simple history book. There is no need to be self-reflexive or clever when presented with such a treasure trove; it is intrinsically interesting and needs no posthistorical garnish (I'll confine that to the preface). That said, I do not claim to present you with the final word on hypertext history; this is an edited selection, a woven structure of deeply interconnected stories contributed in large part by the people who lived them.

I have spent months, years in fact, arranging this collection; it was first assembled as a PhD thesis in 1999, before I had children and consequently when I had the luxury of time. Time to do things like roam around Brown University gathering documents and stories from Andries van Dam and the Hypertext Editing System (HES) team; time to rummage through the Vannevar Bush archives at the Library of Congress looking for interesting correspondence; time to interview Doug Engelbart and feel embarrassingly starstruck; and time to travel to Keio University in Japan to meet Ted Nelson.

Summary

Re:minding.

And yet. But still. (Mais encore) Still flowing.

—Michael Joyce, 2011

Michael Joyce has kept a journal for many years. Before he begins to write, he inscribes the first page with an epigram: Still flowing. As anyone who has read Joyce's fictions or critical writing will attest, his work is replete with multiple voices and narrative trajectories, a babbling stream of textual overflow interrupted at regular intervals by playful, descriptive whorls and eddies. If there is a common thread to be drawn between his hyperfictions, his academic writing and his novels, then it is this polyglot dialogue, as Robert Coover terms it, a lyrical stream of consciousness. Joyce can tell a story. And he has told many stories: four books, 40 scholarly essays, and at last count (my count), a dozen fictions. What courses through this work is a gentle concern, or even fixation, with how stories are told – with ‘how we make meaning, as if a caress’ (Joyce 2004, 45). The metaphor of water is an appropriate one. Like Ted Nelson, who had his first epiphany about the nature of ideas and the connections between them as he trailed his hand in the water under his grandfather's boat, Joyce has long been concerned with how to represent a multiplicity of ideas and their swirling interrelationships, with how stories change over time. In the essay ‘What I Really Wanted to Do I Thought’, about the early development of Storyspace, Joyce writes:

What I really wanted to do, I discovered, was not merely to move a paragraph from page 265 to page 7 but to do so almost endlessly. I wanted, quite simply, to write a novel that would change in successive readings and to make those changing versions according to the connections that I had for some time naturally discovered in the process of writing and that I wanted my readers to share. (1998, 31)

Summary

ABSTRACT

This chapter uses the Mass Observation Archive (MOA), a vast collection of qualitative data on many subject themes, as a case study to examine how the availability of new technologies and tools for research has changed the way in which information professionals can support the use of data of this nature in the humanities and social sciences. It explores the different ways in which research in these disciplines can be supported through digitization, and outlines how important it is to ensure that there is a ‘curatorial voice’ for the researcher in digital material, showing how this adds value to the resource. The chapter also details the various projects with which Mass Observation has been involved to open up and enhance the usability of the Archive. These include the JISC-funded Observing the 1980s Open Educational Resource project, which offers opportunities for the reuse of newly digitized material under a Creative Commons licence, and the SALDA project which produced sets of openly available Linked Data extracted from the records of the MOA Catalogue. By working closely with academics and information professionals on projects such as these, the authors of this chapter argue, they have been able to offer many new ways for researchers in the social sciences and the humanities and other disciplines to use and manipulate the collection.

Introduction

The availability of new technologies and tools for research in humanities and social sciences has changed the ways in which information professionals can support the use of qualitative data in humanities and social sciences. Recent years have seen a large increase in the number of digitization and metadata creation projects undertaken by libraries and archives across the world, underpinned by a firm acknowledgement from the research community that these resources are required in order to enhance and support work in various subject areas. Researchers are encouraged to use technologies to create cross-disciplinary and crossinstitutional collaborations in their work; and by easing accessibility to qualitative data resources, we can support these initiatives, as well as encourage the use of our unique and valuable resources.

Summary

ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on scholars, rather than on all library users. In it I examine some of the key changes in scholarly practices and associated attitudes in recent years. What are some of the key aspects of the relationship between the academic library and those scholars who may make use of its collections and services? Against a shifting background of significant increases in the accessibility of a variety of information sources and services, how is that relationship changing? I will attempt to examine what it might mean to think of scholars as having the identity of ‘library users’, ultimately arguing that there has been a structural readjustment in the nature of the user's relationship with information services providers, including the library. The perspective presented in this chapter is rooted to some degree in the US higher education community. There, it has become clear in recent years that the principal differentiator among faculty members’ attitudes and practices is discipline, far more than institutional type, years in the field or other characteristics. In 2012, Ithaka S+R is conducting research programmes with components in both the USA and the UK. So far, these have identified no evidence of any essential differences in the views of academics in the UK and the USA that would bear substantively on the issues covered in this chapter.

Introduction

As previous chapters have made clear, scholars today have a vastly increased number of options available to them to meet their information services needs. The academic library has responded with a variety of new infrastructures, services and strategies. An understanding of the users’ views is ultimately vital for any information services organization that wishes to serve them.

Background

The nature of the scholar's relationship with information services organizations is, and always has been, multi-faceted. This relationship incorporates functions such as discovery of information, access to collections and the range of services necessary both to enable their use and to enable original research.

Traditionally, these functions were best, if not exclusively, provided in person. Discovery involved such tools as the card catalogue and reference collections. Collections of books, journals and other materials were usually developed for the ideal of locally maintained, on-site stacks. Services included the staffed reference desk, bibliographers with research expertise dedicated to individual fields and other advanced reference services.

Summary

ABSTRACT

The advent of digital communication has created challenges for publishers of scholarly materials; it has threatened to revolutionize the process of scholarly communication and change the fundamentals of the publishing process forever. But has it? This chapter investigates to what extent scholarly publishing has been affected by the transition to digital communication, what opportunities have been created and how the transition is shaping the future of the industry. It breaks down the publishing process into three stages – input, processing and output – to analyse how much each of these areas has been affected and if some areas of the publishing process have been affected more than others. It analyses the changing business models in the scholarly journals market and looks at the effect that the introduction of Open Access (OA) publishing has had on both the subscription business model and the way that the communication of research is being financed. It finds that scholarly publishers have undergone a huge transition over the last 20 years, moving from a slow, print-based model to purely digital delivery in many cases; but for all that change, the process of scholarly publishing (peer review, editorial review and the structure of a scientific paper) has changed very little. What has changed is the way that users are using and accessing the information, and the business models that have now developed for digital media, such as the Big Deal and Gold OA. Many scholarly publishers are still in the middle of a transition to true digital publishing and the mechanisms involved in scholarly communication have yet to take full advantage of many of the technologies available today, and so this industry will have to continue to adapt and change to meet the needs of the next generation of researchers.

Introduction

The publishing side of the scholarly communication process has developed over hundreds of years, with many crediting the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in around 1440 as the starting-point. This invention led to the mechanization of book making and the start of mass reproduction of intellectual works, which over time grew into the modern publishing industry. Many of the scientific publishers still trading today can trace their roots back many centuries and have developed alongside the growth of science as an area of interest and research, playing a role in the communication of its discoveries.

Summary

ABSTRACT

University research strategies make statements about research ambitions, but rarely speak directly about scholarly communications. At the same time, communication of all sorts has become central to a university, whether to support recruitment, present a public profile or respond to events. This chapter seeks to explore the relationship between institutional research strategies and scholarly communications and to see how each may have affected the other and how they might do so in the future. It describes the purpose and structure of an institutional research strategy, and how these are changing. It highlights the linkages between strategy, implementation plans and policies, where the latter encourage desired behaviours. In the context of scholarly communications, the research strategy is the public document in which an institution states its commitment to such forms of communication: that discovering new knowledge and sharing that discovery in meaningful ways are at the heart of the institution. The discussion then moves to the changing nature of scholarly communications, including the Open agenda, and questions how scholarly communications fits into the wider spectrum of institutional communications. The chapter concludes that there has probably been little direct connection between research strategies and approaches to scholarly communications, but that this is changing. Both institutions and individual researchers wish to demonstrate the quality, relevance and accessibility of their research, in order to be attractive to collaborators, funders and employers. Successful institutions will ensure that strategy and scholarly communications activities are mutually supportive, to the benefit of both their researchers and the organization.

Introduction

How have institutional research strategies affected scholarly communications, if at all?

How have changes in scholarly communications affected institutional research strategies?

This chapter addresses these two questions; and to that end it looks at the recent evolution of the institutional research strategy.

University research strategies (and their parent institutional strategies) have tended not to consider scholarly communication directly. Rather, they have tended to be statements about undertaking high-quality, relevant research and translating it into practice or other beneficial outcomes. It is implicit that the results of research will be disseminated, but little attention is paid to how, why and through what media.

At one level, this is neither surprising nor concerning. Indeed, the academic community might be more worried if their institutional strategy became too prescriptive.

Summary

The scholarly communications system has undergone a series of profound changes in the last decade, and change continues apace. Indeed, this book comes at a time when governments, research funders, learned societies and universities, as well as researchers themselves, are showing unprecedented levels of interest in how researchers communicate their findings. In the UK, the Finch Report, the government's response to it and the policies announced by the Research Councils have signalled a sharp acceleration in moves toward Open Access (OA). In Europe, the EU Commission has announced that OA will be a requirement for all publications arising from research funded under the Horizon 2020 programme, and that it will introduce a pilot scheme on access to and reuse of research data. It has also recommended that governments of the member states should introduce policies for OA to both publications and data arising from publicly funded research. In the USA, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued in February 2013 a policy memorandum directing Federal agencies to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to manage the digital data resulting from research.

Such developments indicate how important it is now to find ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of communications both between researchers themselves and between the research community and the many other people and organizations who are interested in their findings. Effective communication is essential if we are to reap the full benefits – in the form of tangible contributions to social welfare and economic growth, and also to the intellectual and cultural life of nations – that can and should arise from the substantial investments that governments, charities and others make in research.

The development of effective channels of communication between researchers across the globe has underpinned the growth in our understanding of the world for at least 350 years. The communication of theoretical and empirical findings through scientific journals and other publications has been at the heart of the scientific and broader research enterprise since Henry Oldenburg, the first Secretary of the Royal Society, created its Philosophical Transactions in 1665, defining its core functions as:

Summary

ABSTRACT

Social media have been hailed as a significant opportunity for scholarly communications, offering researchers new and effective ways to discover and share knowledge. Tools such as blogs, wikis, Twitter and Facebook, as well as their underpinning principles such as crowdsourcing and the value of enhanced or networked data, have all been explored to varying extents by academics, librarians and publishers in their attempts to improve the efficiency of scholarly communications and to reach new or wider audiences. This chapter examines such use of social media and suggests that all of these groups use social media only where it mimics or reinforces their existing behaviours. For the most part, they adopt those elements of social media that make tasks easier or more efficient, but reshape tools or the way in which they are used in order to avoid challenging traditional cornerstones of scholarly communications, such as journal articles and peer review.

Introduction

Facebook was founded in 2004: by January 2009 it had 175 million active users; and by December 2011 it had 845 million – around 12% of the world's population. Twitter was launched in July 2006 and signed up its 100 millionth active user in September 2011. In September 2010, the five billionth photograph was added to Flickr's searchable database; the Tate group of four art galleries has a collection of just 65,000 works of art.4

These statistics show how social media have rapidly become a routine part of many people's personal and professional lives. This chapter explores how these new tools, and the behaviours that underpin their use, are being adopted within scholarly communications, and whether they are changing the way in which researchers and others share information and knowledge.

The social media landscape

Social media tools and technologies build upon the principles and practices of Web 2.0. These stress the move from static, proprietary systems to applications which ‘get better the more people use them’.5Web 2.0 focuses on tools which treat the user as a co-developer and on business models which seek to generate revenue not from sales of a product but from services or enhanced data.

Summary

ABSTRACT

Technological advancement has transformed research across the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines, leading to the development of new fields of enquiry, as well as novel research tools and methodologies. It has also generated a variety of original media for communicating scholarly research. Yet, despite this, articles in highly ranked, peer-reviewed journals remain – for better or worse – the panacea. Postdocs working at research-intensive universities are required to demonstrate innovation to further their careers. However, the pressure to publish in order to secure a permanent academic post means that the gap for creative research communication is narrow. Most postdocs are accordingly conservative in the way that they report and disseminate their research. This chapter looks at how the ‘publish or perish’ culture affects the ways postdocs understand and make choices about communicating their research. Using a recent public outreach project as a case study, it explores the benefits of participating in creative dissemination projects and discusses the broader value of creative forms of science communication.

Introduction

This chapter looks at the ways in which the ‘publish or perish’ culture which exists within STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines influences the choices postdoctoral researchers (postdocs) make about how to conduct research and communicate their findings. Drawing on data examining the role of creativity in STEM research, it explores the scope for creative forms of research dissemination and suggests that while developing a strong portfolio of peer-reviewed publication is critical, more creative forms of scholarly communication are also of increasing value to postdocs’ career progression.

Publishing in the digital age

Technological advancement has transformed research across the STEM disciplines, leading to the creation of new fields of enquiry and the growth of novel methodologies and research tools. It has also generated a variety of original media for sharing data and communicating findings. Yet despite this, articles in highly ranked, peer-reviewed journals remain – for better or worse – the panacea of scholarly communication.

Rather than transforming the way in which research is disseminated, the advent of digital technology seems, somewhat ironically, to have reinforced traditional modes of scholarly communication. Debate concerning the accessibility (or lack thereof) of online publications has led to the development of alternative communication strategies. These include Open Access journals, institutional repositories, pre-print servers, social networking sites and personal blogs.

Summary

ABSTRACT

The challenges of sharing research in chemistry are introduced via the molecule and how its essential information features might be formalized. The review then covers a period of around 33 years, describing how scientists used to share information about the molecule, and how that sharing has evolved during a period that has seen the widespread introduction of several disruptive technologies. These include e-mail and its now ubiquitous attachment, the world wide web and its modern expression via blogs and wikis. The review describes how digital documents have similarly evolved during this period, acquiring in some cases digital rights management, metadata and most recently an existence in the cloud. The review also describes how the dissemination of digital research data has also changed dramatically, the most recent innovation being data repositories, and speculates what the future of sharing research via the latest disruptive technology, tablets, might be.

Introduction

Chemistry is widely considered to stand at the crossroads of many disciplines, with signposts to molecular, life, materials, polymer, environmental and computer sciences, as well as to physics and mathematics, and even art and design. To collaborate and share research data and ideas across these areas, research scientists must strive (and do not always succeed) to find common languages to express their intended concepts. In reality, even different scientific dialects can be a challenge, since the semantics of multi-disciplinary areas of research are rarely defined accurately or fully enough for people to cope with the ambiguities and subtleties. The modern digital information age has promised a revolutionary approach to these challenges, the latest incarnations being the formation of social networks to facilitate the interaction. This chapter will present a perspective on some of these aspects from my personal point of view as a research chemist. There are many crossroads at which one could stand: I can only follow the sage advice of Yogi Berra: ‘When one comes to a fork in the road one should take it’! Here I will take the fork to molecular sciences.

Summary

ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the benefits of Open Access (OA), the challenges that still persist – especially in terms of compliance with funders’ policies – and the costs and sustainability of OA publishing, with particular reference to the work of the Wellcome Trust since 2005. To provide context to the Trust's initiatives, a brief analysis of the OA landscape in the UK, Europe and beyond is also provided. The chapter also discusses the rationale behind the development of eLife, the new OA journal developed by the Wellcome Trust in collaboration with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Max Planck Society. Introduction

A study in 2011 estimated that for every $ that the US government invested in the human genome project, $141 of economic activity was generated. As one of the sponsors study observed, ‘from a simple return on investment, the financial stake made in mapping the entire human genome is clearly one of the best uses of taxpayer dollars the U.S. government has ever made’.

This single example demonstrates the benefits that can be reaped from open content, and explains why it is logical for research funders to develop policies that require the outputs of the research they fund to be made freely available, for both humans and machines to read and make use of. Stated simply, it makes absolutely no sense from a return-on-investment perspective for a funder to invest in research but then allow the outputs of that research – most typically the research articles published in peerreviewed journals – to remain hidden behind publishers’ pay walls.

With reference to the work of the Wellcome Trust, this chapter considers the benefits of Open Access (OA), the challenges that still persist – especially in terms of compliance with funders’ policies – and the costs and sustainability of OA publishing. To provide context to the Trust's initiatives, a brief analysis of the OA landscape in the UK, Europe and beyond will also be provided. The chapter will also discuss the rationale behind the development of eLife, the new OA journal developed by the Wellcome Trust in collaboration with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Max Planck Society.

Summary

ABSTRACT

The way taxonomic information is created, tested, accessed, thought about and used is changing dramatically with the application of information and communications technologies (ICTs). This cyber-enabled taxonomy is not only changing the efficiency and work practices of taxonomists, but also changing ways of disseminating taxonomic data, and, arguably, the very nature of taxonomic knowledge. In this chapter I examine some of the major outputs of taxonomic research; how ICTs are affecting their production, dissemination and reuse; and common impediments to further progress, including a lack of incentives to build, sustain and populate appropriate infrastructures.

Introduction

Biological taxonomy and systematics is one of the oldest scientific disciplines. It aims to explore, discover, characterize, name and classify species; to study their evolutionary relationships; and to map their geographic distributions and ecological associations. Taxonomy draws on information from many disciplines in order to build a coherent picture of the extent and trajectory of life on earth. This is currently enshrined in an estimated 5.4 million volumes (circa 800,000 monographs and 40,000 journal titles) published on natural history since 1469.

Cybertaxonomy is a contraction of ‘cyber-enabled taxonomy’ and involves the application of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to taxonomy. It shares the traditional goals of taxonomy but uses non-traditional hardware, software, instrumentation, communication tools and work practices, bringing information science and technologies to bear on the data and information generated by the study of organisms, their genes and their interactions.

In this short review I highlight areas where cybertaxonomy is transforming taxonomic practice, particularly in the collection, management, synthesis and dissemination of taxonomic works. This transformation has the potential to provide unprecedented global access to information on biological species and their role in nature. The full realization of this potential requires a number of further technical advances, where progress is being made; but also cultural change, where progress may be harder to achieve.

Taxonomic names and checklists

The names by which organisms are known are the basis for communication about them. Almost all information relating to organisms is given context by scientific names. When due allowance is made for problems such as homonymy, synonymy, orthographic variation and the dynamic relationships of names (as text character strings) and concepts (sets of organisms represented by names), names offer a nearcomprehensive system of metadata by which to index and organize biodiversity information.

Communications, Information Theory and Security

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Chapter 1 - Technical Evolution

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Conclusion

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Chapter 3 - Augmenting the Intellect: NLS

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Preface

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Chapter 6 - Machine-Enhanced (Re)minding: The Development of Storyspace

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Part 2 - Other players: roles and responsibilities

2 - Supporting qualitative research in the humanities and social sciences: using the Mass Observation Archive

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13 - The library users’ view

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Contributors

8 - The changing role of the publisher in the scholarly communications process

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11 - Changing institutional research strategies

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Index

Introduction: Scholarly communications – disruptions in a complex ecology

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7 - Social media and scholarly communications: the more they change, the more they stay the same?

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Frontmatter

4 - Creative communication in a ‘publish or perish’ culture: can postdocs lead the way?

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1 - Changing ways of sharing research in chemistry

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10 - The view of the research funder

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Part 1 - Changing researcher behaviour

5 - Cybertaxonomy

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