Slide 1: DQE Symposium Series

Slide 2: What's The Big Deal?

In a nutshell, we're looking at what's good and what's bad about

• acting as your own publisher

• existing "outside the system"

• skipping the review/referee process

• providing open access to your work

But first... "How did we get here?"

It's easy to blame the World Wide Web and there's more than a little truth to it, but the roots go back a lot farther. In fact, it even predates the Internet (neé ARPANET)...

Slide 3: 1945, Vannevar Bush

In 1945, Vannevar Bush published "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly. Well ahead of its time, it wasn't until the 1960's that some of its concepts could be applied in earnest, and even that took another 25 years (1989) until it really took hold. But we're getting ahead of ourselves...

After years of advocating that modern science move away from the "making of strange destructive gadgets," Bush found himself exploring in what pursuits humanity should be involved instead. In that paper, he presented his basic premise:

• that we had accrued a vast amount of knowledge in the world,
• that it was ever growing exponentially larger through specialization across disciplines,
• and that progress was actually bogging down and losing research as we are buried with the effort of managing it.

Bush's concerns of managing it can be summarized as

• communicating ("transmitting") information among scientists
• reviewing research and results from colleagues
• extending and building on that research
• writing new scholarly works

Slide 4: 1945, Vannevar Bush

The proposal to deal with this was, in essence, a huge cross referencing index that would cut across the information in a particular application or discipline. (He wasn't limiting this to scientific pursuits; his examples included stocking a department store.) Information (text, pictures, video) would be compressed and made available, tagged in this main central index. Indexes themselves would be managed in a sort of microfiche, though he was open to the possibility of magnetic records on steel cards.

So far, so good, not so crazy.

How would one use it, though? A giant desk-sized viewer, the "Memex." A huge contraption, it would be filled to the brim with microfiche and index cards. Any word appearing on a slide of microfiche could be read by the machine, and looked up in the index. The operator¹ could then select the next pages of microfiche to view, and continue forward from there.

The paper also considers at length the possibility of using video (television) for these tasks, dry photography, voice recognition, even psychology (specifically how we remember things). But all that pales beside the thing he inadvertently invented, that no one would think about until the 1960s.

¹ We didn't have "users" back then.

Slide 5: 1999, Al Gore and 10⁶ Eleven Year Olds

No, wait. Wrong slide. That comes later.

Unfortunately.

Slide 6: 1968, Doug Engelbart

Doug Engelbart, when he wasn't inventing the mouse, chorded keyboards, portrait monitors, and remote collaboration over a network, thought a lot about this ability to link documents together based on the words they contained.

It became central to his work in augmenting human intellect at Stanford Research Center. No one really got what he was doing until 1968, when the "Mother Of All Demos" took place. To this day, there are still people that believe it was a "rigged" demo; not only did it demonstrate fascinating new ways of interacting with a computer, not only did it demonstrate the then-unheard concept of "groupware", not only did it utterly confuse everyone that saw it, it also gave us names for a lot of these ideas...

Especially this one really bizarre idea that, really, no one got at first.

Text. Leading to other text. Linking to other text.

² Or "hypermedia", depending on which person you ask.

Slide 7: 1970, Ted Nelson

You can't talk about hypertext in the late 1960's and 1970's without bringing up Ted Nelson's Xanadu system. He's alternately labeled "visionary", "nutjob", "ahead of his time", and "the guy that got the whole thing backwards (and almost killed Autodesk, Inc.)"

Xanadu was designed around the idea that text could link to other text. But instead of the links going in one direction ("outbound" to another page of information), Xanadu supported "transclusion", or "back and forth" text inclusion. The page you were viewing could include arbitrary material from other pages, and vice-versa. Instead of you going to the material, the material could be brought to you. Very powerful, and very difficult.

Regardless of what he got wrong, Xanadu did give us some very important ideas. The most important of these was the idea of worldwide libraries, self publishing of your own material,³ access to all information and their indexes, and reviews of that information. For everyone, by everyone, egalitarian, distributed, non-authoritative.

Is this sounding familiar yet?

³ Betcha thought I forgot what this was all about.

Slide 8: 1989, Tim Berners-Lee

You all know this part, I bet.

While working at CERN, Berners-Lee invented what we call the World Wide Web pretty much "all at once."

HTML

An application of SGML for marking up text.

HTTP

A protocol for moving hierarchical content from a server to a client.

Browser

A tool that could obtain HTML and other content from a remote computer via HTTP and format the content for display.

Web Server

A resource that sits on the network and responds to HTTP requests from remote computers.

Slide 9: 1989, Tim Berners-Lee

HTML ← Hypertext Markup Language

Originally, the tool we call a web browser was called "WorldWideWeb." Soon after the first release, that became the name for the global namespace of content, and the tool became the browser "Nexus" (written on a NeXT system). The server never really had a formal name, but CERN's first web server defined the name everyone else would use: httpd

While we had world wide indexes of text and information on the Internet long before this (WAIS, Gopher, Archie, Veronica, etc.) the combination of a simple protocol and a markup language (for "fancy" text) just plain took off. It's worth noting, however, that a large part of this had nothing to do with the protocols or the services: Nexus and NCSA Mosaic were also the first widespread GUI to common Internet services. Before them, it was all terminals and text...

CERN originally funded the work as a system to make it easier for their physicists to access and exchange the papers and research materials among each other, especially over a distance (using the network).

Where have we heard that before...?

Slide 10: One Small Problem

CERN originally funded the work as a system to make it easier for their physicists to access and exchange the papers and research materials among each other, especially over a distance (using the network).

Okay, what's missing there from everyone else's ideas?

Review. Feedback. Commentary.

Unlike Engelbart's NLS/Augment system or Nelson's Xanadu system, the World Wide Web is generally a one way transfer of information. It's trivial to publish your information, but until recently, it was hard to review someone else's materials. Sure, you can link your comments to their media, but unless they link to your comments, how would anyone find it?

Search engines and dynamic web sites have taken some of the edge off this problem. For example, we google or yahoo people when they apply for jobs, positions, research. But is this really feedback? Is this a review? Can the review be addressed by the victim subject? And who wrote the commentary? Is there any accountability?

Slide 11: Roots

These aren't necessarily at odds with each other.

Slide 12: So What's The Problem?

Unrefereed, unreviewed, personal, etc. publishing has been around for a long time. (Seriously, this is nothing new; before computers were popular, the big hobby at the turn of the century was do-it-yourself typesetting and printing.) But, until recently, it's been generally "small scale" and hard to really get a wide distribution. With the adoption of the World Wide Web, though, anyone can get their message out, and it's not hard to influence to a search engine to bring people to your page.

Slide 13: One Example, Chandrasekhar

In 1930, Chandrasekhar submitted a paper on the theory on the mass limits of white dwarf stars, which was rejected by the Royal Astronomy Society. It's generally agreed that the paper was rejected because its content was too objectionable at the time.

In 1983, Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on black holes, which goes all the way back to that 1930 paper.

Had the World Wide Web existed back then, as commonly used as it is today, would that have helped him by getting his research distributed more timely and widely?

Or would it have hurt him by labeling him a crackpot and thus making it harder to get his work accepted? (Remember, Eddington publicly ridiculed him at a 1935 presentation at the RAS, so we know there was more than a little resistance to his theory.)

Or, no change? Despite the unfortunate 1930's, he was highly respected at his positions at the University of Chicago, and served as the editor of the Astrophysical Journal for almost two decades.

Slide 14: Other Examples

Turning it around, these examples come at it from the other direction.

Wikipædia

Does the John Seigenthaler, Sr. biography controversy destroy Wikipædia's credibility?

Sokal Hoax

What does the "parody" paper submitted to the Social Text journal say about the potential for malicious publications even in reviewed journals?

Does that make these "respected journals" invalid?

-- RolandoRaqueno - 13 Jan 2006