scholarly workflow and personal digital archiving interviews
TRANSCRIPT
Scholarly Workflow and Personal Archiving
Smiljana AntonijevićPenn State University
PDA 2013University of Maryland
February 21, 2013
Project
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded study.
• April, 2012 – June, 2013.
• Methodology: – web-based survey– ethnographic interviews
Sciences, humanities, social sciences.
Interviews
Publications perceived as longest-lasting contribution.
Thinking about preservation in terms of end products.
“Philosophy is a book discipline, and peer-reviewed articles are still the most canonical about my work.”
“I do online tools, I do iPhones, apps, and I feel, like everyone in engineering design, we’re more of an applied discipline. My most lasting contribution, of course, is always going to be papers.”
the most canonical about my w
“I do online tools, I do iPhones, apps, and I feel, like everyone in engineering design, we’re more of an applied discipline. My most lasting contribution, of course, is always going to be papers.”
“In the narrower sense, kind of the promotion and tenure sense, it’s the books and articles. The measurable stuff, the sort of CV stuff.
But I think that we’re in danger of so bureaucratizing our evaluation processes that younger faculty are driven away from some of the greatest contributions they could make because they’re not immediately measurable in merit reviews.”
“This collection of Digital Dialogues I am creating I see increasingly as a legacy and a resource.
My strategy for the enhanced digital book is to think about how to archive those dialogues; I want people to be able to listen to them right from the book. But it’s not peer-reviewed. So, the way I get credit for them academically is how they enrich my traditional scholarship.”
“Core is the research trail part, how do we preserve the research trail, so that we can see where we went wrong, or see discovery that we didn’t notice we were making at the time, and go back and recover it.
If we obliterated all that, we would have lost something valuable to every discipline—disciplinary knowledge.”
Preservation is a task of publishers, scholars, and professional organizations.
“I don’t want the university to assume the authority to capture all of my every keystroke and own it. That seems to me very wrong.
On the other hand, I don’t have the capacity, particularly nowadays in the digital age, to know what to do with all this material. It’s so much, it’s so dispersed.
I’ll be gone pretty soon, but the university has a right to its memory, it has an obligation to its memory. ”
Sciences: sharing as preservation.
“Religious” about sharing.
Tenure-track faculty tend to be more territorial.
“Unless there is some obvious reason to share the data, I don’t see any benefit in doing so; I don’t want someone to reanalyze it and then publish it.
I want them to know as much as I want to tell them about the dataset, not enough that they could make something better or different.
Even coding, I want to use the code and take it in a new direction and earn credit for it.”
Data management
Big problem across disciplines
Inadequate institutional services
Lack of funding
Privacy and sustainability
Fragmentation and accessibility
Curation and annotation
“Every experimenter tends to do things in their own custom way, and they tend to develop tools that are very special to the purpose of the person who took the data.
I have the data and can make it available to you, but is it organized? Without me there answering your question 24/7, it is useless to you . “
Data management
Need for linked data and linked practices.
Repository should also have annotation functions, sharing, personal profile …
"I want [a tool] to get my full research circle closed, where I can go from searching through annotation and everything else to publication.”
"I use Dropbox for everything. It has saved my life, it has changed my life."
Scholars’ personal archiving practices reflect broader issues in academia.
Lack of training
- variety of strategies; confusion
- lack of systematic approach
- expectations of help
- awareness about dire need.
Lack of workflow awareness
- attention and effort focused on end products
- research traces with little inherent value
- failure of educational systems to raise awareness about the importance of one’s workflow.
Lack of reward
- current academic system shapes scholars’ archiving views and practices through the system of rewards
- currently, this system almost
exclusively rewards end products
- scholars’ do not necessarily preserve what they care about but what they get credit for.