Goethe had a MacBook Pro?     

The Blumenbach Website would have been that UMI dissertation a few years ago. Instead, while the site is still being built it now receives several hundred ‘hits’, or visits, a week. The several hundred pages of text that make up the site are all individually  indexed and accessible through Google, thus making all of the content accessible to users, rather than through title search only. An analysis of the visits indicates that the greatest interest is on the topic of race, followed by the history of science and of anthropology. Since Blumenbach is little known today, one can assume it is through these more general topics that interested visitors would learn more about Blumenbach, the history of race, and about anthropology’s earlier history.

Creating, or writing a scholarly work such as a dissertation that from the beginning is conceived of as a Website radically changes how one approaches such a project. With several hundred visitors a week, rather than a handful over the course of several years, one must structure the work very differently than a written dissertation or work of scholarship. Access to a scholar’s work is incomparably greater on the Internet, and as the move to digital publishing grows this greater access will undoubtedly influence how one structure’s a scholarly work. The subject of the history of race is very interesting to people today, as well as the history of anthropology and science in general. These topics are also very important, and academic specialists should be involved in the general social discourse on them. For a graduate student, as well as the academic scholar, the awareness that one’s work could have a noticeable impact on the general climate of opinion regarding specific topics is exciting and a strong motivator for one’s responsibilities both as an educator and a researcher. In the current state of scholarly publishing, the work of the best minds in higher education is being sent to a publishing oblivion, to highly specialized journals with a circulation of only a few hundred to a few thousand, and are accessible only through expensive licensed indexes to those universities that can afford them. While this is occurring, anyone, from the high school student writing a report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, on through to the sport fisherman writing on an invasive species in his favorite river, can with the click of a button have their ideas made available to millions of people around the world.

By being on the Web, the Blumenbach Website immediately becomes a part of a much larger network of sites relating to the history of anthropology; in effect, through the site a Web author becomes member of a like-minded international community of researchers, in addition to the much larger audience of interested visitors to the site. In creating the Website, the author had all of the resources available on the Web at his disposal, and could freely decide how to use them. The Blumenbach Website includes hundreds of links to other sites, and likewise the site itself will become linked to and integrated into the sites of other researchers, class or course Websites, teaching sites, and the like. The site can be revised dynamically at any time, perhaps because of new ideas suggested by visitors to the site, or perhaps because of further research on the part of the author. There is no place for the concept of an ‘edition’ on the Web, since a site is never ‘locked down’ to a final version as is the case with printed texts. In a word, the added value brought about through being designed and created especially for the Web has a radically transformational effect when compared to being conceived from the outset as a written dissertation.

Because of the nature of scholarly publishing, researchers in the past actually carried out their research and structured their narrative knowing in advance that their work would only be accessible to a very narrow readership. This was justified because

The Way We Were: Printing and the Idea of the Book

If asked about his profession, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would most likely have answered that he was a Wissenschaftler, a scientist, and not a Schriftsteller, a writer of novels and poetry, as he is generally regarded today. His laboratory and scientific instruments at his home in Weimar would have been the envy of any scientist in his day, and over the course of his life he had amassed a sizable collection of naturalia of rocks, plants, and animal specimens. He was an inveterate traveler and collector of natural objects, and he cultivated a wide-ranging network of like-minded Wissenschaftler through correspondence, published articles, books, and meetings that actively probed into nature’s secrets.

Though the German word Wissenschaftler is translated into English as scientist, it possesses a broader meaning than the English word. Literally, the word is a compound of ‘wissen’, or knowledge, and ‘schaft’, a suffix related to the German verb schaffen, which means to create, give shape, or bring forth (‘schaft’ is indeed related, linguistically, to the English word shape). For Germans, a Wissenschaftler is one who creates or brings forth knowledge, and it is no coincidence that the word came into general use in the 17th and 18th centuries, the period of the Scientific Revolution and the Aufklärung, or Enlightenment. Today Germans will tend to distinguish between a Geisteswissenschaftler, roughly translated as a humanist, and a Naturwissenschaftler, more narrowly corresponding to the English scientist in contemporary usage. This distinction would not have been made in Goethe’s time, however.

Because so much of its vocabulary stems from the Greek and Latin, English speakers do not have the advantage, as Germans do, of readily recognizing the entymological meanings behind its words. Because the word science stems from the Latin, we simply accept the word for what it is without being aware of its particular semantic origins in Latin. The root meaning of the word Wissenschaft, the bringing forth of knowledge, is always present for a German, allowing him or her to make use of the word through inference and connotations in a wide variety of ways. The English-speaking world did not make use of the word science as we do today until the 19th century. Before this, the word natural history was generally used to describe what we call science today.

Germans of the18th century were very aware of the role the mind played, through individual effort, in bringing forth new knowledge, and they took this responsibility very seriously. The period between the 1770s and the 1830s witnessed the rise of German Idealism, arguably the greatest period in the history of philosophy.

Rarely do we think of the influence that a ‘medium’ wields in the spread of ideas, . In a far more intimate way than we’re aware of, the physical tools available for us in sharing ideas shape or form both their genesis and transmission. For scientists, philosophers or literary authors of the hand-press period of printing prior to the 19th century, a work was conceived in terms of the idea of the book.

Even asking this question may at first glance appear frivolous, but perhaps the utter incongruity of the question is revealing of a deeper truth. The tools that Goethe had at his disposal for the creation of his artistic and literary work greatly influenced the nature of those works. Indeed, one could say that the ink and feather he used deeply formed and shaped his creative output, including how he formulated his thoughts. We know that Goethe took his writing implements seriously; the “laptop” pictured above was designed especially for him according to his specifications, and he used this portable writing desk with him on his travels. In much the same way the typewriter influenced 20th-century writers like Hemmingway or Heidegger. How did sitting in front of what in hindsight can only be regarded as a rather cumbersome personal type-setting machine influence the production of ideas and the narrative structure of Heidegger’s philosophy, or Hemmingway’s novels? How did it influence their creativity?

What if all academic scholars, regardless of their specialty, carried out their research and published their findings with the awareness that it would possess the multi-media polish of a Hollywood production, and that it would distributed world-wide by a highly efficient media empire? Would the nature of the research, and their writing, change?

Many, if not most, scholars write their articles and books with a particular audience in mind, however unconsciously. For a core academic article, this audience may be only be a handful of colleagues one meets regularly at meetings or communicates with via email or group lists. Because of this, scholars will tend to narrow their articles to a specialized vocabulary and through subtle argumentations, recognizing his or her circle of peers also command this conceptual realm.

When writing and article for a highly specialized academic journal, one recognizes that it will be read by only a relative handful of scholars. In the humanities and social

Web Publishing, or, Why Wikipedia is so successful

When Wikipedia first came online, few information specialists gave it much of a chance of succeeding.

Yet, as encyclopedia publishers struggle, the Internet age has become a golden one for the newer kind of encyclopedia.

An ambitious project to catalog online all known species on earth — with the even-more-ambitious title the Encyclopedia of Life — went live last month. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a project that began online in 1995 and has never been in print and never will be, is chugging along with nearly 1,000 entries that are vetted by an academic board of more that 100 scholars for a total of 10 million words.

And then there is the behemoth Wikipedia, a project that has no board to vet articles and is created by thousands of volunteers, with more than two million articles in English and an additional five million in a babel of other languages.

Wikipedia is regularly among the top 10 most visited sites on the Internet throughout the world — maybe in part because there’s a lot more there than meets the needs of the average term paper. The superabundance of less-than-prized information on the site has led to a phenomenon called “wiki-groaning,” which involves comparing the length of seemingly disparate articles to humorous effect. Lightsaber Combat beats out Modern Warfare, for example, and John Locke, the character from the TV show “Lost,” edges out the other John Locke, whoever he was.

Encyclopedia publishers, while taking swipes at Wikipedia’s unreliability since it can be edited by anyone, have clearly adopted some of its lessons. They are incorporating more photographs and suggestions from readers to improve online content, and they are committed to updating material as facts change.

Students and the Shift From Books to the Web

Writing a Dissertation in the History of Science, Summer 2007

In more ways than one you could say that my status as a doctoral student, and the research I am carrying out, is unconventional.

My computer workstation is nothing like I would have imagined it 20 years ago when I, as a graduate student and the University of Goettingen in Germany, closely followed the research of historian Manfred Thaller on the Historian’s Workstation. Thaller himself

Many years ago I received a tree identification book as a gift, and I decided to go out and identify the trees in the neighborhood. The first was the Joshua Tree because it was so easy to identify. Because it was so rare and exotic, I thought it would be silly to go out looking for it. But lo and behold the next door neighbor had one in his yard! I took a walk and found several others in the neighborhood. The entire neighborhood was filled with them, but I had never ‘seen’ one before! Once I was conscious of the tree, once I could name it, I saw it everywhere. Once you can name something, you’re conscious of it, you have power over it, you control it.

The transmission of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities

Training

Familiarity with the literature and major texts in the field

Bibliographic research

Carrying on the successes of prior research (how to avoid reinventing the wheel)

How is research in the hard sciences different from the social sciences and humanities?

The publishing activity in a number of fields can often take on monumental dimensions. With some historical events, such as a major war or social upheaval, or historical personages, figures such as Joan of Arc or Charles Darwin, the proliferation of published books and articles

+++++++++++

I am sitting here in my office overlooking the Atlantic

I am using a university library’s Website to find the materials I need. Some of these are

I am reading Peter Dear’s Revolutionizing the Sciences

Graduate seminar Historiographical Approaches to Science

In like manner I have mined the course syllabi from history of sciences courses at MIT, Berkeley, and other universities.

In the course syllabusFrom home I can access the JSTOR database, and I

It's fair to say that Henry Petroski loves old objects. Mr. Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, has written about forks and zippers, paper clips and pencils. His latest book is a history of an extremely primitive tool: the toothpick.

Mr. Petroski cautions that technological advancement doesn't necessarily mean improvement. "Everything that's designed or redesigned has its pluses and minuses," he says. "You could make a case for almost any object."

For instance, he has written about how the laser pointer replaced the wooden pointer. A laser pointer has a greater reach than a wooden one, and it's not as heavy. Then again, the laser pointer's tiny dot can be hard to see. Plus, you can't strike it against the chalkboard to rouse that sleepy sophomore in the back row.

Langdon Winner has a word for our obsession with devices like the laser pointer: technomania. Mr. Winner, who is a professor of political science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has written about "privacy-wrecking electronics" and the dark side of technology.

The Question of Audience, or, Defining Access to Information and Knoweledge

The Ongoing Transformation of Scholarly Communication

After excitedly completing my first major research article, I quickly learned In 1995 I learned quickly learned the

With no other possible alternative, few scholars up to that time questioned the accepted norms for publishing research. Once my manuscript had been accepted for peer review, I learned that my article, though containing , was too long for publication. After pointing out that the topic was a substantial one that resisted abbreviating we worked out a special situation in which the article would be published in two parts. In addition, my manuscript contained too many illustrations, and a number would not lend themselves for being printed.

Oh, how times have changed! I am now sitting here in front of a 23” Cinema Display and my MacBook Pro computer, filled with a seemingly infinite range of possibilities for disseminating my research.

Scholarly Communication and Beyond the Book

Consider the conceptual foundations of

book as a fetish object

books are far from perfect

change is being driven by a real need for change because books have problems

rapid growth of macs on college campuses

far fewer faculty are using macs--why is this

the real reason is that most professors think linearly, they still think in terms of traditional paradigms of written narrative

hard aciences is a bit different