Marginal notes

The first in a new weekly feature here, highlighting several key news stories and various ruminations scattered around the web relating to early modern studies, open access, American politics, digital humanities, and other topics of interest to potential readers of this blog (those, I'm assuming, who share at least some of my interests).

The aim of these link-heavy posts is to summarise my web-based reading for the week, and also serves the useful function of forcing me to update the blog less sporadically than usual. I will, of course, write specifically about my own research interests in addition to what is gathered in these regular updates. So here goes...


Milton in the library
In relation to the image at the top of this blog entry (it's a quote from Areopagitica found in the Reading Room of the New York Public Library, sourced via the Milton-L mailing list), here's another one a little too large to post directly here - this one's to be found in the library at McGill University, and the quote is taken from The Reason of Church Government.

Rebuilding higher education in Iraq
News from my own university's website, with a Milton tie-in (the order of these snippets is deliberate). A high-profile group of scholars and politicans recently met with the Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al Maliki, to discuss scholarships worth $1 billion earmarked to help Iraqi students travel overseas to pursue higher education in English-speaking countries. The group includes prominent Miltonist Professor Gorden Campbell of the University of Leicester, who is also the founding chair of the British Universities Iraq Consortium (he's the one with the impressive facial hair on the far left).

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access
Here's website which draws together an alliance of organizations supporting "open public access to taxpayer-funded research". Though it focuses primarily on research within the sciences and medicine, The Alliance for Taxpayer Access website highlights several key Acts which any active supporter of Open Access should do their utmost to oppose, including one I mentioned last week...

Protect the NIH Public Access Mandate From the Conyers Copyright Caricature
Stevan Harnad pipes in about the bill I mentioned last week which seeks to undo the NIH Public Access Act, effectively screening publicly-funded research from those who have invested tax dollars into these projects. I would echo Harnad's call here: head on over to the "Require open access for publicly-funded research" petition and let Obama know that the scholarly community supports public access to taxpayer-funded research.

Judge a president in three weeks? Breathe....
Speaking of Obama, here's a well-written piece arguing that it is folly to judge the new Commander-in-Chief based on the ups and downs of his first weeks in office - his Presidency will be based on "solid stuff and also the less tangible", ranging from the success of his recently-approved Stimulus Plan (albeit in a compromised form which tragically cuts back on funds designed to aid higher education) to the nature of his character in a crisis.

Reinventing the Academic Journal: First, Take Down Your Website
A recent entry in Jo Guldi's blog inscape highlights the need for publishers of academic journals to take take steps to adapt to the changing environment of knowledge dissemination in the digital age, a notion related to themes examined extensively in my own ongoing research. In discussing the ways in which journals might integrate more organically with some Web 2.0 applications already discussed in this blog, she comments: "...a scholar using zotero, jstor, google scholar, and delicious can instantaneously find other scholars' opinions of a particular article, the names of the disciplines and sub-disciplines they think it applies to best, and other articles of similar note to that particular scholar." The possibilities of this Web 2.0 interoperability have intrigued me a great deal in recent days, and is a notion I will blog about once I'm able to articulate my thoughts on this matter.

Academic Publications 2.0
Luis Von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon University writes on a similar topic to the one discussed above, asking if "a combination of a wiki, karma, and a voting method like reddit or digg [can] substitute the current system of academic publication?"

The Rise of Twitter, Academic Unconferences, and announcing THATCamp 2009
Dave Lester, in his Finding America blog, narrates an account of a fascinating to-and-fro which took place among various digital humanists on Twitter this week, the micro-blogging social network site (and yes, I'm on there myself, followed by all of two people). For those who aren't keen to scroll through his wall of text, here's the point I find so fascinating:

As it turned out, all my internet friends were busy working on a new project, called A Better CFP. The sequence of events leading up to this moment was simple. Matt Gold (@mkgold) of the CUNY Graduate Center tweeted the question: “How is it that the Penn CFP list still isn’t working? Does any other centralized CFP site exist?” Hours later, Dave Parry (@academicdave) of UT Dallas replied: “@mkgold re:CFP. Not that I know of, but we could just build one. Want to?” And shortly after, a wiki was setup to collaborate on this new project. To date, eighteen different people around the country (and world, for that matter) have contributed to the wiki by sharing ideas about the site, its design, and possible software implementations while considering a feature-set for both its initial launch, and our pie-in-the-sky ambitions.

In the not-to-distance future I will write at some length about the possibilities of utilising Web 2.0 applications to enhance accessibility into research projects. I'm still in the early stages of figuring out what these possibilities mean to me, but stay tuned and hopefully you'll see some outcomes soon enough.

And finally, The Onion reports...

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On first steps and second thoughts

Following a Herculean struggle, I seem to have finally thrashed out a 150-word summary of my thesis as it stands at this point. I was asked to do this for the Postgraduate Research section of Dr Philip Schwyzer's A Cuppe of Newes blog, where you can survey a "sampling of current PhD projects in the field of early modern studies in the Department of English, University of Exeter". My struggle arose from the realisation that whatever I write down will ultimately feed into the funding application I'm currently working on - that is, it pinpoints my thesis more narrowly than ever before whilst simultaneously declaring it to a wider research community. I don't feel as though I can go back on my word on this one...

Ghosts in the Machine: Early Modern Print Culture in the Digital Age
Concurrent with recent scholarship building on the work of Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan - early pioneers in the study of the cultural effects of technological change - and with a particular focus on the private library collection, curiosity cabinet (and its later incarnation, the Kunstkammer), and the application of Ramist techniques, my study aims to reassess the efforts of Renaissance poets, scholars and collectors as they sought to transpose the mnemonic devices of pre-Gutenberg oral society to the new (information) technology of typographic print. In a wider literary context, my research draws upon works such as Thomas Heywood’s Gunaikeion and Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion as examples of the early modern database and hypertext, demonstrating that not only were current trends in the digital world anticipated in the literary heritage of early modern England, but that much can be garnered too from seventeenth century storage-and-retrieval systems as we embark upon the second information revolution.

The more I read it the less certain I am. I'm definitely still in the early stages of research but, given imminent funding application deadlines, there's an overwhelming necessity right now to articulate my thesis as clearly and as convincingly as possible. This is the first step, I guess, but is it clear? Is it convincing?

On another matter, one of the authors of a report commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) examining the implications of open access publishing recently concluded that "public money is being put into research, but then the people are being stopped from accessing it" (source: Times Higher Education). Well, the penny finally drops - if only the publishing industry saw the light too, as they most certainly did not this week following the re-introduction of a bill in the US House of Representatives "aimed at limiting the open-access publishing policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health" (source: GenomeWeb Daily News). One step forward, two steps back; at least Stevan Harnad is still counting his chickens

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More on OA, and the RAE results

This post is an extended non-response to Tim's comments to my previous post (December 2nd), which you may wish to look at before you go any further. It primarily focuses on a single benefit of OA - its impact on citations. The matter of financial gains and losses to institutions is beyond my capacity to address in great detail, but I will address it in my closing remarks.



First of all, a little background about how the quality of research is measured in UK universities. On Thursday (December 18th) the results of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) were announced (you can read plenty about it in the latest edition of the Time Higher Education. As a sidenote - the English department at Exeter, my university, is now established pretty firmly as one of the best, if not the best English department in the country for research).

You may know a little about the RAE but I'll just summarise it anyway. It's a peer-review system whose primary purpose is "to produce quality profiles for each submission of research activity made by institutions" (RAE homepage). These profiles, as THE notes, "show the percentage of research activity in each department judged to fall within each of four quality grades "in terms of originality, significance and rigour":

- 4* world-leading

- 3* internationally excellent ... "but which nonetheless falls short of the highest standards of excellence"

- 2* recognised internationally

- 1* recognised nationally

The English department at Exeter has 45% of its researchers working at the 4* level, the highest percentage in any such department in the country (excluding those who submitted only their best researchers to the exercise; Exeter as a whole submitted 95% of its academic staff); 90% of its research staff are working at an international level of excellence.

The RAE was last conducted in 2001, but back then the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) included "research intensity" as a metric in the results (the proportion of eligible researchers submitted by each institution, as opposed to simply the volume). Not so this time, meaning that the so-called HE research "league tables" (here's the Excel spreadsheet showing THE's league tables) favour those institutions which submitted only the researchers they believed would fall into the 3* and 4* categories exclusively, or, of course, the institutions specialising in a key area of research (which explains why The Institute of Cancer Research has been graded above Cambridge and Oxford). Ian Postlethwaite, the pro-vice-chancellor for research at the University of Leicester, has written more on this in The Guardian recently. Exeter comes 28th or so in most league tables based on this year's data, but had the research intensity been included as a factor (as it had in every other RAE), then we would have ranked about 13th.

I suppose that was a lot of unneccesary information but it's an interesting set of affairs nonetheless, and something I was keen to comment on. The point is that this time-consuming, cost-ineffective panel review system is being replaced from next year by what is known as the REF (Research Excellence Framework). According to Hefce's news release...

The REF will consist of a single unified framework for the funding and assessment of research across all subjects. It will make greater use of quantitative indicators in the assessment of research quality than the present system, while taking account of key differences between the different disciplines. Assessment will combine quantitative indicators - including bibliometric indicators wherever these are appropriate - and light-touch expert review. Which of these elements are employed, and the balance between them, will vary as appropriate to each subject.

Bibliometrics is, among other things, a measurement of citations - how often is your work being cited in other works? With the increased visibility offered to research papers through Open Access mandates, the benefits to bibliometric data cannot be overstressed. It is true that the effects of OA on citations has been questioned, but when one takes into account the role Institutional Repositories play in the tracking of "hits" to research material deposited in IR's such as the Exeter Research and Institutional Content (that's right, ERIC), it speaks volumes about the quality of data one can produce. Bibliometric indicators become entirely appropriate when these indicators can be tracked and when IR's across institutions and, indeed, disciplines can be quantified and compared - an effort made possible only where these systems are in place and a green OA mandate (note: PDF file) has been introduced.

This is just an initial discussion of the impact OA could have in increasing the value of the REF, an ongoing discussions still very much in its early stages. It also illustrates in a neat circular way why all this research should be freely available: funding councils dish out the cash for research conducted across the country (and elsewhere), who in turn receive their money from the government, who in turn get it from the taxpayer. This money is distributed based on the quality of research conducted at each institution, which will be measured from henceforth through the REF. The success of a key feature of that system - bibliometrics - relies, in my view, heavily upon the increased visibility of research papers and the ability to track how often they are viewed. Not only does OA offer significant advantages to research visibility (and this applies to established scholars and PhD students alike, whose dissertations can now be viewed online by anyone across the world as opposed to being lost in a dark corner of the university library), but it makes the results of tax-payer-funded research available to those who, however indirectly, paid for that research to be conducted in the first place.

Returning to Tim's primary argument, the financial impact of Open Access is a tricky one. Stevan Hanard, a promiment OA supporter based at the University of Southampton, states that:

The Green option allows the number of OA articles (not journals) to grow anarchically, article by article, rather than systematically, journal by journal. This allows TA journals to adjust gradually to any changes that might arise as the number of self-archived OA articles grows.

He goes on to argue that Green OA "allows both journals and institutions the time to prepare for a possible eventual transition (though not a necessary or certain one, as TA and OA might go on peacefully co-existing indefinitely) to Gold". In short, even if authors were to deposit their works to make them freely available, this doesn't necessarily constitute the end of academic subscription-based publishing. And, Hanard notes, even if it does:

...then TA journals can gradually adapt to it, first by cutting costs (by cutting out the features that are no longer essential) and then, perhaps (if it should ever become necessary) by converting to the OA journal cost-recovery model (with the institutions' annual windfall institutional TA subscription savings now available to cover their annual OA publication costs).

The availability of online material for newspapers does not signal the death of the newspaper industry, and I believe the same argument can applied to academic publishing. Where money can be made it will be, but financial gain should not negatively impact upon scholarship.

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As a footnote, I'd like to wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy new year! I have been developing some exciting ideas for my PhD thesis lately, and I'm hoping to share them in future posts - as much as I love talking about them, I don't want this blog to be dominated by OA and research software. See you in 2009!

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Open Access

Speaking about the benefits of publishing his work in the open access journal BioMed Central, Professor Chris McManus (University College London) has this to say about OA:

Open Access is just one of those things that should be a given as far as scientific research is concerned. Science works on an open interchange of ideas, and if things aren't available then ideas aren't being interchanged... why should you do something really interesting and hide it away so nobody can see it?

This argument can certainly be applied to the humanities as well. Without complete access to the results of the best quality research within early modern studies, how can I claim that my PhD is the best it could possibly be? And how does this restriction imposed upon me as an emerging scholar aid the discipline as a whole? What is the benefit of this closed system?

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Stanley Fish, Open Access, and some thoughts on higher education

I'd like to point you in the direction of a fascinating interview with Staney Fish conducted earlier this week on election day in the US, one of many similar conversations conducted with various academics which can be listened to on the Radio Open Source website. Radio Open Source is a podcast and blog (more information can be found on its Wikipedia entry), and is hosted by the American media personality and author Christopher Lydon (who has a Wikipedia page of his own). It's been going for a while now, but I've only just stumbled upon it and I highly recommended you to take a look at what's on offer in the site's archives.

Along related lines to that of 'Open Source' (which, according to Wikipedia, can be defined as "computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license"), I've been reading a little about Open Access (OA) in recent days. OA takes the same approach to digital scientific and scholarly material as Open Source does to software in general - it opens it up for readers to view (although, of course, not to modify as one might in the case of open source software). At the danger of over-citing Wikipedia, I refer you to an entry there on OA, but I would also highly recommend this video presentation by Stevan Hanard, a scholar at Southampton University, on the how's and why's of OA (only the brief introduction is in French - the rest is in English so stick with it).

Here at the University of Exeter, it will become compulsory for PhD students to upload their completed thesis/dissertation into the institutional repository from the academic year 2008/09 onwards. This, in my opinion, is a positive move given the limited visibility currently afforded to PhD dissertations. Furthermore, by encouraging open access to scholarly works written by its own distinguished researchers, Exeter, like an increasing number of other higher education institutions in the UK and abroad who are catching on to the benefits of OA, permits its student body access to the volume of work produced by the academics to whom they are most closely associated with. As the list of universities who subscribe to the idea of open access grows, this provides students and researchers with the opportunity to draw ideas from a larger portion of the 25,000+ scholarly journals currently in circulation around the world - this can only be a good thing. Exeter has organised its collection of free scholarly papers into what it has named the Exeter Research and Institutional Content Archive (ERIC), but at present I find the number of works available extremely limited (just 4 from the English department!), and the dissertations uploaded by PhD students of previous years are not relevant to my own work. I'm confident the repository will see a larger number of works trickle through in the coming years, but for now I'd say it's still early days for open access at Exeter.

In closing, I feel compelled to comment briefly on what happened in the US on Tuesday night. I'm wary of writing too much about politics - this blog is after all a chronicle of my time as a PhD student and not a space for partisan grandstanding, but as a student hoping to break into academia in the next few years it is necessary to talk about the effect President Obama will have on higher education as I finish my PhD and look for work. Where I work is still a great unknown to me, but it has been my dream since my teenage years to work in the US, and since Tuesday that dream has somewhat intensified.

I am inclined to agree with Stanley Fish's view that Obama's presidency will have little short-term impact on higher education in America (even if its predominantly liberal population of scholars will be a lot happier having an intelligent leader in charge of their country). This realisation doesn't discourage me from hoping to teach at an American college, however - I am drawn more by the sense of hope and change which seems to be permeating the American consciousness right now more than an anticipation of college-friendly policy changes. I believe it would be a wonderful thing to work and study in a nation where, after eight years living under the burden of an administration that governed so often with the politics of fear and ignorance, a change is coming in the shape of a man who speaks so eloquently of hope and understanding.

There is also the sense that higher education in the UK, particularly when it comes to the arts and humanities, is floundering - and it can only get worse under what looks increasingly to be a Tory government after the 2010 general election. I have had conversations both with my academic supervisor and my line manager at work this week who have complained of the time-consuming need to deal with increasing amounts of paperwork, and of the need to meet targets which reflect less the quality of research and teaching at the institution than they do its success at securing vast sums of money, and its obsession with ticking off boxes as its climbs up the university league tables. How does it benefit a world-leading scholar to wake up at 5am every morning to work on an application for a research grant sought by at least ten other academics in that scholar's school? Surely the university should acknowledge the merit of their researchers not by forcing them to beg for the opportunity to develop it, but by granting them a semester's leave to write up a paper in their own time. When you combine this approach to research in many so-called "top twenty" universities in the UK with the ever-dwindling financial support for arts and humanities postgraduate students here, is it any surprise than I'm repulsed by the prospect of starting by academic career in such a narrow-minded climate? The whole issue of postgraduate funding in the UK was in fact summarised in a BBC News online article recently, which I encourage you to look at.

This has turned somewhat into a rant and for that I apologise, but what Tuesday's election result made me realise more than anything else is that American truly is the land of opportunity. Under eight years of Bush many of us doubted that cliche, but it's true and I believe it provides more opportunities for an English scholar such as myself than my home country does. My PhD supervisor came to this country 15 years ago because, among other things, she believed that British scholars were the best in the world, that the British Library was and remains "the centre of the universe", and that its universities value research as much as they do teaching. I have no doubt that our scholars are outstanding, and whilst I agree that the British Library is an indispensible resource its importance to scholars isn't as crucial as it was 15 years ago since EEBO was introduced, but on the third point I detect a worrying shift: it seems to me that my supervisor simply doesn't have the time to conduct research in the way she did when she first came to this country anymore. Would it be any different for her in America? Maybe not, but after January 20th 2009 there is a greater chance it will be, whereas I think the opposite could be said about this country.

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