Marcus' World

Occupy Wall St at "Ground Zero"

Very soon after the September 11 attacks we took to calling the former World Trade Center site "Ground Zero." Ground Zero for what wasn't clear.  Brave souls like Susan Sontag pressed for a tough examination of why so many people hate America.  But most people, starting with President Bush, presented Ground Zero as the first front in a never-ending "War on Terror."  New York Governor George Pataki initially proposed calling the new building the "Freedom Tower," in a further statement of the moral correctness of the U.S.

Ten years later the jingoistic phrase Freedom Tower has been replaced by the more muted 1 World Trade Center.  1 World Trade is currently rising, and the 9/11 Memorial is now open to the public.  1 World Trade will peak at 1,776 feet, a symbolic height if there ever was one.  And it will be in the shadow of Wall St, where the vibrant occupation of Wall St continues.

We were downtown the other day, and the juxtaposition of the memorial, the new tower, and the protest--all within 1/10 of a mile--was jarring.  The protestors are taking aim at nothing less than the global capitalist system, which was formerly epitomized by the Twin Towers and is still symbolized by Wall St.

I have mixed feelings about the protests.  Their organization is impressive, right down to the weekly newspaper and the growing library. Their democratic ideals are admirable, even if it means that their assemblies--sans PA and mic--are hard to manage.  From the New York Observer: "The general assembly, which now attracts a thick crowd...is becoming comically inefficient. The group has no sound permit for a PA, so each committee's proposal must be amplified by the 'human mic,' in which a speaker says a few words at a time that are repeated by the audience seated immediately nearby, then echoed in concentric rings."  

On the other hand, utopian dreams often become dystopian realities.  Jim Jones promised an equitable world too, and his followers ended up literally drinking the koolaid.  Sad as it is to say, economic self-interest really does grease the skids of human societies.  Selfishness is ineradicable, so we might as well use the invisible hand to our advantage.  The protesters have presented a legitimate critique of capitalism but an unreasonable solution--redistributionism never lasts except under the iron heel of government.

Not that the Republican Presidential candidates, with their various flavors of regressive flat taxes, have the right answer either.  This is the same party that exploited the pain of New York City to justify a trumped up war in Iraq.  It's the same party that bandies about terms like "Freedom Tower" as a means of squashing dissent.  And it's the same party that now wants the rich to become even more fabulously wealthy, by trotting out lies about the supposed trickle down effect of supply side economics.

If the protesters are too radical, the Republicans are pernicious.  Meanwhile 1 World Trade rises defiantly, and we seem to have succeeded in avoiding a real conversation about America's vexing role in the world or of our economic polices.  In some ways the attacks at "Ground Zero" didn't change anything at all.

Moving Beyond Open Access

This week I'm in Philadelphia for the EDUCAUSE conference, and am very much looking forward to Seth Godin's keynote tomorrow morning. It will be a great meeting.

Just before wandering the exhibit hall today I caught up with Scott's post about the economics of open access. Scott's main point is incontestable--that some OA publishers are also doing well financially, so where's the librarian outrage?  Shouldn't we be consistent?  Yes, we should.

That said, I don't hear that much outrage against traditional publishers these days either.  We have entered a more quiet, measured phase in the open access debate. The revolutionary fervor has abated. 

That's a good thing.  Open access is a conservative proposition--you're making PDFs available for free to all, but they are still PDFs that hearken back to the print-only era.  How tame this revolution is. 

So let's get beyond the PDF already. It's time to figure out how to use the Web to create, nurture and preserve new types of research.  Why stress so much about "papers" in the digital age?

Scholarly Communication: Creating and Indexing Web-Native Research

As an Associate Fellow at the National Library of Medicine, I learned about the intellectual infrastucture that goes into indexing PubMed.  Coders (indexers) label the key concepts of every article "indexed for MEDLINE."  This is the backbone of how people search for articles, even if they do keyword searches and do not search for vocabulary terms directly. 

Indexers choose from a controlled vocabulary maintained by the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) section.  That vocabulary has grown considerably to accommodate changes in health care, but any term is added only after careful consideration.  MeSH is both conservative and expandable.  An indexer can suggest terms to add to MeSH, but this is taken under advisement and not a guarantee.

At the time I focused on the competing interests between the indexers and vocabulary maintainers--the indexers desired very expansive terminology, while the MeSH team felt they had to guard the integrity of the vocabulary.  I am sure this tension still exists.  But today what interests me is what this intellectual endeavor symbolizes.  All this bother is because the peer-reviewed scientific literature is deemed to be especially valuable, and thus worthy of discovery tools that are more sophisticated than a Google search.

In Michael Clarke's brilliant post about why scientific communication has not yet been disrupted, he points to four functions of the scholarly communications system: dissemination of a new idea; registration of that idea in the scholarly record; validation of that idea via peer review; and filtration of those ideas into recognizable buckets (journals), so that the research process is manageable. 

Within Clarke's framework, NLM's indexers and MeSH section provide the tools for registraton of new ideas.

Clarke's essential insight is that the Internet only solves the dissemination problem, which is why scientific publishing has yet to change fundamentally.  Just posting something online does not register it in the same way as having a citation in PubMed.  Posting without peer review does not offer validation, and proliferating online posts make the filtration of ideas ever more difficult.

Changing scientific publishing at the root will require something more than the Web alone.  First we need to get beyond the metaphor of the "paper" as the delivery mechanism for a piece of research, as this is tied to pre-Web times.  Events like this year's "Beyond the PDF" conference are a good place to start. And we need ways for scholars to utilize the unique capabilities of the Web to conduct and report research.   Peter Sefton's innovative work on scholarly HTML looks to be a way forward there.

As to peer review, NYU's innovation regarding open peer review is an exciting experiment. It is time for the lid of secrecy to be removed from the often suspect peer review process,  making it more transparent.

In a world of open peer review and scholarly HTML that has gone beyond the PDF, the dissemination function of scholarly communication will evolve and the validation function will remain intact.  That leaves filtration and registration.

Filtration first needs to be decoupled from the constraining idea of the journal, which is no mean feat.  But remember--in this universe we've gone beyond the PDF and are utilizing the native capabilities of the Web. That should mean greater focus on ideas and their merits, and less on the container in which those ideas appear.  Built-in filtration would be a natural byproduct of this evolution.

That leaves registration.  Here is where librarians come in.  We should build an index for born digital, scholarly HTML that is every bit as robust and sophisticated as the one we have built for journal articles.  Google won't cut it in this case, because it yields too much noise. We shouldn't wait for someone else to build this index or rely upon market demand to make it happen. Instead we should take the Steve Jobs approach and build something people didn't even know they wanted.  

Steve Jobs, Some Discordant Notes

This week's death of Steve Jobs hit the Bay Area especially hard, as he was a child of this region who lived here his whole life.  The steady pilgrimage people are making to his home in Palo Alto testifies to the public impact of this very private man.

I am writing this post on a MacBook Pro, and at some point am likely to check to see if people made any comments about it on my iPhone.  Maybe tonight I'll make some final edits on my iPad.  It's clear that Jobs has had a direct impact on my life, which is why his death Wednesday made me very sad.

And yet, Amidst all the hagiography that has followed his death there have been some discordant notes.  On Thursday, listening to KQED Forum, I rediscovered how he would often berate and humiliate people to get them to do what he wished.  And the SF Chronicle's obituary noted how he had conned Steve Wozniak out of money that was rightfully Wozniak's in the early years of Apple.  Nobody is perfect, of course.  But the shortcomings of Jobs were out of scale to those of many others; the same was true of his genius.

Mike Daisey and Andy Crouch have offered two of the more thoughtful assessments of Jobs in recent days. Daisey points out that Jobs and Wozniak originally conceived of Apple as an anarchic and freeing company, but that over time Apple code and policies became very closely guarded secrets.  Daisey: "Today there is no tech company that looks more like Big Brother from Apple's iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself."  Daisey argues that the young Steve Jobs would not recognize or agree with how his older self conducted business.  Sure enough.  But that's true for all of us.

Crouch claims that Jobs was a "secular prophet."  He finds coldness, not wisdom, in Jobs's oft-repeated assertion that death is "life's change agent."  Compared to a leader like Martin Luther King Jr, who utilized his megaphone to seek a better world, Jobs was a salesman offering seductive but empty techno-balms for all our problems.

That's a serious charge, and to my mind an unfair one.  Martin Luther King was a minister, whose oratory was explictly and proudly grounded in Christian theology.  Steve Jobs was a tech company CEO, full stop, who never portrayed himself as a spiritual leader.  If you search the app store for "Bible," you will find dozens of apps.  The platform Jobs built is spiritually neutral, not anti-religion. 

If we put too much faith in technology to solve our problems, we should not blame Jobs. He never asked us to do that; all he did was make and sell beautiful toys.

Jeff Jarvis and Online Privacy

Today's WSJ includes a piece by L. Gordon Crovitz about whether our concern for privacy online is overwrought.  Crovitz quotes liberally from Jeff Jarvis, the provocateur journalism professor whose new book Public Parts is a plea for more sharing in the digital age.  For Jarvis, the more we share the more we all mutually benefit.  And new technologies often bring concerns about privacy; Theodore Roosevelt banned cameras from Washington parks, deeming them a privacy violation. So we should not be overly concerned.

These days frequent posting on social media is often derided as over-sharing. Quoth Jarvis: "They sometimes accuse me of oversharing. Well, I say they're over-listening. If they don't like what I say and don't choose to enter a discussion, they shouldn't follow me -- and they shouldn't try to tell me what not to say." 

Cranky? To be sure. But Jarvis has a point.  One man's ceiling is another man's floor, so any laws that attempt to protect privacy in the digital sphere will over-reach.  Nobody should be compelled to share what they don't want to, but we shouldn't presume that everyone wants to be secret.

During my divorce year of 2009, writing about the experience very publicly on this blog kept me sane.  I don't think I'd be in the same healthy position today if I hadn't blogged then.  These days I'm focused more on traditional essay-writing and going to writing workshops and events. Back then the immediacy of the blog form was compelling.  Like Jarvis I figured that anyone who didn't want to read didn't have to.  But I'm glad many people did.