CS Architecture of Web Information Systems Spring 04 April 16 th 2004 Shay David sd256 at cornell.edu Social Networks in Scholarly publishing

Scholarly activity as agora: communities for idea generation What role do documents play in formation of these communities? How do these communities change when documents change? The communities of scholarly publishing

“Revolutions” in scholarly communication 1665 first scholarly journal –From face-to-face communication to more open accessible system –Anselm Strauss: social worlds built on texts –Distortion by commercialization of publication 1994(?) Web –Reassertion of democratization –Emergence of multiple alternatives to journals: e-Print archives, institutional repositories, technical and organizational federations

Claim the nature of the document, the technical artifact of scholarly activity, and the nature of the social networks in which this activity takes place have a reflexive relationship.

The Problem Space

Social Networks Comprise a set of people, organizations, and other social entities connected by socially meaningful relationships Study of communities in physical environments-can well-known concepts be transferred to virtual

SameTime A/V Meeting Network, Fall 2002 Red – Cornell University Blue – Syracuse University

Using Social Network Analysis to inform decisions about group membership Identified teams with –Less initial apprehension toward new technology –High expectations for DL –High evaluations of intra-group communication Important dimensions for New task groups Applications

Traditional Scholarly Publishing Network

Researcher Social Network

Hybrid Network

Transformation of Scholarly Networks

Understanding Evolution of Different Networks Three hypotheses –Reputation, authority, and trust can emerge through different network measurements; –Different classes of documents will enable different dimension of reputation, authority and trust; –The hybrid network of documents and scholars will enable more dynamic interactions between scholars and documents and thus lead to faster evolution of the network.

Four steps of investigation –Identification of an arXiv sub-community –Understanding of the evolution of formal document network and social network –Understanding of the evolution of semi-formal network –Developing and investigating mechanisms for materializing informal communication How can we understand the evolution of different networks?

Expanding the breadth of documents Enrich the document milieu –annotations, reviews, recommendations, similarity-maps, data visualizations Intermix formal publication artifacts with artifacts of personal communication

Reputation of documents and actors How can reputation be managed when documents include not only published work but also less formal documents? Claim: Reputation is important as both a means to select material during discovery (a potential solution to the problem of information overload) and as a means to build social capital

Recommendations and Visualization Sociograms - diagrams that visualize the connection among the different parts of the network Make available to users in real time to visualize their own social environment according to different ‘matching’ criteria Facilitate answers to: –Who is talking to whom? –What are the articles relevant to a specific subject? –Who are the experts?

Expanding the depth of documents Examples –Concurrent presentation of multimedia –Incorporation of real-time data –Integration of database queries (e.g. GIS data) Towards virtual documents

Challenges with virtual documents Aggregation –composed from several sources of data of mixed genre; text, images, video, audio, database access, and other types. Distribution – document parts may reference external data sources. Execution –integration and execution of local or distributed parameterized services (programs) that process the local or distributed data producing on-demand disseminations.

A little story Adrian Johns / The Nature of the Book, p. 633