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Change & Permanence

Change & Permanence a Walk around Science 2.0 by Lucas Frederik Garske Lucas Frederik Garske is a research associate and member of the digital humanities and educationial media research cluster at the Georg-Eckert-Institute f or International Textbook Research. He blogs on paintitscience.com. Disclaimer: T his blog wasnt designed f or long texts. If you f ind it hard to read the article on this template there is a small print f riendly button at the bottom of the article that should make it easier f or you to read (unf ortunately the print f riendly version doesnt support f ootnotes). Credits to Tom f or cleaning the mess up.

So urc e : Paul Harris (1996) HYPER-LEX: A Te c hno g rap hic al Dic tio nary.

0. From Web 2.0 to Science 2.0

Talking about Science 2.0 is much more than adopting a f ancy and successf ul concept: What we are f aced with is a change of communication in which the web plays an important and decisive role. T he internet has always been more telephone than radio, more exchange than inf ormation. T he change on the web we commonly ref er to as Web 2.0 is specif ically concerned with interaction and collaboration. As science is embedded in communication processes, it is part of this change. Obviously it wouldnt make much sense to talk about collaborative or interactive science, as science has always been based on tools and infrastructure that imply interaction and communication (paragraph I). While it seems easy to address ongoing changes, its worth ref lecting not only on flow but also permanence of current developments (paragraph II). I will argue that instead of claiming paradigm change based on technology we should rather demystify our terminology and f ocus on the continuity we are f acing in 2.0 culture (paragraph III). I propose to describe the most relevant change in science as a shift from invention towards perpetual Science as elaborated in paragraph IV. I. Changing conditions: tools & infrastructure Science is an activity that takes place. T he underlying metaphor of spatiality was highlighted by Karl Schlgel f or the case of history. 1 However, lets start to reconsider science in a broader sense by ref lecting on the conditions under which science is done. For some f orms of science you dont need much more than a piece of paper, a pen and some time. For other science you need a particle accelerator or a giant server f arm. Dif f erent tools imply and allow f or dif f erent types of science. In order to trace back conditionality in science it seems usef ul to start with the development of tools rather than with abstract thoughts on scientif ic paradigms or attitudes. Lets think of tools as resources that help us do whatever we do when we say we do science . 2 A tool does not have to be a material thing, it can equally be an inspiring discusssion, a usef ul theory or a set of good conditions at your work place. On the other hand, material things play an important role as well: think of certain IT equipment, a specialist library right on ones doorstep or simply the money to f inance your research. T he use of tools was and still is strongly related to spatiality, however, not in the sense of distance but rather in the sense of inf rastructure and communication. 3 Inf rastructure can be considered as a workshop that provides us with the neccesary tools to take our research to a dif f erent level. 4 Yet, since not everyone has access to every workshop, we must shed some light on the accessability of tools and inf rastructure. Most obviously, access to tools is restricted legally and economically, but it is also inf luenced by certain research standards and traditions. 5 A tradition of stable ref erences, has excluded and is still excluding a great part of dynamic scientif ic activity generated on the web. Inf ormation and sources seem much harder to control and archive and they appear less credible in terms of content and authorship (especially Wikipedia, the nightmare of many teachers and scholars). For a long time, blog entries and online discussions were neglected in serious scientif ic discourse. T his is mirrored by the f act that only recently the quotation of electronic sources, especially blogs and podcasts, was addressed by well-respected style guides like the MLA Style Manual (2008) or the Chicago Manual of Style (2010). T he work of major platf orms like scienceblogs, hypotheses or SciLogs contributed to the reputation of web science. On the other hand, certain web phenomena and practices have helped highlight the f ragility and instability of traditional research, with users harnessing sof tware and collaborative platf orms to detect plagiarism. We can also observe how new projects are working creatively on the lack of control and assessment of inf ormation in digital media. Hypothes.is to me is one of the most interesting and ambitious projects in this context.

However, most restrictions imposed by tradition are much less sophisticated and simply based on a lack of practice. T he fact that tools are technically ABLE T O make things easier, more efficient or more sustainable does not mean that they will effectively do so. Rather than adopting and learning how to use new tools, users need to discover and appreciate them f irst. Without an intrinsic need f or change, the discovery of new potential stays with online pioneers (nerds?) willing to take risk that is, to invest time . T his includes time to get comf ortable with live collaboraton in documents (Google Docs, Z oho), new correspondence technology (instant messaging, Videoconf erencing, Wave/Rizzoma) or new techniques of data treatment (Data Mining, Visualization, Coding). II. Has anything changed? But how prof ound is the change f rom Science 1.0 to Science 2.0? I will use the example of hypertext to argue that in most cases the term Web 2.0 bottles old wine in new wineskins. While this might sound provocatively negative it can also be interpreted positively as a discovery of old treasures. Innovation is of ten f lawed or challenged by the theory that there are no prof oundly new ideas, but merely translations, remixes, revamps. I remember one of my project members commenting that one shouldnt be too optimistic about the acceptance of Web 2.0 f eatures in science. He argued that in the late 90s there was a big f uss about hypertext and everyone predicted that in the f uture there will only be hypertext, which in his opinion turned out to be a rash statement. One can argue that the prediction was in f act wrong, however, f or a dif f erent reason: Even though strongly connected to inf rastructures like Wikipedia, hypertext can be traced back to the f irst uses of ref erence systems like indices, quotations or f ootnotes centuries ago. So in f act, long bef ore hyperlinks and Wikipedia became part of our vocabulary, science was strongly based on hypertextual structures. 6 In particular, the f act that researchers usually ref er to other researchers in the middle of their work contradicts the assertion that scientif ic texts are usualy organized in a strictly linear and categorical way. Of course, ref erences and f eedback on the web work much f aster and discussions have a structure that allow f or f lexible responses. What changed are certain habits we integrated into the way we are communicating. Iconic and deictic use of language on the web have become more popular and common. Obviously, we are dealing with a new technology. However, rather than enabeling us to do things dif f erently, new technology makes us look at old practices f rom a new perspective. As Manuel Lima pointed out on his speech at the Royal Society of Arts (with amazing visual support f rom Andrew Park), we are currently undergoing a shif t f rom categorical thinking towards thinking in networks. Beyond statements and causes we are becoming more inteterested in connections and relations. Network-based scientif ic communities and scientif ic blogging may be seen as a practical implementation of how we do science dif f erently but they are merely a translation of practices we had bef ore (e.g. publishing an article in a journal & discussing the issue on a conf erence). In the end, the medium is the message and new media do not substitute older ones: A letter is not an email and an email is not a text message you f eel it as you write it. But you speed up communication a lot when the channel is less important and you can f ocus on content. T he f act that new technologies most likely wont create anything essentially new doesnt mean they arent worth playing around with. Quite the contrary, by experimenting with new media we continuously update scientif ic language. T his may raise questions that can only be answered with those new tools. T hat alone, of course, does not imply that the results are generally better or more precise, but they might be potentially more suitable to present problems. III. T he Scientist as Songwriter vs. the Scientist as DJ

Lets come back to the idea that scientists use and produce instruments to do their work and that those tools are resources that help us do whatever we do when we say we do science . T his means that everything and everyone can become a tool f or science and if were lucky we or our work becomes a tool in someone elses work. T his makes science an ongoing process of working with and working on tools. We cant help f alling back to science done by others in the past, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. But there is a problem with the idiom: While it makes things way easier to think of the history of science as the history of great men and great inventions we tend to f orget about the simple f act that things come hardly out of nowhere (at least as a physicist might note in most cases) and that the concept of authorship might be reasonable in a practical sense (ref erence & archive), but in the end it is implausible if the work is not only(!) done by individuals but in f act by many individuals. Sticking with the image of giants, we would probably agree with the image of the Leviathan depicted on T homas Hobbes f amous title a giant imagined and made up of many.

T he so-called death of the author (Barthes, Foucault and with less theory Twain) predates current phenomena like the f lux of massive data induced by search engines like the Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar or digitilization, but today it becomes more relevant than ever. How are we treating these new circumstances? One metaphorical approach could be changing our understanding of the scientist more and more f rom songwriter to DJ. While at f irst sight this might appear as a devaluation of the scientist it is rather a revaluation of the DJ: the work of the DJ does not only consist in playing records of others, s_he draws up narratives, samples old bits of pieces and f inally turns them into something new (check this speech by DJ Spooky on Remix Culture). T he DJ is creating and inventing but the relations betwen his_her work and the work of others is more visible than it is in the case of the person that claims to be the creator of his_her own ideas. S_he is more node than author, more conclusion of successf ul practices than lone standing monument. T he metaphor enables us to rethink authorship without discrediting creation as the essential part of our scientific work. It also gives way to reconsidering mixing and merging as eclecticism that doesnt need to end up in a blended, unrecognizable and indecipherable melange. More than ever we are able to locate ourself in the network of knowledge that we are working in.

Authorship played and still plays an important role in our society and in science, culturally and legally, but we can argue that authorship is merely the consequence of cutting of f the remixing process that has been done to f inish the creative process. 7 Certainly, by using ref erences we already conf ess the hypertextual condition of our work, but still the own work is crucial to what we are doing. T here might be a slight chance that the way we locate ourself s in the work we do will change in the f uture. Ref erring to knowledge could transf orm f rom pointing to the work of certain authors to the identif ication and construction of networks of their ideas. If the humanities take the direction that has already anticipated by web technology we will see more collaborative projects and networks of researchers but also the decrease of the authors relevance in scientif ic work. IV. Summing things up: (Perpetual) -Science T he production of science can learn f rom sof tware releasing strategies commonly practiced in web 2.0 environments. One is the shif t f rom a teleological release process towards a cyclical one. In their f requently quoted article What is Web 2.0 Tim OReilly and John Battelle prognosed the End of the Sof tware Release Cycle (traditionally proceeding f rom PreAlpha taking Alpha, Beta, RC to the Final Release). OReilly and Battelle argued that in Web 2.0 not products but operations must become a core competence and users are treated as co-developers. Instead of proceeding f rom Beta to Final, products stick in a perpetual Beta process, were they are continuously elaborated . A short look on current web 2.0 products show that perpetual beta is already the most f requent case even if release terminology still recurs to Alpha, Beta, Final. Now, learning f rom changes on the web does not necessarily imply the end of the publication release cycle, but it def initely challenges the idea of the f inal release. Publication traditions still support the idea of the stable version as the main medium to perf orm science. In many disciplines, especially in Historiography, the monography is still a kind of gold standard. And yes, there are good arguments to produce grand narratives of science instead of short articles depending on whatever you work on. But -Science does not mean a retreat f rom greater to smaller narratives but a turn towards more hybrid ones. Indeed, Wikipedia is a good example f or hybrid narratives that are equally gigantic. 8 It reads much dif f erent than a book but it is technically capable to do the same. 9 We can understand -Science as a fundamental acceptance of science in progress, hybrid narratives and the increased use of bits and pieces as valuable parts in collaborative productions. -Science is a habit, thus part of our socialization. A mundane and certainly not very philosophical illustration f or the dif f erent f orms of socialization is the existence of Let me google this f or you (you dont know what is? click here or less inf antile here). Lmgtf y is symptomatic f or a peer group where stupid questions actually do exist, namely when you can answer them on your own via search engines/Google. T here is a gap between those who are using and experimenting with digital tools constantly to work with their questions and problems and those who primarily f all back upon non-digital sources of knowledge. As f ar as I see this gap is going to be closed as time goes by. Until then its worth discussing it critically.