My Copyfight

Actually it’s our copyfight, but my had a better ring to it.

Here’s the backstory. Lorri Mon, a friend and colleague, is the guest editor of a special issue of the journal The Reference Librarian, on topics around the future of reference and library education. Since I have a thing or two to say about those topics (as my students have heard ad nauseam), Lorri asked me to contribute a paper. I said, ok, how about a paper on liaison librarianship and how to teach it in the standard Reference course in ILS programs? I figured I could easily write 5000 words on that topic, since I have taught that standard Reference course many times, and have tried to integrate liaison librarianship into that course. And it was Lorri asking. So I said yes.

Fast-forward nine months or so. In the interim there somewhere, I had asked Diane Harvey, another friend and colleague, and the Head of the Instruction and Outreach Department for the Duke Libraries, who’s involved with their liaison librarianship program, to co-author the paper with me. Nine months or so later, the paper is written. We’ve submitted the paper to Lorri. It’s undergone blind peer review. We’ve made revisions based on the reviewers’ comments.

And here’s where the fun begins.

Lorri sends us the copyright form. Both Diane and I sit on it for a while, a few weeks, more out of laziness than anything. We were not intending to play chicken, as described here by Jason. After a few weeks of sitting on this form, Diane left me a voicemail asking me if I’d signed the form yet, and I left her a reply voicemail saying no. I also thought I should contact Lolly Gasaway, law professor extraordinaire and former instructor of my School’s copyright course… and who I have heard, from her very own mouth, ‘fess up to playing that game of chicken with publishers. Diane beat me to the punch though, and contacted Kevin Smith, Duke University’s Scholarly Communications Officer… and, incidentally, my hero.

I have to stop here briefly, to point out that the publisher of The Reference Librarian is Taylor & Francis. I had not even thought about who the publisher is, prior to agreeing to write this article… like a typical academic, I imagine. In academia, we’re acculturated to the mindset that the publication is the important thing, and the publisher is a means to that end. Journals, not publishers, have reputations and impact factors and whatnot, so that when we choose where to publish, “where” equals “in what journal.” We give little thought, generally, to the publisher behind the journal. Indeed, the publisher is largely invisible, or if it is visible, it’s only in the person of the journal editor, who doesn’t even work for the publisher. We all know that there’s a serials crisis, and about the open access movement, and all that. But when the rubber hits the road, we tend to think in terms of journals, and not in terms of publishers. I will never make that mistake again.

In response to Diane, Kevin replied that Taylor & Francis’ copyright agreement form is extremely confusing. See the form here. Note the following two issues. One: The copyright assignment agreement is on pages 2-3, but the author signs page 1, making it unlikely that the author will read the fine print on pages 2-3 closely. Two: The Schedule of Author’s Rights contains the actual terms that the author is agreeing to, but that Schedule is not included in this document, nor is a link to it provided. Kevin, of course, being a mensch, found it online… see it here.

Kevin also pointed out that, according to the Schedule of Author’s Rights: (1) The author transfers all rights to T&F, (2) T&F grants some rights back to the author, and (3) among these are (a) the right to post a preprint “on your own website, or on your institution’s intranet” (item 4 on the Schedule), and (b) the right to post a postprint, but not until “18 months after first publication” (item 6). Now, let us consider these rights. First of all, preprints are defined as “versions of the article created prior to peer review.” In other words, a draft. I would argue that a more common definition of preprint is the version of the article after peer review and revisions, but prior to copyediting and layout: what T&F defines as a post-print: “the Article in the form accepted for publication in a Taylor & Francis journal following the process of peer review.” (Though, to be fair, if I understood Kevin correctly, he disagrees with me on these definitions; he would define these terms as T&F does.) Second, I can’t post a post-print until a year and a half after the issue in which my article appears is published. Which means probably 2.5 years after it was accepted for publication, given how long the issue production process takes. Kevin pointed out that this 18-month restriction is unusual, and that the goal of it is pretty clearly to make author self-archiving difficult and, ultimately, irrelevant.

After this conversation between me, Diane, and Kevin, I emailed Lorri to ask if she could look into whether a change could be made to these policies. She did, and got an extremely unhelpful and unbudging response from a T&F representative (“we cannot change this section of our author rights policy”). I then replied to Lorri that Diane and I would not sign the T&F copyright agreement. I referred to the UNC Faculty Council Resolution on Faculty Ownership of Research. (I understand that Duke has a similar policy, but I don’t have a URL for it.) I offered to provide a revised author rights document that Diane & I would be willing to sign. And I apologized profusely to Lorri, for being a thorn in the side of her special issue. Lorri suggested that I write all those things to the regular journal editors (Rita Pellen & William Miller) and the T&F rep (Stacy Stanislaw), which I did.

And here, as a comic interlude, is where we had a “What we have here is a failure to communicate” moment. The response I got from Rita was: T&F will not publish the article without the copyright form signed by the authors, therefore we cannot include your article in the special issue. I replied, I wouldn’t expect T&F to publish the article without a copyright form signed by the authors. What I’m saying is that we won’t sign the form as is, but I’m offering to create an edited version of the form that we would be willing to sign. To her credit, Rita suggested that I send her an edited version of the form, and offered to submit it to T&F. This of course committed her & William to nothing, but was, from my point of view, a welcome show of solidarity.

So I created a revised version of the T&F copyright form. Because the original form was so confusing, my goal was to make it a single page: just the page that the author signs. I edited out all references to the “agreement attached” (that is, the copyright assignment agreement on pages 2-3), thus also eliminating all reference to the Schedule of Author’s Rights. I also removed the assignment of copyright to T&F, and replaced it with the right to publish, etc. — language which I lifted from the ALA’s copyright license agreement. My revised form is here… not that it matters, since T&F rejected my version.

The T&F rep Stacy replied to me a few days later that T&F “cannot accept your revised copyright form.” I assume that in the intervening few days, a fleet of lawyers had picked apart my watertight legal logic… though Stacy never mentioned who had decided that they could not accept my version. Instead, Stacy suggested that we sign T&F’s “License to Publish” form. What she said about that form was: “This form will allow you to retain copyright on your article. We would then consider you — the author — the rightsholder and list you as copyright holder at the top of the article.” One odd thing about this License form is that, apparently, only a T&F production manager can generate one, so it took a few days for one to get created for us. But here it is.

I have to stop again briefly here, to point out something very important. T&F has — had all along — a License to Publish form. Why had Stacy not mentioned this before? This email exchange had, by this time, been going on for a month. Let’s give Stacy the benefit of the doubt: let’s assume that she was not being malicious, but that she simply did not know about this License to Publish form until she ran my version by T&F’s lawyers. This is a very significant piece of information for the rep to a journal (almost certainly more than one journal) to not possess. Which means that this is a very significant oversight on the part of T&F, not keeping their journal reps informed. The result of which was that the rep to a journal was unprepared for a situation in which the author demands a less-restrictive copyright agreement. A situation which, I would like to believe, is not uncommon. Or perhaps this is a deliberate tactic by T&F? A tactic to put authors in the position of having to agree to a restrictive copyright agreement, because no one they could possibly have any contact with knows any different. Which brings me back to maliciousness.

As an aside, when Stacy first mentioned this License to Publish form, before a copy was generated for us, I did some searching. Turns out, Peter Suber had a post back in 2006 on T&F’s iOpenAccess program, which seems to have been the origin of their License form. So this License form has been around for 5 years. Plenty of time for Stacy to have learned of its existence. Also, plenty of time for it to have been integrated into the journal production process more cleanly, so we didn’t have to wait days for just the right T&F employee to create one.

The License form looked ok to me… the author retains copyright, and there’s no mention of an embargo period. But we ran it by Kevin Smith anyway, to get his reaction. And, of course, he demonstrated why I am not a lawyer. His reaction was that there is not much difference in the author’s position under the License agreement or the original Copyright Assignment agreement. The author retains copyright, but grants T&F an exclusive license to publish. By doing so, the author would need T&F’s permission to put the article in a repository. That permission is contained, you guessed it, in the Schedule of Author’s Rights, which is referred to in the License form. So there would still be an 18 month embargo for posting a post-print.

And so we come to the end of this saga. Diane and I spoke, and decided to withdraw our paper from the special issue. I wrote to the T&F rep Stacy, to drive the point home that all of this was on account of a too-restrictive copyright policy; and I wrote to Lorri to apologize profusely, again, and to promise her several drinks the next time we meet, for the hassle.

So now we have this paper on our hands. It was peer reviewed and revised. What to do with it? Diane & I discussed submitting it to another journal, but we decided that we’d had it up to here with publishers for the moment. And, of course, we don’t actually need to publish this article… need in 2 senses, actually. For one thing, I have tenure and Diane has continuing appointment, so neither of us need this publication for professional reasons. For another thing, if we want to put this article out there, we can just do it. We have the intertubes and we’re not afraid to use them.

And here’s where I get on my Open Access soapbox. What is the point of scholarly communication? I would argue that the most important function of scholarly communication is making scholarship (the input, e.g., data, datasets, etc.; and the output, e.g., articles, reports, etc.) publicly available. So that the scholarship can join The Great Conversation: so others can benefit from it, can react to it, can criticize it, etc. So scholarship, in all its forms, should be made public, though not necessarily published, at least in the traditional sense of the word. Of course, I’m not saying anything even remotely new with any of this.

And here’s where I realize that I am a very bad person. Because this whole saga has made me realize that there’s a possibility for a dirty trick here. One could, were one so inclined, submit an article for review to a journal, have it reviewed, make the revisions as recommended by the reviewers, then withdraw the article. This is of course what we did, but not by design. One could do this by design, and thereby address one of the persistent criticisms of scholarly publishing outside of the vehicle of the journal: the lack of peer review as a quality control mechanism. Plus it would still allow you to do whatever you want with your article, unbeholden to any publisher’s copyright agreement. Of course this is a total free-rider approach, and therefore unsustainable at scale: free-ridership as parasitism. But hell, the scholarly journal publishing industry is collapsing anyway, why not help it along?

So in the end, Diane & I decided to just make our article public. So here it is: here is a link to the article as a Google Doc. In fact, the Google Doc in which we wrote the article. I was thinking of setting up a WordPress instance and installing CommentPress, and putting this paper there, so that you, dear readers, could comment upon it and give it a round of post-print peer review. And maybe I will do that for future writing. But it seemed like overkill in this case.

Let me start my conclusion by saying that there’s a certain amount of irony to this whole soap opera. On the one hand, this is a tempest in a teapot: this paper is in no way worth the trouble that has surrounded it. It’s not even 5,000 words, and is hardly my magnum opus. (At the risk of speaking for my co-author Diane, it isn’t her magnum opus either.) I really don’t care all that much if it gets published or not. On the other hand, precisely because I don’t care if it gets published, it’s the perfect paper on which to take a principled stance. I can afford to take a principled stance, because I don’t care if I lose. Where “lose” is a word which here means, “don’t get the paper in the special issue.” Which, let’s face it, is losing the battle but winning the war.

It’s good to be tenured. Pre-tenure, I would have signed the copyright agreement and barely stopped to read it. If I did read it, I would have been annoyed and then signed it anyway. Now, I can afford to be an asshole take a principled stance and give the publisher a hard time over an unreasonable policy.

Now, let me really conclude by saying this: I hereby boycott all T&F journals. T&F publishes a fair number of journals in ILS (Journals by Subject > Information Science), and I shall not publish in any of them ever again. And, furthermore, I would encourage you, whether you are in ILS or not, to not publish in T&F journals either. Because, let’s face it, the only way publishers will change their restrictive copyright policies is if authors refuse to publish with those publishers. Give ‘em hell.

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Email stats

Inspired by Paul’s #noemail project, I’ve been wondering what the cost-benefit of the various media I employ is. Despite being solidly in the “I wish I could do that” group, I’m not quite ready to divest from email. For me, the most important consideration is that, as Paul points out, our shared institution relies heavily on email, and there is no real institutional solution other forms of communication and data sharing. As tempting as it is, some days, to cut myself off from many of my colleagues’ conversations, I’m not quite ready, or perhaps not quite brave enough, to do that. But the #noemail project got me thinking about how much time I spend on email, and other media, and what I get out of it. So I decided to do what any good academic would do: I decided to collect some data.

Following Paul’s lead, I started with email. Plus, email seemed like the easiest medium on which to collect data.

In the interest of ease of data collection, I decided to care about only 3 categories of email:

  1. Received: Number of email messages I receive per day. This is individual messages, not threads: if I get 3 messages from the same person as part of one conversation, then I count 3 messages.
  2. Read: Number of messages I read per day. I delete many messages unread: the Subject line and 2-line preview is my friend. I’m also going to be liberal about this one: if I start to read an email that turns out to be spam or otherwise irrelevant, I’m going to count it as read, even if I didn’t read the whole thing.
  3. Replied: Number of messages to which I reply per day. This is not equal to the number of messages I send per day, because I initiate some email conversations… though as few as I can get away with. This is the number of received and read messages to which I reply.

These categories are, naturally, flawed. Received email includes spam. Spam is always an issue, but especially so since I was migrated to Exchange: I get far more spam now, in Exchange, than I did when I was forwarding my UNC email to Gmail. I’ve been setting up Inbox Rules, to filter out as much spam as I can. (Read: Exchange is a radical downgrade from Gmail.) But plenty still gets through. So the Received category includes spam. The Read category includes only those messages that I opened, even though I read the Subject line and 2-line preview of probably every email I receive, to decide if I want to read it in more depth. So that’s cheating a little, maybe. But opening an email and reading the whole thing takes more time than reading just the Subject line and preview, and that time spent is what I’m interested in. Finally, Replied includes only email that I received that I replied to, not email threads that I initiated. I try to do that as little as possible, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. So anyway, the usual limitations apply: These categories are flawed. It’s only one person’s data, it’s only 2 weeks worth of data. This data is only counts; I didn’t collect any data on the content of these emails. Et cetera.

How did I collect this data? Unfortunately, manually. I created a simple 3-field Google spreadsheet form. Every morning, I look through my Inbox and Trash folders, count up the 3 categories of emails above for the previous day, and fill in the form. Now that it’s summer, I’m sitting in front of a computer far less than during the semester, so most of my email is read & written on my iPhone. (I love the Dragon Dictation app.) I’ve read about iPhone usage forensic software, the name of which I no longer recall, which I’d love to use. But when I read about it, I looked into it, & I recall it being about $700, which is approximately 2 orders of magnitude more than I’m willing to spend, given that this data collection is a total whim on my part. I indulge my whims, perhaps too often, but not that much. (If anyone has a less expensive iPhone or Mac usage forensics solution, I’d love to hear about it.)

So: Obviously Replied will be a subset of Read, which will be a subset of Received. The question is, what are the percentages of these subsets?

I’ve collected data on this for 2 weeks now. Admittedly, 2 weeks isn’t much time… and anyway it’s summer, so email traffic is down in the halls of academia (though not as much as I’d wish). But I wasn’t going to wait until August to collect this data. So anyway, here it is. As my colleague Chuck says: A little mediocre data is better than no data at all.

The first thing to notice is that Thursdays are the big email day. I would have expected Monday, to be honest, but apparently I’d have been wrong. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

The second thing to notice is that, predictably, weekend email volume is way down. Also, 5/30 was Memorial Day, which is why that day, though a Monday, had weekend-level numbers.

This data indicates that I receive approximately 30 email messages per weekday, ± approximately 10. I read approximately 50% of those, which honestly is a higher percentage than I had expected. I reply to less than 10% of the messages I receive, less than 20% of the messages I read.

As an aside, Paul reports that he gets “about 100+ new messages, post-spam filtering, hit my inbox every 12 hours.” So clearly I shouldn’t complain… I’m at a third of his volume. But then, I’m not as much of a network hub as Paul. Obscurity has its compensations, clearly.

Looking at this data the other way ’round, I delete unread approximately 50% of the emails I receive. So clearly I need better spam filters and a better killfile (or the Exchange equivalent). I’m not spending a lot of time deleting all those emails, but even a little time is too much. Also, more than 80% of the emails I read do not require a reply. Clearly much of the material in the email I receive could just as easily be handled by RSS feeds. I’ve moved as many of my mailing lists and table of contents subscriptions to RSS feeds as I can, over the past few years, so those are off the table. What’s left is, I’ll be honest, mostly institutional announcements, discussions among my colleagues (other than Paul, as of 3 days ago), and conversations with students. I don’t have much hope that the first 2 will move off email any time soon. I can do better with the third.

So there you have it: 2 weeks of email data. Problematic though it may be. This is perhaps just the start: I’m interested in how I use other media as well. Paul writes that “Twitter always returns more value for time spent for me than email.” I’m not actually sure that’s the case for me. But that’s fine: the point here is not to emulate Paul (worthy goal though that may be), but to look critically at my own media use. The problem is, I’m not sure how to collect data on my Twitter (or Facebook or whatever) use: not just what data to collect, but logistically, how to collect it… cf. previous comment about iPhone usage forensic software. Suggestions, anyone?

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Citizen of Google

Within the past two days the news came out that Google was shot down by Judge Chin for overstepping in the Google Books case, and that Google is forking over half a million dollars to detect Internet transparency issues.

On the topic of a Google books: I am not by any stretch of the imagination a copyright lawyer, so I’m not really qualified to be issuing opinions on this subject. I’m really looking forward to Kevin Smith’s blog post on this topic. However, I think that Judge Chin really blew this one. First of all an opt-in arrangement, as Google has pointed out, is completely untenable. As a result, a vast number of orphan works will be lost for to public use, which is a social tragedy of the highest order. Second, I will grant you that perhaps Google would gain essentially a monopoly over orphan works. However, who else but Google could do this? I don’t see Microsoft or Amazon stepping up to this particular plate. This is my objection to Siva Vaidhyanathan‘s Googlization of Everything arguments: yes, on the one hand he is right that it is a bit of a Faustian bargain. However, who else is going to do these things? It sure as hell isn’t going to be libraries or the library community generally. It should be, but it hasn’t been and it won’t be. It is, unfortunately, Google or nobody. I say this to my classes all the time, and I’m sure my students are tired of hearing it, but Google is fighting libraries’ fights for us, and has been for years.

On the subject of Internet transparency issues: Google is developing a set of tools that will be immensely useful in political crisis situations, such as existed in Egypt and exists in Libya, and according to the reports they are going to give it away for free. Let me emphasize these points: Google is creating a set of technology tools that are clearly useful in the service of social change. Also, Google is giving it away for free. Why are they doing this? Clearly, it is in Google’s business interest for there to be more, rather than fewer, users on the Internet. It really doesn’t matter why there are fewer — ISPs throttling users, governments cutting off ISPs, etc. It’s in Google’s business interest to prevent or limit this. Still, that business interest has the happy side effect of enabling the creation of tools that can be used for social change.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Can I become a citizen of Google, please? I haven’t seen a single government on the planet do as much to promote the public good in the online arena as Google has done within the past several years. I’ve been following the reporting and tweeting about Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, etc. with great interest. And I’m coming to the conclusion that what is good for the Internet is good for society. Increasing channels of communication is good for society, and the Internet allows for an increase in the number of channels of communication. That’s overly simplistic, admittedly, but that’s what it boils down to. Enter Google. It is in Google’s business interest to enable use of the Internet, and to foster the existence of online channels of communication. The fact that this is a profit-making endeavor for Google does not, I think, change the fact that by pursuing their business interests they are also incidentally providing tools for the benefit of society… whether those tools are to detect Internet throttling, or to provide large corpuses of texts accessible to every one of the several billion internet users on Earth. Let me be more clear. I am coming to believe that by pursuing their business interests Google is making the world a better place. And I can’t believe I’m hearing myself say this: I sound like a Conservative. I’m the last person who would claim, uniformly, that business can run the world better than government. But in this case I’ll make an exception. Somebody tell me I’m wrong. Do I wish that some public or nonprofit organization were doing these things? Yes. But I don’t see anyone stepping up to these particular plates in such a systematic way. If not Google, who? If Google decided to run their own country, I would very likely want to move there.

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A proclamation!

Cross-posted with the Pomerantz Kidblog.

It’s been a long time since I’ve obsessed publicly, here on this blog, over a children’s book. So clearly it’s time.

We’re big Mo Willems fans (the man who brought us the pigeon who is not allowed to drive the bus), and ever since seeing this movie, have been obsessed with naked mole rats. (It was a happy, happy day when the Syracuse zoo installed a naked mole rat exhibit.) So we were congenitally unable to resist this book:

Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed

Wilbur’s different from the other naked mole rats in his colony, because he wears clothes — and likes it! But what will happen when Grandpa, the oldest, wisest, and most naked, naked mole rat ever discovers Wilbur’s secret?

*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***

What happens is this: Grand-pah makes a proclamation, on the acceptability of clothes. (There’s one page were 3 naked mole rats repeat “A proclamation!” Charlotte loves to read this dialogue in increasingly high voices: A PROCLAMATION! A proclamation! a proclamation!) And when he makes his proclamation, Grand-pah is dressed in a rather natty summer Southern suit and hat. At which point, Wilbur rushes home to get dressed, and when he returns, several other naked mole rats are also clothed.

Which makes me wonder: Where did Grand-pah and the other naked mole rats get their clothes? Three possibilities present themselves to my mind:

1. They went out and bought them right away: Grand-pah before his proclamation, and the others as soon as the proclamation was made. I reject this option, as it wouldn’t have given the others enough time to go shopping. The text very clearly states that Wilbur ran home and got dressed and returned, “as fast as his legs could take him.”

2. They stole the clothes from Wilbur’s store. Oh yes, did I mention that Wilbur opened a clothing store? At the sarcastic urging of his fellow naked mole rats. One has to wonder to whom Wilbur expected to sell clothes, since, as his fellow naked mole rats repeatedly point out, naked mole rats don’t wear clothes. Theft from an unmanned (unmoleratted?) store would of course speed up the clothing acquisition process. But it would also indicate an amorality and lack of regard for the law that one does not usually associate with naked mole rats. Though let’s give them the benefit of the doubt: maybe they intended to pay Wilbur later.

The other problem with option #1 is this: Where did Grand-pah get his clothes? Not from Wilbur’s store, since if he had, Wilbur would have been wise to the theme of the proclamation ahead of time. Maybe Grand-pah (and the others?) went shopping at someone else’s store? But not a store owned by another naked mole rat, since it seems pretty clear that Wilbur’s store is the first of its kind. So this begs the question, who else makes clothes in naked mole rat sizes? Moles? Rats? Is there some kind of rodent Garment District a few burrows over?

3. They had the clothes all along, and only had to run home to get them. I’m sure it says something profound about how my head works, that this is my preferred option. Because it makes me wonder about the existence of a clothing underground in the naked mole rat community. Anti-nudists? Could there have been a whole bunch of closeted (Get it? Closeted? Ha!) naked mole rat dressers out there? While only Wilbur was bold enough to go public with his fetish, it was a fetish shared by many: approximately half of all naked mole rats, to judge by the picture in the book. Perhaps Wilbur wasn’t a poor businessrat; perhaps he had a bead on otherwise hidden naked mole rat subculture. I imagine all those poor little naked mole rats, dressing up in front of their tiny full-length mirrors, feeling like freaks and misfits (Get it? Fit? HA!). Worried, and rightly, if Wilbur’s case is any indication, about persecution by their fellow naked mole rats. And then Grand-pah takes a stand validating clothing fetishism! Support from the top for inclusion and alternative lifestyles! Civil rights for the clothed! It’s enough to make you cry. Well, almost.

Of course, prior clothes-ownership only pushes back the problem; it does nothing to address the underlying question: where did the clothes come from in the first place? Still, I’m willing to overlook this glaring omission, in favor of a good civil rights story.

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My Favorite Martian

Recently I tried to watch Babylon 5. I never saw it when it was on the air in the mid- to late-90s, even though many of my friends were big fans. So, way late, I figured I’d give it a go. I’ve always been impressed by the fact that Straczynski apparently created a real 5 season-long story arc, without succumbing to the X-Files Effect (that is, getting hopelessly lost in the storytelling and ultimately jumping the shark). So I convinced Y, got the pilot from Netflix… and I could barely make it through those 90 minutes, the writing and acting was so bad. The aliens were pretty interesting, and Straczynski had clearly done some solid world-building (galaxy-building?). But, well, the writing and acting was just terrible. Afterwards, twenty minutes on Wikipedia reading about the show satisfied my curiosity about all the questions that the pilot raised. So that’s that then; I won’t be watching more Bab5.

Watching the Bab5 pilot got me thinking about one of my favorite topics: aliens. Specifically, TV and movie aliens. Why are all aliens in TV and movie SF basically people with prosthetic foreheads? And I don’t mean the costuming, either. CG exists, so we can create whatever damn creature we want on screen, and yet most movie and TV aliens are people in costume. Even aliens that are entirely CG (I submit to you Avatar) might as well be people in costume. But I’m willing to overlook that. What I want is a really alien alien: an alien with alien motivations. Not an alien that’s basically a human personality trait taken to the extreme (think Spock). In Bab5, the aliens were basically humans, with human motivations: a declining empire struggling to remain influential on the galactic stage, a civilization recently freed from oppression with a chip on its shoulder, a more advanced civilization whose technology is indistinguishable from magic. Interesting, but hardly original.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, as he so often does, totally nails it in this video. In it, he says:

You know what the best Hollywood alien movie has been in my list? The Blob, the old Steve McQueen movie from the ’50s, The Blob. That didn’t have a face, did it? It was just this creature. And you didn’t know what made it work, but it loved your blood. Even though it was a B-movie they did well.

In my opinion, this is one of the things that makes Tyson so good at presenting popular science: he’s really got his cultural referents down. Typically, my favorite alien is more obscure. For my money, the best alien in all of science fiction — and I mean it, in the entire corpus of SF from the beginning of the genre — is the ocean from Solaris. I mean the original Stanislaw Lem novel, not the Tarkovsky film, and definitely not the George Clooney remake.

Solaris is brilliant on a number of levels. But one aspect of the story in particular that I’ve always appreciated is that Lem creates an alien that is well and truly alien. I mean, really, what would we have to talk about with a planet-sized ocean? There is a chapter in the novel in which Lem describes the history of human discovery of Solaris. Part of this was that it took humans a long time to even recognize that the sea was alive and had volition. A major theme of the novel is the question of whether the sea is sentient, and if so, what does that mean for the definition of sentience?

Existentialism has dealt with the issue of the Other for a long time. The Other is fundamentally unknowable to the Self. This is both horrible and wonderful. (I’m pretty happy that Y can still surprise me, after being together for over a decade.) But let’s face it, no matter how alienated we are from our fellow human beings, both they and we are human beings, and so there will always be a lot of common ground. Cultural differences, experiential differences, gender differences, fine. But both you and I have the same sensorium. We’re evolved from the same common ancestor shrew. We’ve spent our whole lives breathing oxygen, eating carbon-based foods, drinking H2O. On the other hand, what do you and I share in common with a planet-sized ocean that single-handedly maintains its planet in a stable orbit in a multiple star system and can produce human avatars? Sweet FA, that’s what.

Why can’t we have decent aliens in TV and movie SF? The George Clooney remake of Solaris was actually ok, but it wasn’t about the ocean, it was about the relationship between Kelvin and Rheya. Which is, of course, rather complicated by the fact that Rheya isn’t human at all, she’s an avatar of the ocean. And she comes to realize this slowly, and it messes with her head. That in itself is an interesting story, and it’s a subplot of the Lem novel. But — and let me repeat this — the movie is not about the ocean. Why not? Because an inscrutable planet-sized ocean doesn’t make for very good movie-watching. Even if the filmmaker did show us some mimoids, it would just be good CG work. And so what? Avatar had good CG work, so I hear… I never saw it, and I don’t care to. Again with the lame aliens.

Why was the show Firefly so good? Well, good writing, good acting, good world-building. So, hard to go wrong there. But fundamentally, it was a Western. It was Wagon Train to the Stars, as Roddenberry supposedly pitched Star Trek originally. Firefly was SF with no aliens, only humans. It was about people being people. (Even the Reavers were people, in the end… people irreparably broken by other people.) And why is this good SF? Because people being people makes for good storytelling, no matter what the genre.

I believe there must be a middle ground between Firefly and Solaris. And it’s not Spock (though I love Spock) and it’s not Worf and it’s not Yoda. The Alien is close… the Alien is good, but fundamentally the Alien is just a killing machine. It’s a weapon of war. So, fairly simple motivation there. The Predator, as much as I like the Predator movies, is just a prosthetic forehead: it’s a hunter, and we’re the prey. Simple. There’s something nicely visceral to stories about people not being at the top of the food chain (think Jaws), but the Predator is not, fundamentally, alien. I mean, think about if the roles were reversed: a human lands on an alien planet and starts to hunt the natives? Not too far-fetched really: just replace “on an alien planet” with “in an alien land.” Like, say, the Americas, circa the 15- through 1700s. Or reverse the roles in another way: replace the Predator with something that humans actually hunt, a deer perhaps. You get a Far Side cartoon.

Neil deGrasse Tyson talks in that video about the Blob. But as much as I like the Blob, again, it’s just a killing machine. Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Maybe. What’s the motivation of the Pods? We don’t know. What would happen if they succeeded in replacing everyone on Earth? Would they just go about their business (our business, really), or would they suddenly launch into some new and previously hidden agenda? We don’t know. Invasion of the Body Snatchers has always worked for me on two levels: the inherent creepiness and paranoia of everyone around you slowly being replaced, and the further paranoia of the underlying hint of a hidden agenda.

And speaking of hidden agendas… for my money, another great alien is the Targive from Future Boston, a book so obscure that, according to WorldCat, fewer than 200 libraries in the world own a copy. As far as I know, I own the only copy in private hands in the world. The Targive are always hidden, you never see one. Indeed, it’s not even clear if the Targive are individuals like us. All you ever see is the Targive Citadel, a constantly shape-shifting structure made of, apparently, beetle chitin. (The Targive are genetic engineers.) People go in, and come out genetically changed. How did these people make their requests? We don’t know. Targive-created products are all over the place in the book. How did they get to market? We don’t know. What motivates the Targive? We don’t know. They seem to be interested in collecting DNA. But what for? We don’t know.

And so, once again, we return to inscrutability as the characteristic that makes the alien most alien. And perhaps that’s where we have to leave it. If an alien had truly alien motivations, would we be able to relate, to empathize? What does an octopus want? What is it like to be a bat? This is probably unknowable. And so the truly alien alien would be inscrutable, by definition.

But that’s really unsatisfying, as an avid SF reader. I challenge someone to write an alien, motivated by truly alien motivations, and not have that character be inscrutable.

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Social Q&A vs. Newsgroups

This tweet by Howard Rheingold led me to this short piece that he wrote in 1994. In it he describes newsgroups as “a worldwide, multimillion member, collective thinktank, available twenty-four hours a day to answer any question from the trivial to the scholarly.” That description sounds a lot like social Q&A sites to me. Which got me thinking: of course there’s nothing particularly new about a “new” technology not being new. But I started wondering what the actual differences are between social Q&A sites and newsgroups. I mean, it seems obvious. But these things never are, when you start thinking about them.

Let’s start with this: Shah, Oh, & Oh 1 define social Q&A as “a service that involves (1) a method for a person to present his/her information need in natural language (mostly a question, and not a collection of keywords), (2) a place where other people can respond to somebody’s information need, and (3) a community built around such service based on participation.”

Let’s take those in turn for newsgroups, shall we?

One: A method for a person to present his/her information need in natural language. Yes, newsgroups certainly meet that criteria. Of course, a newsgroup is a venue for more than presentation of information needs; it’s a venue for conversation. And questions are a subset of conversation. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that newsgroups afford all manner of speech acts, and questions are one type of speech act. But I suppose that amounts to the same thing.

Two: A place where other people can respond to somebody’s information need. Yes, that has always been one of the functions of newsgroups.

Three: A community built around such service based on participation. Well, no. I guess here’s where we get to the crux of the difference between social Q&A sites and newsgroups. Newsgroups are not built around the service of question-answering; newsgroups are built around topic-specific conversation. The fact that question-asking and -answering can happen in that venue is a side benefit, one that derives from the nature of conversation.

So there’s the distinction: the raisons d’être of the two types of venue are different: newsgroups are based on conversation, and social Q&A sites are based on question-asking and -answering. Can we then make the leap to say that, since question-asking and -answering is a subset of conversation, social Q&A sites are a subset of newsgroups? That doesn’t sound right to me. A subcategory? Maybe. A narrower use case?

The only other distinction that I can think of at the moment is platform: newsgroups and social Q&A sites are powered by different software, with different functionality. Despite having been a big Usenet user in my misspent youth, I actually don’t know a whole lot about the software that powered newsgroups. I do know, though, that there’s at least one open source application designed to run social Q&A sites. And again, while I don’t actually know for sure, I feel confident that Yahoo! and other companies that run their own social Q&A sites wrote their own software to do it. So the software is different, an custom-built.

Which brings me to the functionality of that software. Newsgroups didn’t allow the user to do much except write and submit what you wrote. What you wrote could be a reply to what someone else wrote. Social Q&A sites allow that as well, though with less threading: there’s the question and there are the answers, but not replies to the answers. Social Q&A do, however, have whatever reputation systems they’ve implemented: in the case of Yahoo! Answers, for example, the questioner and/or the user community can vote on best answers, and answerers accumulate points and levels. Newsgroups for sure didn’t have that kind of explicit reputation system in place. Newsgroups had reputation systems in place, yes, but they were socially constructed, not built into the software. So another difference between newsgroups and social Q&A sites is the functionality of the software behind them. Which, I suppose you could argue, falls out of the raisons d’être of the two types of venue.

  1. Shah, C., Oh, S., & Oh, J. S. (2009). Research Agenda for Social Q&A. Library & Information Science Research, 31(4), 205-209.
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In which Pomerantz reflects upon his responsibility for his students’ research

Every semester I advise a few students on their Masters papers. Last semester I had two students who, for very different reasons, had trouble collecting data. In the end, both students were fine, they collected good data, their papers were interesting, they got their papers submitted on time, and all’s well that ends well. But the fact remains that the middle part of their process was rocky. This has stuck with me. In this post I will reflect on the following question: To what extent is this my fault?

My immediate reaction to even thinking that is to then think: Pomerantz, you have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. Bordering, perhaps, on megalomania. Certainly you have too much of an internal locus of control.

Then, my counter-reaction is that no, these are my advisees, and if they’re having trouble with the mechanics of their studies, then I should have done something differently prior to their arriving at that point. I’m supposed to be the expert in how to conduct a research project, not them. How have I failed if my advisee is running into problems conducting said research project?

Then, my counter-counter-reaction is to remember what I say to my advisees — inspired by Huxley (“The great tragedy of science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”) and Einstein (“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”) — that research is a messy, unpredictable business, and the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley. (Ok, I don’t really say that in Scottish.) Part of the process of learning to do research is learning how to make a graceful recovery when things go sideways. Because they almost always do.

So the question I have to ask myself is this: What is the educational goal of the Masters paper? When the topic comes up (which is more often than you might expect), I tell people that, at least in part, the goal is to get students thinking about doing research right before they graduate and leave us to join the professional world. So hopefully our grads will carry that mindset out into the profession, and will be inclined and unafraid to conduct research in their places of work. And that this research will be of good quality. Because academics in ILS are always saying that what this profession needs is more good (emphasis on good) practitioner research. So… if this is in fact the educational goal of the Masters paper — to give students experience with conducting a full research project — then my counter-counter-reaction is the right one: let them dangle. Trial by fire makes for effective learning. No, I’m being melodramatic. It’s not trial by fire: it’s not like I make my students figure out how to recover from problems in their research by themselves, without any assistance from me. But it is true that educational research shows that the best, and possibly only, time for people to learn is at the point of need.

So the next question I have to ask myself is this: Is “experience conducting a research project” the only educational goal of the Masters paper?

We do have the option for students to do a Masters project… though, interestingly, I have at least one colleague who will not advise students if they want to do a project instead of a paper. But never mind the fact that, if we’re unwilling to advise on this, we should probably not have that option on the books. The fact remains that the Masters project is on the books as an option for students. And at the risk of being pedantic, the Masters project is not a research project. The description says that the Masters project can be an evaluation… and I’d be the first to advocate for the value of conducting an evaluation. Indeed, I’ve had students conduct evaluations for their Masters paper research. So perhaps that’s not such a useful option for the Masters project. The description also says that the Masters project can involve system design. In all my years in SILS, I’ve had one student do a Masters project and build something. So clearly this is not a very popular option among the students.

Still, it is an option. So, what is the educational goal of the Masters project? Harder to say, since I’ve thought about it so much less. But as a first pass, I’d have to say, to give students experience with managing an entire development project. The problem with that is, project management isn’t exactly something you can do by yourself. To do project management right, you need to be managing a team, or something like that. Without that, the Masters project becomes simply an opportunity for teaching oneself new skills: a new programming language, perhaps. Which goal is probably better suited to a field experience or an internship. So I’m talking myself out of the usefulness of the Masters project, here. I’m one step away from becoming like my colleague who won’t advise students on Masters projects.

But let’s put that aside for the moment. If a goal of the Masters project is to give students experience with (individual) project management, then certainly you could say that that’s equally a goal of the Masters paper. Time management and managing one’s own workload are valuable skills, and ones that you really shouldn’t be allowed to graduate from grad school without having acquired. But I think it shouldn’t be the job of the Masters paper / project to get students those skills… the acquisition of those skills is really built into the entire process of grad school. I think we don’t need to belabor the point at the Masters paper stage. Plus, if a student gets to the point of doing a Masters paper and hasn’t yet acquired those skills, it’s probably too late anyway. I’ve had one student in that position, actually. He hasn’t finished yet.

I’m left with the conclusion that the educational goal of the Masters paper — at least the primary goal — is to give students the experience of conducting a research project. So I should allow them to hit snags. Next question: How can I help my students do their research projects in the most educationally and professionally useful way possible? Actually, I think I’m doing a pretty good job with that. Though I feel like Descartes, saying that: he started from first principles (cogito ergo sum), and ended up reconstructing the world exactly as it was, complete with monotheism and monarchy. Suspicious, if you ask me. But anyway, that last question boils down to the perennial question that someone in my line of work should be asking themselves every day: How can I be a better teacher? Not a question I can answer here.

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The Table of Contents I’d Like To See

Maybe I’m just having a bad week, but I’m starting to find that the journals that I regularly browse (that is, the journals for which I subscribe to an RSS feed or an email table of contents service) are not as interesting to me as they once were. Which is being generous. To channel Lemony Snicket for a moment, “not as interesting to me as they once were” is a phrase which here means, “boring me to tears.” Y suggests that I need to subscribe to new journals’ RSS feeds. Unfortunately, being up on the latest work in Science Fiction Studies isn’t going to do me much good in the classroom. So here, dear reader, is my review of the latest table of contents of a journal that I browse regularly. And no, I won’t tell you what the journal is.

  1. Moderately interesting, though only in a, dare I say it, academic sense.
  2. Read it a thousand times already.
  3. Probably a spinoff article from the author’s dissertation.
  4. Academics navel-gazing.
  5. Yes, we know that database is flawed. If the vendor gave a damn, don’t you think they would have fixed it by now? Get over it.
  6. Wow, people behave online the same way they do offline? Say it ain’t so, Joe.
  7. Yet another user community discovers the latest shiny object.
  8. Shiny object! Let’s find an excuse to use it!
  9. Yes, we know that Impact Factor sucks.
  10. Read it a thousand times already.
  11. Should have been written at least 5 years ago.
  12. The medium is the message? Really? You think?
  13. What is this paper doing in this journal?
  14. Death by jargon.
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That Was The Week in Twitter That Was

Back in February, I started digesting my Twitter feed to this blog. Well, I’ve decided to stop.

I was inspired by Scott‘s My Day of Twitter posts and Dave‘s Twitter digest posts, plus I liked the archival aspect to it. But after doing it for a while, it seems like overkill to me. If you want to read my tweets, follow me on Twitter. I also feed my Twitter feed to my Facebook profile; you could friend me there if you were interested.

Terrell recently gave me some flak about how weird and untenable my position re my own privacy was, that I have a protected Twitter account, a fairly locked-down Facebook profile, and yet feed my Tweets to a public blog. Admittedly, that is a silly combination. But my Twitter account is protected more to avoid spam followers than to actually protect my privacy. And my Facebook account is locked down because, well, Facebook annoys me and I want to give them as little as possible. So it was never really about protecting my own privacy anyway.

No, I’m going to stop feeding my Tweets to this blog because I’ve stopped believing that this is the appropriate venue for them. This blog has mostly been, for me, a venue for medium- to long-form writing, separate from my professional long-form writing. And tweets are most definitely not that. Also, posting weekly updates is a pretty lousy way to archive my tweetstream. I’ll just continue to use Tweetake to download my tweet corpus periodically. Also, I follow both Scott and Dave on Twitter, so I don’t do more than skim their Twitter-feed blog posts anyway, to see if they wrote something interesting that I missed. I imagine that my dear readers (both of you) do the same.

So there you are. The end of a (short) era. Chalk it up to experimentation. I’ve done far sillier things in the name of experimentation, believe you me.

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My week in Twitter

  • I, for one, would like to know where Max & Ruby's parents are, hm? Parents, any thoughts on this apparent abandonment? #
  • The IKEA electric butt: http://twitpic.com/1w5iyt #
  • Chapel Hill Tire is apparently staffed by a fleet of Scottys. A 2.5 hour estimate? No problem. Done in 45 minutes. #
  • @essprit Oh dear. Maybe he's just trying to say “firetruck”? in reply to essprit #
  • It's come to this… I've been reduced to dumpster diving to get my daily fix of cardboard. #
  • In case you're curious, this is what 20 cubic yards of mulch looks like: http://twitpic.com/1vc73e #
  • Who thought planting English ivy for landscaping around here was a good idea? Really, I want to know. Because I want to KICK THEIR ASS. #
  • English ivy eradication plan, part 2: cardboard under mulch. Unfortunate cardboard-related realization: a lot goes a short way. #
  • Vision of my future: C is playing w/ a neighborhood kid, & they're holed up in her room. I feel strangely superfluous. #
  • Now THAT's search for discovery: Missing Descartes Letter Discovered in Haverford Archives, Will Be Returned… http://bit.ly/a9L2HJ #
  • I am now the proud owner of 20 cubic yards of mulch, courtesy of Orange County. It's as tall as me, twice as wide, & steaming. #
  • Hilarious yet also tragic: RT @NatGeoSociety Did the loss of mammoth burps cause a 1,000-year cooling event? http://on.natgeo.com/cZa6Y9 in reply to NatGeoSociety #
  • 5 hours @lifeandscience w/ a 4 year old. Impressive, both for the museum's engaging-ness to a 4 y.o., & for the 4 y.o.'s attention span. #
  • Today's realization: Children are Hobbits. They all need 6-7 meals per day. #
  • @DavidBThomas Maybe would have been less crazy if we had arrived when it first started. By 1 hour in it was 30-45 min wait at most trucks. in reply to DavidBThomas #
  • #foodtruckrodeo lesson learned: food trucks do not scale well. @NCBulkogi was damn tasty though. #
  • #foodtruckrodeo is definitely a social experiment in how much your time is worth & sunk costs. #
  • @lazyphiphi Yeah, ok, not much of a rumor then. And this is why I'm not an investigative journalist. in reply to lazyphiphi #
  • Bull City Food Truck Fiesta update: rumors flying that @onlyburger is opening up a storefront on Shannon Rd. #
  • At the Bull City Food Truck Fiesta. It is complete madness… There are literally hundreds of people here. #

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