Google’s Book Search gets most of the press but Microsoft has also been active in the large-scale digitization of both in copyright and out of copyright books for their search engine. At least until recently. I hope Microsoft’s short-sighted decision to phase out their book digitization programme does not encourage Google to do likewise. We academics have also lost out - the same decision also put paid to Microsoft’s “Live Search Academic” engine which shadowed Google Scholar.

LSE Research Online has been substantially re-vamped since the last time I looked. You can browse a mix of full text and abstracts of work from our department here, and if you register you can make saved searches that email you when new material arrives or which you can subscribe to as RSS feeds. This link should be to an RSS feed of full text items from our department as they arrive (please comment if the link does not work).

Note: The repository is not even close to representing the entirety of the department’s output (it currently contains 195 items, 81 of which are available in full text) but hopefully it will become increasingly useful as staff and students learn about and use it.

Ofcom (2008) “Social Networking: A Quantitative and Qualitative Research Report into Attitudes, Behaviours and Use”

As well as the new UK survey and qualitative information it provides, it contains a review of the literature on the social networking focused on potential harms co-authored by Sonia Livingstone and Andrea Milwood Hargrave with myself contributing. We would be interested to hear any reactions.

We invite contributions to the Media@lse Electronic Working Papers series.

This series is intended to:

• Present high quality research and writing (including research in-progress) to a wide audience of academics, policy-makers and commercial/media organizations.
• Set the agenda in the broad field of media and communication studies.
• Stimulate and inform debate and policy.

Please read the guidelines at the website before you submit a paper for consideration.

Please email your paper to Bart Cammaerts, Deputy Editor b.cammaerts [at] lse.ac.uk

Series Editor: Professor Robin Mansell

Series Deputy Editor: Dr. Bart Cammaerts

The Editorial Board is comprised of LSE academics and friends of Media@lse with a wide range of interests in information and communication technologies, the media and communications. They come from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including economics, geography, law, politics, sociology, politics and information systems, cultural, gender and development studies.

The Media@lse Electronic Working Papers series aims to achieve a quick turn-around of papers from submission to online publication. Rights are retained by the author.

We look forward to receiving a paper from you.

Having just about finished a literature review for a report on ICT and disadvantage (I’ll provide a link when it becomes available) can I plead with other authors to be specific in their abstracts? Here’s a (suitably anonymised) example of how not to do it…

“… The study investigates the links between [X, Y, and Z] and reveals the changing situation experienced by [people].”

OK so what was the nature of the links?! How has the situation changed? I know an abstract is necessarily of limited length and it can be hard to summarise months of research in a few sentences but abstracts are is meant to enable the reader to quickly get a sense of whether the paper or report itself will be of use. With abstracts like these the reader has no choice but to read the whole thing or discard it.

PS To make matters worse the report in question was divided into sections but the version I downloaded didn’t come with a table of contents or endnotes!

David Brake

Sonia Livingstone has asked me to pass this on. Please respond to her directly (as below) but it would be interesting if you could share your favourite new media papers here in the comments as well (and comment on my choices - at the bottom - if you wish):

My colleague Leah Lievrouw and I have been asked to develop and edit a major compilation of “classic” must-read articles in new media studies - a sort of “desert island” collection that will be published as a (rather hefty) four-volume reference.

Leah and I have made our own preliminary list. However, our experience with the Handbook of New Media has taught us that this field is a very big umbrella, covering everything from media law and regulation, to studies of communities and social networks, to education and the workplace, to digital arts and culture (and more). The challenge is to assemble a collection that fairly and comprehensively covers the field as we specialists understand it.

So, we are seeking your help! We’d love you to tell us about up to three nominations for journal or proceedings articles, key book chapters, or other publications of similar length that you would consider essential reads for anyone wanting to know what new media studies (broadly construed) is about.

These might be readings you always assign to students, items you consistently cite in your own work, or pieces that have made a difference in the way you think about and study new media yourself. We are particularly interested in items that have historical value, tend to be overlooked, or concisely capture a writer’s most important ideas. We’re also keen to make this an international list, since this is an international field. You may suggest your own publications, BUT we are more interested to know what or who has influenced you.

Leah and I will select the final list for the collection, but we will be happy to summarize and share everyone’s nominees after we get feedback, which itself should be a very interesting resource. We’d like your suggestions and ideas by October 1 if possible - we’re also eager to see if this exercise generates any discussion!

Thanks very much for your time and interest!

Sonia Livingstone - please reply to s.livingstone@lse.ac.uk

For myself (David Brake) I must admit I haven’t been as conscientious as I could be in keeping track of which papers and books I have found most useful or thought provoking but here are three that I thought were excellent and which others might not have run across:

Browne, K. D. and C. Hamilton-Giachritsis (2005) “The Influence of Violent Media on Children and Adolescents: A Public-Health Approach“, Lancet, 365 pp. 702-710.
A clear and concise overview of the extensive scientific debate on this contentious issue.
Bruckman, A. (2001) “Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet”. in Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiries, Lancaster, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html

Nuanced discussion of different ways of ethically treating people whose texts and other works appear online ranging from full disclosure of their identities to complete concealment.

Crawford, A. (2002) “The Myth of the Unmarked Speaker” in Critical Perspectives on the Internet, (Elmer, G. ed.) Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., pp. 89-104.
An excellent and thoughtful debunking of the notion that text-based Internet communication eliminates status differentials because of the lack of visual or verbal cues.

It was recently announced on the blog that (the leading journal) Nature runs that:

Nature is conducting a peer review trial of its own. From today, submitters to the journal are being offered the option of having their manuscripts posted on a preprint server to solicit public comments. At the same time, their work will go through the usual anonymous peer review process, and both sets of comments will be considered by the editors in making their decisions.At the end of the trial, which will last for about three months, Nature editorial staff will assess the overall value of comments from self-selected public contributors versus those from invited anonymous reviewers.

It was Nature you might recall that also tested Wikipedia against the Encyclopedia Britannica and, controversially, found them to be roughly equivalent, so this latest move is consistent. Since the administration of the peer review process is one of the reasons advanced by commercial journals to explain why they are still necessary it will be interesting to see whether Nature really does have the courage to undermine its own business model…

I thought I had written my own robust defence of Google Book Search and book digitisation in general but it seems I haven’t - at least I haven’t found any on this blog or my personal one (though I posted enthusastically about meeting Brewster Kahle who runs the Internet Archive and briefly mentioned my own experience of using Google Books).

Kevin Kelly has had a go at providing a popular account of the potential importance and utility of the widespread availability of books online in Scan This Book! in the New York Times. He rehearses many of the good arguments against the ever-lengthening text copyright regime and for the social utility of book scanning programmes but unfortunately his argument is somewhat spoiled by his need to “epater les bourgeois”.

First by hyperbolic statements: “The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.” Inventions? Talmudic scholars (for one) would be surprised to learn we had just invented annotation.

Secondly, and more importantly, by un-necessarily sweeping and apocalyptic predictions about the way technology will (must?) change existing businesses (like publishing).

Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library.

Much of what he says is arguably valid for non-fiction and particularly scientific research but less so for fiction where (as Updike says) we actually seem to like reading (or viewing) self-contained narratives (though we may then go on to comment on them or construct other self-contained narratives based on them).
He usefully points out that academic science is heading faster than other fields towards the universal library but doesn’t think through the implications. Academics need to publish freely to advance and do so happily but only because there is a state system in place that pays them to be experts because society benefits from their creation and dissemination of knowledge. It is hard to imagine the same model being applied to the writers of cookbooks, say, but in the UK we pay authors a (very) modest sum when their books are checked out of the public library.

Could some form of super-UNESCO (or a number of national government initiatives) help to fund freely-available fiction (or other creative works) to be added to the universal Internet library of the future? Perhaps paid for through a levy on broadband subscriptions as suggested by some in France - the Global License? This is approximately the way the BBC works, for example (though it is not as free as it should be in sharing the content that our license fees have paid for). Surely this is a more attractive proposition for artists than having to individually flog “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, ads, sponsorship or periodic subscriptions” which KK suggests are the options that will be available to artists in the brave new world when their individual works themselves are no longer saleable.

KK anticipates some of the hostile reaction that followed from John Updike (speaking predominantly on behalf of fiction authors) and by Nicholas Carr (among others) more generally:

Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

I for one am in the young enthusiast camp but I don’t think it means that the way things work in the creative industries has to be swept away in order to bring the (near)-universal Internet library about.

If we could reduce the term of copyright to 14 years, renewable for another 14 (as Creative Commons suggests) and if copyright could be easily asserted at a central database but the default for works where the ownership was unclear was that such work would be in the public domain, authors would still be able to get paid for their works during their most valuable commercial life but we would have a huge public domain of useful information instead of the stunted one we have now.

The above suggestions still radical (more radical than many authors and publishers would like, I am sure) but are consistent with the new potentials technology offers without requiring the total restructuring of publishing…

I’ve not provided as fully thought-through or well-ordered set of arguments here as I’d like (and not perhaps a particularly original point of view either - it draws heavily on Lawrence Lessig’s thinking, for example) but there’s as much polishing here as I can spare considering the £0 I am getting paid to write this! What do you think?

Update: As if in answer to my wishes, I have just heard about a very promising bill in the US House of Representatives - the Orphan Works Act which would release into the public domain works where the owner is no longer known. Someone should set up a campaign to support Lamar Smith (the bill’s sponsor).

David Brake

Jan Schmidt brought my attention to the recently-launched International Journal of Internet Science which will publish twice a year online, readable by anyone, with 5-7 papers in each ‘issue’. It’s not clear yet how it will differ from First Monday, JCMC and Gnovis among others, but perhaps the first sample issue will give a clue. And certainly any new entrant to publishing is to be welcomed - particularly one that is open access.

It is possible to get published in for-profit journals and still publish on your own website as well, depending on what the policies of individual publishers are. The SHERPA project brings together the copyright policies of the major publishing houses in one place so you can see what your rights are. I am certainly glad that so many of my fellow Internet studies academics have made much of their scholarship available online - often pre-publication and fairly often even post-publication (usually in a ‘draft - not for citation’ form, but still…)