Style of work
Hands-on experimentation
I think of myself as a "scholar-geek" because I create, tweak, research, reverse-engineer, and hack the software tools that I use in my own research and teaching. I delight in squeezing the utmost possible functionality from the tools and infrastructure. Not only do I hope that this utility become a routine part of everyone's toolkit, but also because I think that we can advance the entire scholarly enterprise through the creation of better infrastructure and tools.
Perhaps paradoxically, this work requires much play.
Interdisciplinary focus
In addition to being a scholar-geek, I'm also an interdisciplinarian or multidisciplinarian or trandisciplinarian (whatever the term of the day might be). And if you believe some of the knowledge pundits of the day, so is every scholar and knowledge worker: we all work across (or aspire to talk across) disciplinary lines today. I would hasten to add that interdisciplinarity hardly means the death of disciplinarity. Tools and content specialized for a particular discipline or group continue to be necessary and, in fact, foundational. But they are not sufficient. In the same way that we need to dialog across disciplinary boundaries, so it is that our tools and digital content and information also be "connectable" across the same boundaries.
Specific work for 2005
Some work for me to focus on this year:
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Writing daily or as close to daily in MyWikis and my weblogs as an integral process of anticipating, planning, reflecting on, and sharing what I'm learning and discovering.
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Becoming an active user of and driver for the ScholarsBox by hands-on work, both in creating digital documents with the ScholarsBox and allied tools and in terms of programming the ScholarsBox.
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Focusing on digital collections of bibliographic citations and images as the first types of collections with which to experiment in the ScholarsBox. In the long term, we want to create collections containing multiple types of digital content types. We will start with single content type collections to simplify the problem.
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There are so many immediate good things to do with wikis and blogs, particularly with advancing the wiki and weblogs for the purposes of PersonalKnowledgePublishing, the building of PersonalDigitalLibrary, the publishing and sharing of collections, ObjectEmbeddedNarrative. This is a hot area, with lots of interested parties looking at various pieces. Our work will probably fall in two areas: 1) just building up our conventional infrastructure in this area as a group, an activity that may or may not lead to any novel angles and 2) work at integrating our blogs and wikis with the other members of the FourDomainsOfInteroperability, which I think will immediately yield novel and useful results. Some more concrete examples? Writing macros in MovableType or WordPress or MoinMoin for easy embedding of ScholarsBox collections and links to books, scholarly articles, etc.
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Identifying in detail the large and small projects that can be taken on the move towards to the AnySourceTypeServiceIdeality. For example, hacking the clipboard, building FireFoxBrowser/BrowserExtensions that will let me highlight text in my wiki and instantly publish the selection to my blogs.
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Publishing the ScholarsBox and our various FireFoxBrowser/BrowserExtensions as out as well-documented OpenSource software so that others can help build it and use specific services.
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Participating more deeply in the work at the CDL, including CaliforniaDigitalLibrary/MetasearchInfrastructure -- but I really want to be the kid in the candy store for a bit with the CDL materials.
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Publishing our findings in various venues as appropriate, including peer-reviewed journals and conferences
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Sharing what we are learning in our meetings and my proposed BuildingCyberinfrastructureSeminar.
No doubt this list will continue to evolve, but it is a good start from which I can build.
