NDSA:Sci-tech-med-math

Science, Technology, Medicine, and Mathematics Content Working Group

Meeting Minutes

• NDSA:March 2012

Different Kinds of Online Science Content

Scientists, Doctors, and Engineers Blogs

This would include everything from blogs scientists keep about their personal lives, to things like open notebook science where scientists are sharing their daily raw notes, to more reflective and commentary based blogs. See some notes on this in this post about Science Online http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/01/some-first-thoughts-on-online-science-and-digital-preservation/

Examples:

Anthony Salvagno's open notebook: http://research.iheartanthony.com/

Blogs About Science, Med, Math, and Tech

These would fall into broader science communication channels. For example, Scientific American has a rather large blog network, so does Nature,National Geographic, and PLoS. Beyond these, you can get a sample of the diversity of many science blogs by taking a look at the blog roll of all the attendees at last years Science Online Conference. http://scio12.wikispaces.com/-Blogroll

Other examples of blog aggregators are:

Scientopia: a collective of people who write about science because they love to do so Science Blogs: a digital science salon featuring the leading bloggers from a wide array of scientific disciplines

Discussion Forums About Science, Med, Math, and Tech

There are a lot of open public discussion spaces in which scientists, mathmaticians, doctors and technologists are talking with eachother. Places like Stack Overflow, Math Overflow, Science Forums. Science also comes up a lot in non-professional forums, everything from video games, to things like pro and anti evolution forums http://www.evcforum.net/Forums.php and http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi or for that mater parts of other forums, like this anti-vax section on a mothering forum http://www.mothering.com/community/f/443/im-not-vaccinating

Citizen Science Sites

Things like Galaxy Zoo, projects at the Nest Watch, and Fold It that are both new models of scientific work and represent interesting places where the public are engaging with scientists. Not only are the data gathered in these projects potentially at-risk, but also the the community based discussions around the data.

Novel and hybrid online publications

Things like PLoS and the Journal of Visualized Experiments that are churning out things that work like formal publications (ex journal articles) but in practice have all kinds of other features and components to them. It might also make sense to include preprint services like http://arxiv.org/ in this category.

Official science organization websites

There is considerable value in things like research group and lab group websites (everything from small university labs http://hfac.gmu.edu/people/rparasur/Neuroergonomics.htm to sites for institutes like http://krasnow.gmu.edu/soc/ and major research facilities http://www.fnal.gov/ as well as government orgs and agencies sites like NOAH, NASA, DOE, NSF, CDC, the National Academy of Sciences, etc. I suppose professional association sites would fall into this area as well, broad orgs like AAAS, to things like APA, to particularly small topical conferences.

Different sorts of research value these content can represent

Off the top of my head it seems like there are three primary different kinds of histories these different kinds of collections would let historians tell.

The Public Record of Knowledge

Much of the history of science, tech, medicine and math is about looking at who published what when and how they cite other published material. Traditionally this has meant collecting books and journal articles. However, in our case the novel online publications seem to be the key fit here.

Internalist History of Science, Technology, Medicine and Math

This is a very traditional history of science genre, focusing on the process by which scientists and technology innovators do their work and make their discoveries. In the analog world we find these kinds of things in manuscript collections, personal papers, Institutional archives, etc. In the case of the online materials we are discussing, things like researcher blogs and online notebooks seem to be central in this category, however, some of the citizen science sites actually reflect these kinds of discoveries as well, for example a new kind of galaxy was actually first discovered in the web forums for Galaxy Zoo and in that instance the Galaxy Zoo forums are interesting for telling this inside science story. I suppose discussion forums also fit in here, as they represent a kind of correspondence between scientists.

Public Understanding of Science and Science Communication

Lastly, there is a much broader category that has to do with a very different kind of history of science, one that focuses not on the internalist story but much more broadly on science as part of culture. Here there are a ton of different kinds of web content that might be interesting. Trevor provided some examples from his research and writing that focus on a few different kinds of content in these areas.

a) The "Cosmos Remixed" song and music video on Youtube is a nice example of where science ends up in user generated video. http://www.trevorowens.org/2009/11/autotune-for-science-or-when-youtube-got-smart/

b) Discussion forums frequently turn to discussions of science, even in places where you might not think of it. For example, here is an article I wrote about the discussion forums for Spore http://www.trevorowens.org/vitae/teaching-intelligent-design-or-sparking-interest-in-science-what-players-do-with-will-wrights-spore/ and here is an article I wrote about discussions of the nature of science and technology in the discussion forums for the game Civilization http://www.trevorowens.org/vitae/modding-the-history-of-science-values-at-play-in-modder-discussions-of-sid-meier%E2%80%99s-civilization/

c) Yelp and TripAdvisor comments and Flickr photos similarly end up being potential materials for exploring science in culture. For example here is an article I wrote about using where the Einstein memorial appears in those sites as a point of entry to explore what the memorial means to people. http://www.trevorowens.org/vitae/tripadvisor-rates-einstein/