In a team framework where there are several members of a research team and the job requirements call for the sharing of bibliographic data (of materials referenced) as well as the actual resources being referenced. In this environment there needs to be a central repository for sharing both kinds of data. This is true for small localized (geographically) groups as well as large distributed research teams. New researchers joining a existing team need to be able to “plug-in” to existing foundational work on the project and be able to access bibliographic data as well as the resources those bibliographic details point to. It is my point here to outline some of the current challenges involved in trying to overcoming the collaborative obstacle when working in the fields of Linguistics and Language Documentation.This sentiment is echoed by many in the world of science. Here is someone on Zetero’s forums [INSERT LINK]. (Though Zetero does claim to combat some of these issues.)
For a couple of months I have been looking into options for presenting academics' CVs on the web in semantic xHtml. Of the options out there hResume rises to the surface. There are several reasons for this:
Popularity of hResume in presenting CV's and Resumes.
Microformats are about the interoperability of data through semantic markup - Academics generally want people to cite them, and resume publishers usually hope to have resume users and readers.
Semantic markup of content allows for the semantic styling of content.
The largest challenge in implementing academic CVs in hResueme versus business resumes in hResume format is citations from publications and presentations along with that is the semantic markup of citations with standards like COinS (though COinS might not be true Semantic Markup). However, there are other challenges too. For instance how to categorize the sections of a CV. I work mostly with linguists and with the CV sections that linguists use. Therefore, I may be missing some crucial section of a CV as used by another academic discipline.CVs like resumes are unique to each individual so these categories are an abstraction and not all sections will be in every CV. These abstractions are included the following chart along with a mapping of how these sections are (in my opinion) best expressed in the hResume microformat. hResume builds on other microformats, like hCalendar and hCard. So I have also mapped the elements of an hResume back to the building block microformat (per this list on microformat's website). These dependency formats are also presented. In the last column I have presented some remarks specific to that section.
Sections of a Linguist's CV
Sections in hResume
inclusion in hResume
Building block
Microformat status
Outstanding issue or question
Contact info
Contact info
Obligatory
must use hCard; should use <address> + hCard
hCard is a Recommendation
how does the adr and the geo relate to the contact info or hCard?
Personal Info
Not designated
What would fit into this section which would not fit into the Contact info section? (married status) But that might be able to be expressed through XFN, unless the spouse is unnamed.
One or more hcalendar events with the class name 'education', with an embedded hCard indicating the name of school, address of school etc.
hCalendar is a Recommendation
Education Abroad (Could be considered a sub-category of "Education")
Education
One or more hcalendar events with the class name 'education', with an embedded hCard indicating the name of school, address of school etc.
hCalendar is a Recommendation
Research interests
Not designated.
One could argue that this might be related to "skills", or marked with the rel-tag format.
Positions Held
Experience
Optional
One or more hcalendar events with the class name 'experience', with an embedded hCard indicating the job title, name of company, address of company etc.
hCalendar and hCard
The [hResume] draft should describe a way to handle a series of assignments at various employers within the context of one job working for a contracting, consulting, or temporary firm/agency. per mfreeman (2009)
Field Work
Experience
Optional
One or more hcalendar events with the class name 'experience', with an embedded hCard indicating the job title, name of company, address of company etc.
hCalendar and hCard, (my recommendation is to also consider using hGeo)
Field Work often has a Geo-Location and a language involved so I am not sure if it shouldn't also be marked up with hGeo and some rel-tag to the language.
Embedding hCard for job title leads to ambiguities. per TobyInk (2010)
Awards & Honors
Not Designated
Support for Awards and for Service sections are not currently implemented. per jeffmcneill (2007)
Grants Received
Not Designated
This might be considered simular to Awards and Honors. But in most CVs I have seen it is given its own section level.
Publications
publications
Optional
A lot of work has gone into description or a hCite type of format. But nothing has evolved yet. To this end I have resolved myself to using CoinS. Although the official recomendation is to use the <cite> tag.
Peer Reviewed
publications
Optional
Articles (PR)
publications
Optional
Chapters (PR)
publications
Optional
Books (PR)
publications
Optional
Monographs (PR)
publications
Optional
Edited Volumes (PR)
publications
Optional
Not Peer Reviewed
publications
Optional
Articles (NPR)
publications
Optional
Chapters (NPR)
publications
Optional
Books (NPR)
publications
Optional
Papers (NPR)
publications
Optional
Presentations
Not Designated
Generally these are cited like a publication but put in their own section.
Invited Talks
Not Designated
Generally these are cited like a publication but put in their own section.
Dissertations and Thesis supervised.
Not designated (but possibly like publications)
Generally these should be treated like publications.
Professional Associations
Affiliations
Optional
The class name affiliation along with an hcard of the organization.
I am not clear on how XFN can be used in this context. But it seems that this is the sort of thing that XFN was created for. There is also still the same objection as mentioned by TobyInk (2010) because there is no way to tell who the primary hCard on the page referes to.
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Over the past several months I have been wrestling with academic expression on the web. I have been trying to think through what it should look like. What do I want my footprint to be? How do I want to participate in the discussions I am involved in? Part of the struggle has been with content distribution v.s. content publishing. In using the web as a content distribution platform the web technology question looks more like "how are we going to arrange these PDFs". Where as the web publishing question looks more like blog posts published directly to web browser oriented venues. Academic writing has traditionally been the written discussion between professionals in various pursuits of life. But as the web has shaped how we communicate academia must (and is) consider how it is going to participate in the discussion. If social media and its various forms are where the discussion is happening then how is academia going to stay relevant or connected? This is most relevant in the area of citations and links. These questions are not just relevant for the individual but are also relevant to academic institutions like, SIL International, Linguistic Society of America, Academy of the Sciences, etc.
Should be considering is that in a world where academic writing is reduced, where is their place. The LSA has a journal, Language, which I enjoy reading. But are they the center of academic thought that they once were? is their presentation of knowledge really the medium of use today?
While I agree that the web is radically changing the way information is decimated. I doubt that the structure of argumentation will change. We may have to find new ways of expressing the points of the argument but an argument will still have points. So, till our professors stop making us write papers, and allow us to tweet our contradictions, and assertions of scientific fact.... How to build an argument and how to write a paper are still important.
I have come across some interesting resources. One of them reminded me of something taught in my undergraduate degree. My philosophy professor made us learn an outline for paper writing which has proven most helpful.
Here is the original outline
1:Issue:What is integration
2. Position: for integration
+3. Argument 1: social pluses -4. Objection 1 social negatives +5. Reply 1: with out the negatives of life are we really preparing students for life
-15. Objection to the position: Separation -16. Argument for the objection to the position: separation is necessary for lower salaries on school budgets +17. Objection to the objection to the position: -18. Reply to the Argument for the objection to the position: Even with a higher budgets on salaries lowering the student to teacher ratio and paying more would help all student overall.
This argument still needed to demonstrate the dichotomy of a paragraph.
Introduction :: why should the reader read this? - the grab. Definition :: What are you talking about? Relationship to higher-level thought :: how does this relate to what the reader knows? Conclusion :: what does your claim imply? Transition :: What question does this lead us to ask?In this outline he showed that one needs a
Proposition
Some supporting elements
Some supporting elements
Some supporting elements
Then to strengthen the argument a counter proposition is needed.
One could choose to be very crafty and make the counter argument a counter to one of the supporting elements of the original proposition. But regardless of the quality of the counter proposition, it still needs several supporting elements.
Element supporting counter position
Element supporting counter position
Element supporting counter position
Then the author needs some discourse to deconstruct the counter supporting elements and explain why they are not valid contradictions supporting the counter position. During this discourse the opposing opinion is clearly presented. Eventually, this discourse will then refute the counter proposition. At which time a second counter proposition is needed.
Second counter proposition
Element supporting counter position
Element supporting counter position
Element supporting counter position
More discourse.... and the process repeats itself until a point is proven or considered well laid out.
The importance of the point in explaining the opposing side better than the opposing side can, was recently brought back into focus as I read a post by Nagesh Belludi . Recently I have also encountered several works of interest regarding academic discourse. The following presentation from Beyond the PDF Has a really good break down in the first 10 minutes of the presentation on the discourse structure of an academic paper.
From time to time, I read an academic paper, or journal article which really shines. It is engaging, it tells a compelling story, presents new insights and knowledge, and it brings me to a new conclusion or awareness of my surroundings.
I recently had the pleasure of reading a paper by Alexandre François, on some phonology aspects of a language he was doing research in. He did a marvelous job at presenting an issue, the evidence to be considered, and then also the propositions and the objections. He brought the reader with him as he explained the issues. The level of background knowledge needed was minimized, yet this work was not focused on presenting just the background issues and story. It is a recommended read if you are interested in phonology sorts of things, but also if you are interested in looking at the presentation of argumentation.
One of the most popular Citation Management software applications among academics is the application Endnote. Endnote has a long history is published by a reputable company, and has some pretty cool features. I use it (version X4) primarily because it is the only citation softwareThere is other citation management software for OS X which claims integration with pages but none of these solutions are endorsed or supported by Apple. Some of the other applications which claim integration with Pages are:
Papers – This is according to Wikipedia, but I own and use Papers 1.9.7 and have not seen how to integrate it with Pages. (However, Papers2, released March 8th, 2011 does say that it supports citation integration with Pages.)
which integrates natively with the word processor Pages, by Apple, Inc. The software boasts a bit of flexibility and quite a few useful features. Some of the really useful features I use are below.
Customizing the output style of the bibliographies.There are several Linguistics Journals with style sheets on Endnote’s Website. Among them are:
Research Notes section in the citation’s file for creating an annotated bibliography.
Copy our all the selected works, so that they can be pasted as a bibliography in another document.
XML Output of Citation DataThe XML Support of Endnote has not been hailed as the greatest implementation of XML but there are tools out there to work with it.
However, regardless of how many good features I find and use in Endnote there are several things about it which irk me to no end. This is sort of a laundry list of these problematic areas.
Can not sort by resource type: For instance if I wanted to sort or create a smart list of all my Book references, or just Journal Articles. This can be done, one just has to create a smart list and then set Reference Type to Contains: “Book Section”. There is not a drop down list of reference types invoked by the user.
Can not sort by custom field: I think you can do this in the interface. Though it was not obvious on how to do it.
Endnote Display Fields
Can not view all the custom fields for a resource type across all resources. This seems to be limited to eight fileds in the sorting viewer at a time.
Can not view all entries without content in a specified field. This would be especially nice to create a smart list for this.
No exports of PDFs or exports of PDFs with .ris files.
There is no keyboard short-cut to bring up the Import function (or Export) under File Menu
Does not rename PDFs based on metadata of the resource. This is possible with Papers and Mendeley. The user has the option to rename the file based on things like Author, Date of publication, etc.
Can not create a smart list based on a constant in the Issue data part. I have Volume and Issue Data. Some of the citation data pulled in for some items has the issue set as 02, 03, etc. I want to be able to find all the issues which start with a zero so I can remove the zeros. Most stylesheets do not remove the zeros and also do not allow for them.
Items are not selectable based on Issue Data
Can not export PDFs with embedded metadata in the PDF.
Can not open the folder which contains a PDF included in an Endnote Library.
Endnote does not have a way to open the containing folder of a PDF
Close-up of the same menu.
Modifying Resource type does not accept |Language| Subject Language|
There is no guide in any of Endnote’s documentation for how to create an export style sheet. This is in the Help Menus I was expecting it on the producers website or in a book.
When editing an entry’s meta-data i.e. the author, or the title of a work, pressing TAB does not move the cursor to the next field. At least some times it does not continue to TAB. If I do a new entry as a Journal article, then it will tab till the issue field, but not beyond. It gets stuck.
There is no LAN collaboration or sharing feature for a local network solution.
There is no Cloud based collaborative solution.
There is no way to create a smart group based off of a subset of items in a normal group. i.e. I want to create a smart group of all the references with a PDF attached but I only want it to pull from the items in a particular group (or set of groups).
Endnote has no option for 'part of group' filter
There is no PDF Preview within the application. The existing Preview is for seeing the current citation in the selected citation style. (Preview of the output.) It would be helpful if there was also a preview pane for viewing the PDF or the attached file.
I am looking to re-skin Wikindex. I thought that I would add some CSS classes that would embed the meta-data in a manner that the citations could be picked up by Zotero quite easily. It seems to be a bit more difficult than I first anticipated. As a Microformat for citations is not yet been fully fleshed out. Obviously one way to go would be to embed everything in a span element as COinS does but that is not really what I am looking for. (Mostly because I don’t have a way to generate the Attributes in the span element automatically.) I have thought of using RDFa. But I still need to do some more research and see what can be gleaned in terms of which controlled vocabularies to use. I am hoping that this Lesson On RDFa will really help me out here. Finally I do need to know something about OAI so that once the Resources are put into Wikindex I can then tell OLAC what language they belong to.
