In a very interesting post by Peter Brantley at O'Reilly Radar , a point is made that reading habits are changing as a consequence of the Web. Contrary to most predictions, people are indeed reading more, but they consume shorter pieces of texts. The concern by many is that shorter pieces are shallower and that this might negatively affect our young readers.
Question now is when this pattern will get to scientific reading/writing and how exactly it will affect it. This is pure speculation, but here are some some thoughts about potential future trends:
a. Scientific writing will indeed become shorter but it will also have a greater number of layers of complexity. In other words, the first layer of the scientific text will only contain information at a more general level, maybe even understandable to non-specialists. As the reader digs into the text using hyperlinks, further details will be displayed, down to the level of raw data and minutia on lab notebooks explaining details on how experiments were actually conducted. This layered approach would satisfy multiple types of readers, from the vast majority just trying to get a feel for the general content, down to those interested in all the details such as peers focusing on the same area.
b. If the scientific article becomes deeper, its construction will also be layered. Rather than written as a single piece at the end of the project, the article will be written from a bottom-up perspective as well as a from the top down. From the bottom-up, a collection of lab notes, emails, forums and other details will be progressively compiled into the complex layered article structure. Of importance, this process will most likely occur as the article is actually written rather than attempting to organize all the notes at the end. From the top down perspective, the high level pieces will progressively connect the multiple lose pieces to give it a coherent meaning, or even multiple coherent meanings. The latter note deserves some further explanation.
c. Multiple coherent meanings can be interpreted as follows: If the article is built from the bottom up, there is probably not a single manner to interpret the data. Therefore, future scientific articles will most likely have multiple interpretations over time. If articles are posted in a collaborative environment, multiple authors will be able to provide different high level versions of the same over time, and even contribute to the low level data with additional experiments. This collaborative process will most likely supplement the formal peer-review process, with substantial advantages since it will be dynamic and will evolve over time. In other words, articles will be dynamically generated information rather than being the static piece that it currently is.
But these are just thoughts. What do you think?
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2 comments:
Ricardo,
I agree and would extend your point: In the peer-reviewed environment layered, hyperlinked writing is much more efficient. The linear narrative is an artifact of history: Written scientific communication began as letters and continued on paper. It is an elegant form but highly inefficient in a data-dense virtual world.
Further... in the future the ideal figure will be multilayered. There will be an image on a page/screen associated with a "published" research result and its discussion. The viewer will be able to click through to other representations of the same data, to the data set itself; software will provide the ability to manipulate these data to display aspects of interest, such as statistical tests or subsets. This is happening in various fields.
None of which means that narrative doesn't have a large and important role in the broader communication of science. It's what I do as editor of an interdisciplinary magazine. I believe it will continue--we all *need* narrative--but as a separate activity.
Rosalind, very good points. I agree that narrative won't disappear -- it is fundamental to provide meaning and context to our scientific findings. Sociology of science has been demonstrating for decades that our scientific conclusions are always interpreted in a social context, and narrative provides us with this framework.
I also agree with you that narrative as we know it will become one of many different ways of presenting scientific information. There are probably many reasons for this, but one that is particularly appealing to me is that having one single format for presenting scientific information is filtering out important contributions. Here are some examples to dig somewhat further on this topic:
Bhandari published an article in 2002 showing that "two-thirds of the orthopaedic abstracts [presented at an orthopedic conference] ... were not followed by publication of a full-text paper." (Bhandari, 2002) In a subsequent paper his group showed that the most common cause for not publishing the full paper was researchers' lack of time for research activities (Sprague, 2003). Notice that this lack of time happened after the research project had already being completed and presented at a conference. Therefore, what respondents refer as lack of time for research activities actually means lack of time for writing the article up. There are many possible interpretations to this finding, but one important reason is probably the cognitive burden of writing a scientific manuscript to comply with our current monolithic format. The effort required to write a full-fledged scientific manuscript is something that simply scares researchers away from the activity. If that burden could be reduced by simpler formats, we would probably increase the amount of information available on research that has already been conducted.
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