Data – it’s everywhere! From ‘March Madness’ to politics to infrastructure to Broadway musicals, data is shaping our understanding of the world. You don’t have to look very far to find data, data sets, coding and visualizations. Try 30 Places to Find Open Data on the Web.

From the news this week see:

• NCAA Tournament history database
• Reading level of 2016 debate rhetoric
• Corrosive water in Flint, Michigan

 

Even Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog site riffs on the words per minute in ‘Hamilton’ Is the Model of a Modern Fast Paced Musical. Full disclosure, this author admits to reading baseball data too often!

How does this ubiquitous data impact the university, academia and research? Universities are using data visualizations to connect students and alumni to their institutions. See this Interactive Alumni Map from CUA.

Faculty and students are learning new coding tools and data visualization techniques to tell the story of their research. Libraries are awash in usage data from electronic resources for decision-making. Librarians are collaborating with researchers on all aspects of the data life cycle; from data management planning, to data collection, to archiving research data.

Future posts in March will focus on data and digital scholarship. We will discuss library support for data-driven digital endeavors. Topics of interest will be data science, data management, e-Science, digital humanities, API’s, text and data mining.

Tell us about your data CUA! Contact Kim Hoffman hoffman@cua.edu

 

— Kimberly Hoffman

Is the PDF dead?

Beginning in 1666, academic scholarship becomes public through print academic journals. Today, in our electronically enabled universe the portable document format PDF has become the standard for scholarly communication. In 2008 the PDF became an International Organization of Standardization standard – ISO 32000-1:2008. The PDF (the container) made the transition of electronic and print scholarship possible. It is the content of academic research that furthers ideas and progress.

It may be time to rethink our dependence on the PDF. Two recent articles highlight new scholarship needs that are not served by the PDF.

Text and Data Mining Are Growing and Publishers Need to Support Their Use – An AAP-PSP Panel Report

Hypertext Markup Language HTML made researchers giddy with the promise of networked scholarship. The reality has become the hybrid paradigm of online journals and  the PDF which does not serve the pace and global reach of scholarship today. Beyond the marketing and analytics available from  text mining, there may be unforeseen connections in the data mining of a corpus of scholarship.

Challenging the print paradigm: Web-powered scholarship is set to advance the creation and distribution of research

The scholarly literature is rife with potential for data mining, across all fields. Just for starters: data mining could be used to better understand how perceptions of key historical events have shifted with time, as well as how philosophical conceptions of consciousness have evolved. These are just two of countless potential applications. Although data mining may feel like the province of the hard sciences, there is no epistemological reason why this is the case. Any field of scholarship could benefit from tools that detect patterns within the scholarly literature that are not apparent to the naked eye. A human being cannot easily digest 20,000 papers or monographs, but data mining software can do so with no trouble.

See this short history of Scholarly HTML . Imagine the possibilities of text mining across all disciplines. Can we do this with the digital format of scholarship today?

 

— Kimberly Hoffman

 

 

 

The Catholic University of America, as a campus community is engaged in the work of scholarly communication – the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. In April, CUA will be celebrating scholarly communications and research by sponsoring its’ first campus wide Research Day! Be there!

The Scholarly Kitchen is a blog sponsored by the Society of Scholarly Publishing (SSP.) In January 2016, the blog highlighted scholarly communications trends.  What Do You See On The Horizon For Scholarly Publishing In 2016?

Some of the trends to pay attention to:

• Impact metrics
• Author’s Rights – what does that CC BY really mean? New authoring innovations from publishers.
• Rise of Gold OA, and not enough information about Green OA
• Innovative  growth due to technology – Open Library of the Humanities
• ORCID at tipping point – SHARE and CHORUS growth

Judy Luther introduces new tools to check out.

“Up till now Google Scholar has been the primary discovery tool for OA and paid scholarly content.  This may change with the launch of two new services: ACI, which indexes and hosts 10,000 curated scholarly blogs and 1Science , which indexes all OA peer reviewed articles wherever they are found. “

Alice Meadows discusses one of the more succinct wishes for scholarly communications may be that it is acknowledged as essential.

“Last but not least I hope this will be the year when we start to collectively acknowledge the importance of sustainability in scholarly communications and begin building some consensus around what that means — both for commercial and nonprofit organizations.”

The CUA Librarians offer a scholarly communications module for instruction which includes discussion of open access and tools every scholar should be using. Please contact Kim Hoffman for more information.

 

— Kimberly Hoffman