Activity to start soon hopefully on Waves Google Group
Cameron Neylon
Things have been a bit busy and I have been chasing a few people to
try and get them to join up. We should see a few more in the next few
days with any luck. To bring people up to speed I have managed to set
up a meeting with Stephanie Hannon, the project manager for Wave at
Google next Friday, where I hope we can get a bit more information and
see how it might be possible to work with Google to take things
forward. I am also planning to meet with the IT director of PLoS next
Wednesday if feasible.
SciFoo campers will be getting accounts on the developer sandbox but
it looks like we won't be getting any before then. I will seeing if I
can beg a few extra invites at that point for everyone else. Thus far
though Chris Thorpe is the only one in the group with a live account.
I've set up a couple of pages within the group to start sketching
things out with respect to both development targets and concerns with
possible Google tie-ins, so have a look at them and feel free to
modify/adjust at;
http://groups.google.com/group/knowledge-waves/web
Cheers
Cameron
Bruce D'Arcus
Neylon<camero...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Things have been a bit busy and I have been chasing a few people to
> try and get them to join up. We should see a few more in the next few
> days with any luck. To bring people up to speed I have managed to set
> up a meeting with Stephanie Hannon, the project manager for Wave at
> Google next Friday, where I hope we can get a bit more information and
> see how it might be possible to work with Google to take things
> forward. I am also planning to meet with the IT director of PLoS next
> Wednesday if feasible.
Thanks for the update Cameron.
Bruce
Daniel Mietchen
writing up a grant proposal on a Google Wave for scientists theme.
I am still not sure whether the 15-month review ESF call is really the
way to go there
but faster alternatives exist at some national levels and at that of the EU.
I spoke about that with some people from the European Commission last
weekend at FEBS
in Prague, and their reactions were rather encouraging.
A relatively quick shot in this direction would be possible via
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/dc/index.cfm?fuseaction=usersite.FP7DetailsCallPage&CALL_ID=201
(deadline July 27, allowing to fund personnel; program background at
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/people/industry-academia_en.html ), while
several slower options exist
for more complex projects.
In hope for a successful meeting tomorrow,
Daniel
Bruce D'Arcus
Mietchen<daniel....@googlemail.com> wrote:
> While you are with Google, Cameron, may be you can also bring up the option of
> writing up a grant proposal on a Google Wave for scientists theme.
Not per se about your post Daniel, but prompted by it, I did want to
just note something I mentioned to Cameron privately awhile back: that
it would be nice if the efforts of this group could take a pretty
broad view of "research" and so not only focus on the sciences.
Bruce
Cameron Neylon
I agree this is really important, both in terms of making useful
things but also in hopefully getting critical mass quickly. Would you
be able to point us to some writings anywhere that will help clue up
the science focused amongst us as to what the issues are in keeping
things relevant beyond the sciences?
The good news is that several of us now have at least invites to the
Google Wave sandbox and expect to get accounts probably overnight
tonight. I had a good conversation with the people at PLoS yesterday
and have confirmed the meeting with the Wave team at Google tomorrow
so will be hoping to get some more invites at that point. I will aim
to write up both meetings separate over the next day or so. We hope to
run a session at SciFoo and I will aim to webcast that so everyone on
the outside can be involved as well. Updates as they come to hand.
Cheers
Cameron
On Jul 9, 9:12 am, "Bruce D'Arcus" <bdar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 9:14 AM, Daniel
>
Daniel Mietchen
social sciences departments too (not for research, though - just as a student),
I try to incorporate these perspectives in my activities by defining a
scientist
broadly as "anyone who follows the scientific method". So I welcome your input
on these matters and hope we will end up with a nearly all-encompassing
approach (perhaps by speaking of "researchers" rather than "scientists").
I add a recent example in which I apparently failed to factor in the
"cultural sciences" properly:
when I invited comments on
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Open_scientist/What_would_science_look_like_if_it_were_invented_today?
,
the only non-scientist (in the narrow sense of "hard" sciences) to contribute
more than "like" or "dislike" wrote the following:
==quote==
once again, I think your vision of science is too restrictive, and it
does not quite
fit with the reality of research in cultural sciences (human and
social sciences +
humanities). In these disciplines, we do not stand on the shoulder of giants;
rather, we re-interpret what others did and challenge their
conceptualization on
a specific topic. Of course, this does not exclude verification: I'm not an
anti-positivist, just not a positivist.
Please make room for us cultural scientists in "Science" :-)
==unquote==
I asked for specifics (I have problems understanding what exactly
people mean by
labeling things with *isms) and pointed out that the post was (and
still is) being drafted
on a wiki precisely to allow others to add their perspectives, but no
reaction since.
Daniel
Daniel Mietchen
Daniel
Bruce D'Arcus
Neylon<camero...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I agree this is really important, both in terms of making useful
> things but also in hopefully getting critical mass quickly. Would you
> be able to point us to some writings anywhere that will help clue up
> the science focused amongst us as to what the issues are in keeping
> things relevant beyond the sciences?
I don't have anything on hand, but in some ways it might be boiled
down to different kinds of data, and different kinds of analysis (and
hence workflows).
For example, in the bibliographic realm I've been working on for the
last few years (I'd like to help enable a citation robot on wave), the
sciences typically cite only secondary academic literature (journal
articles and such) as research findings. In the humanities and social
sciences, people often cite primary literature (legal documents,
interviews, film, etc.) as data.
So if you assume only the former, you might think BIbTeX is perfectly
adequate or this use case. If you recognize the latter, you realize
it's not.
If you generalize that notion of different kinds of data and analysis
you probably guard against possible problems.
Bruce
Bruce D'Arcus
Well, this is a REALLY big topic that gets into the realm of
philosophy, but I (who work at the border of the social sciences and
humanities*) don't call myself a scientist. To be blunt, I'd call that
almost an insult; not because I have anything against scientists at
all, but because it's just not at all what I do.
WRT to positivism, that person is just pointing out that mainstream
science (though certainly not all of it; consider something like chaos
theory) is dominated by particular ways of understanding the world
which translate into particular methods of work. While some of those
traditions are also common in the social sciences in somewhat
different form (say use of statistical data to test hypotheses), I'd
also say things are more eclectic.
I'm being vague; I know (need coffee!). But just consider what my
research work typically involves: reading a wide range of documents
and looking for patterns of meaning (this paragraph communicates x, y,
z ideas, etc.).
Bruce
* Though I am in perhaps the one discipline (geography) that spans the
whole range from hard science to humanities!