new disserter 2010

yep, this site is dead, has been for a year.  why?  partially i got freaked out that some people actually read it.  partially i finished my quals and hid from the world for awhile. partially because i really thought i'd start a star trek blog, buy i haven't been watching star trek lately.  (its been all veronica mars, lost, ugly betty and finally starting battlestar galactica).  

and i never quite liked Pivot (which runs this site) and for reasons i'm still trying to understand, i thought i should learn how to use Drupal.  point is, i set up a new disserter 2010 here, in honor of actually starting my dissertation research for reals.  or atleast the hard parts that involve going places and talking to people.  

here's that exciting link again :  www.jakepeters.org/test

- research tools - ten comments / No trackbacks - § ¶ July 17 08 - 15:27

good-bye usc server.

ah, a new home. i now own myself, or atleast "jakepeters.org." and no more frustrations with how USC has set up php on their servers! pivot works in all its functionality now! editing tools on the publishing page, searching, etc., etc.

and, more importantly, i'm now going to set up my "conceptual backend," which is dokuwiki. the conceptual backend will keep all of my written thoughts on readings, talks, ideas, keywords, etc., etc. and as it will be closed to anyone but me, it'll be a different writing project than this. the constraints of blogging can be useful, but some writings cannot be for just anyone's eyes.

i highly recommend both pivot and dokuwiki. both only require php, no database requirements. they're easy to install and administer and i think there's a great deal of value in:

1. understanding how a software works, not on any deep level, but enough to make it do a bit more of what you want so that as a user you have a better understanding of the system of constraint you've entered into.

2. "owning your own data." i'm still thinking about the implications of this as a "web politic" or the like, but for now i think it is a necessary start ... a web service can do all kinds of things to your blog [and other] data, just think about where blogs go when they die...

- research tools - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶ October 06 06 - 18:25

TouchGraph and visualizing relevance.

both are fun and easy to use and yield some interesting connections, but are not as immediately useful as i had hoped.

the TouchGraph Amazon Browser did not yield any particularily useful connections to books i hadn't considered. perhaps this is because i used it at the end of my searching. seems like it would be best used as tool for initial research, especially into an unfamilar field.

GraphScholar is a different beast. i was very excited about using this software (which graphs the "cited by" page on google scholar), but i haven't been able get the results out of it i would like. it delivers similar content to web of science (requires subscription) "cited ref search," but not exactly the same. (a "cited ref search" shows how many times an article or author has been cited and where -- but the interface is frustrating the results are difficult to manage. it is mostly used by "science" and clinical researchers to prove to tenure committees and review boards that their work has had an impact on the field). not only does google scholar rank the "cited by" articles in a different manner than web of science (and the ordering can't be changed, thus the only way to change what you graph is to change the # of citations displayed) it also has different includes/excludes.

what i really want to be able to do is graph connectivity, not popularity or relevance. however, currently i can only get GraphScholar to show me exploding links from certain nodes, not all of the links between a set of nodes. this might be a user error ... i have high hopes for the usefulness of this tool.

- network society experiment, research tools - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶ May 08 06 - 11:32

folksonomy on a scale of one

even more intersting was finding other people writing on this. which as soon as i find the damn articles i'll post and write more. can't believe i didn't add them to del.icio.us. yeesh.

- network society experiment, research tools - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶ May 08 06 - 10:46

del.icio.us

although very handy, del.icio.us does not seem to be a useful research tool for literature reviews or bibliographic management.

links to journal articles rarely have any other tags, nor to books from amazon. the interface is not conducive to bibliographic management and citeUlike does function like “a del.icio.us for academics.” however, del.icio.us does appear to be very useful for tracking news stories [and finding related stories i would otherwise miss], so when it comes to developing a methodology for tracking press on FOSS, it will be very useful.

i also tested the following “social bookmarking”/folksonomy sites:

+ http://www.connotea.org/ : connotea was too focused on clinical research. there was almost no crossover with any of the test books i used. looks okay if you’re doing clinical research, but i don’t like the interface as much as citeUlike. also appears to only support RIS, not BibTeX

+ http://www.blinklist.com/ blinklist had the same problems of del.icio.us, not so good for scholarly work. also, not certain about mindvalley labs … looks like the sort of site that might have develop a more annoying interface when it goes out of beta.

+ http://www.librarything.com/ i like the principle of librarything and the interface doesn’t seem bad, but it lacks a good interface for articles and only allows 200 entries for free. “rise of the network society” was in 25 people’s libraries, but was surprisingly not useful for discovering new sources or categories. perhaps this is b/c it is not geared specifically at academics like citeUlike.

+ here’s an actual review of social bookmarkig toos.

jjpeters, jake - network society experiment, research tools - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶ May 08 06 - 01:08

categories for the "network society"

from the 99 articles i tagged in citeUlike some surprising and some not surprising categories emerged.

categories i already had in mind:
+ governance
+ cities
+ digital divide
+ cooperation
+ community
+ nation-state
+ public space

categories i might have guessed:
+ information capitalism
+ civil society
+ ecology
+ gender
+ power

categories i don’t think i would have thought of otherwise:
+ education
+ war
+ planning

jjpeters, jake - network society experiment, research tools - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶ May 08 06 - 01:01

an experiment in creating a lit review

the goal was to figure out the best categories for understanding literature on the "Network Society." i have no previous knowledge of this literature and had never heard of the concept or Manuel Castells [whose writings popularized the idea and term] before starting graduate school. currently my project is concerned with technology and the state, conceptions of justice and figuring out what is "at stake" in free/open-source software movements, thus, i am looking for a "ways in" to this literature that are conducive to the larger project.

this project is currently on hold, why i work with my advisor to figure out if network society literature is likely to be as large of a part of my project as i had earlier imagined.

my frustration with bibliographic management is rooted in 7 years of working in academic medical-research libraries -- i am frequently frustrated by difficulties in managing large sets of biliographic data. i have have used endnote, reference manager and refworks to various levels of frustration and success. here i attempt to use endnote/refmanager, the BibTeX format, folksonomy websites, connectivity visualization software and blogging software to make the research process function as i would like.

my process:

1) search for relevant citations. with the hope of being able to manage a larger set of citation data than i usually can, i casted a wide net, pulling in aprox. 150 citations from the following databases:

+ Expanded Academic ASAP
+ Gender Watch
+ ISI Web of Knowledge Social Science Abstracts
+ Quick Search Form
+ ISI Web of Knowledge Social Sciences Citation Index
+ ISI Web of Knowledge Arts & Humanities Citation Index
+ ArticleFirst
+ Dissertation Abstracts
+ Humanities Abstracts
+ ABI/INFORM Business
+ EconLit
+ Current Research At University of Southern California
+ NewsBank Access UN
+ RAND Documents
+ Official Documents of the United Nations
+ PolicyFile

these citations were exported from the databases in a variety of formats that would work with endnote, then sorted for duplicates, leaving me with 134 likely looking citations.

2) get the citations from endnote to citeUlike.org.

i highly reccomend posting directly citeUlike if the database is supported by citeUlike or exporting in BibTeX format and then importing into citeUlike instead of using endnote/refworks as an intermediary.

i had to create an endnote export filter [downloadable here] to get the articles out of endnote. after the export they still required a good deal of "cleaning." definetly keeping everything in BibTex format next time.

3) read abstracts, tag articles and attach DOIs or .pdfs. i pulled up abstracts for nearly every article and frequently read portions of the actual paper before tagging with categories. this process whittled 134 citations down to 99 usable citations, 34 of which are book reviews and 9 of which are books. see what i've tagged "network society" in citeUlike.

thanks to UCLA's library i was able to get full text for approximately 85% of the articles (USC's e-journal collection and library in general is almost unusable -- i've heard "UCLA is USC's library" many times).

4) see what others are doing, grep for categories and importance. i found that folksonomy works well on a scale of one [see this post], but it was also useful to see how others tagged the same things i tagged.

unfortunaltly, none of my articles were tagged by anyone else [which may have to do with how i imported my citations], but i added books on the network society specifically for this purpose. 3 of 9 were tagged by other folk, whose research interested intersected with mine in interesting ways. i picked up a few books i hadn't heard of and am now using citeUlike's "watchlist" to keep track of categories used by 4 other users.

from this list of citations i then used TouchGraph Amazon Browser to see the connectivity my books [based on what amazon's customers bought with, looked at after or listed with particular books] and GraphScholar to look at citation webs and connections of key articles. this was not as useful as i thought it would be, but perhaps only because i don't yet know what to do with this data. [more on this]

5) pick key categories, read or re-read articles, and write. in progress. for categories, see this post. as i read the articles, i'll use this site to write-up my thoughts on individual articles and the categories. it's easy to link directly to individual citations in my citeUlike library, so i will be able to eliminate endnote from this process. see results [partial] of an annotated bibliography generated in endnote here -- its not linked to the citation and much less dynamic then i'd like.

6) final product? an annotated bibliography posted on this site -- always accessible, easy to change and reorganize, the basis for my quals questions and literature review for my dissertation proposal and eventually dissertation [or anything else].

my evalution of this process.

jjpeters, jake - network society experiment, research tools - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶ May 07 06 - 15:30

it begins ...

somehow it now feels like i'm actually going to do this [dissertation] thing. of course quals are closer on the horizon, but going through the process of thinking how i'm going to keep my thoughts, bibliographies, papers, etc. organized through the whole qualifying exams => dissertation proposal defense => research/writing makes the whole process much more real. yet just as intimidating.

here's how i imagine that this site will help with several of the hurdles in this process:

1) literature reviews. not certain how well it will work yet, but i will use pivot to generate dynamic annotated bibliographies. essentially pivot [this blogging software] will serve as a platform for intermidiary writing in my research process. for more on this [and using citeUlike.org, endnote, graphscholar and other research tool] see the "network society experiment."

2) quals. Aram Sinnerich's "quals blog" Aram Squalls inspired me to use blogging software for organizing bibliographic data. although i'm not certain if i will "blog my quals" [i.e. write about the process of doing my qualifying exams] i will use pivot to collect my thoughts and keep track of my reading lists.

3) general information processing [i.e. thinking]. writing is crucial aspect of my thinking process. i need to [or atleast should] write about talks i attend and articles i read in order to even begin to understand them and work through my thoughts. this yeilds a large collection scribbled notes, random text files, etc. using pivot i hope to keep everything together, accessible where ever there's a accessible connection. this will require keeping some posts private.

4) collaboration. i don't imagine anyone reading this site, nor am i certain that anyone should -- or that i even am comfortable sharing my no doubt foolish thoughts on scholars i respect [and those that i don't] with the few nerds who might bother to read this. nonetheless, i desire better tools for collaborate without the fears that i [and some of my fellow grad students] have about putting our ideas out there, recieving useless or hurtful feedbad, loosing control of our intellectual labor and wasting our time with myopic rambling such as this ...

Pivot team - personal, research tools - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶ April 25 06 - 14:11