Yesterday I posted a copy of a quickly pulled together
³talking points²
handout I planned to share at the Birds of a Feather
Research Session at the
7th IA Summit. Instead the discussion went in a different
direction and
never reached a point where it seemed appropriate to discuss
the substance
of the handout. So it remains posted to this list adrift
from the impulse
that generated it.
Therefore, It seems appropriate to provide a little of the
missing context I
would have provided in the BOF session and suggest that at
some point we may
want to begin a deep discussion about the issue of
publishing in the academy
in ways that will make us competitive with mature
disciplines.
In the handout I propose that we eventually establish what
might be
described as an ³ideal² set of specialized IA journals. The
journal topics I
suggest in the handout very loosely reflect the sort of
interests mature
disciplines seem to have found essential to discuss in depth
in separate
journals. It seems obvious that if IA successfully adopts a
similar
strategy, it can demonstrate a commensurate gravitas and
commitment to IA as
a domain.
As an interdisciplinary domain, IA has the additional burden
of confronting
the traditional division of disciplines. IA doesnıt have an
established
home that fully supports all aspects of IA, so we must be
³serious² about
being competitive in managing the intellectual space we want
to establish
within the academy.
All that having been said, we have to start some place. At
the morning
session, Don Turnbull inaugurated IAJournal.com, which will
be housed at the
University of Texas. Although the details, including the
editorial focus
were not discussed, It became clear that it was conceived as
a venue for
promotion and tenure seeking academics to publish -- a
worthy goal, but one
that was of little interest to practitioners in the room.
To rebalance the situation, further discussion by Keith
Instone lead to some
potential solutions, such as the idea of establishing some
ancillary tools
at the journalıs website that would support matchmaking
between academics
and practitioners, as well as serve as a venue for
publishing 2-page
documents that synthesize/reduce long traditional research
articles and turn
them into something usable by practitioners.
Tom Forelich reminded us of the real issue of objective and
subjective
science in the post-modern age. Scientific objectivity is
at the very least
a quaint if not dead philosophical issue for all but the
most
unreconstructed folks, which unfortunately includes many
of the folks in
charge of funding. Those folks also seem to have a bias in
favor of
quantitative experimental studies. How to manage this
problem merits
considerable discussion within the community.
Nancy Kaplan made it clear that she felt as though we needed
to do something
creative that took liberties with the status quo. It seems
to me that the
intellectual agenda of the IA community should not be
subordinated to
institutional needs such as promotion and tenure or even the
exigencies of
funding. A balance will need to be struck that does not
compromise
creativity in the development of a body of literature of
IA's own. This
topic also merits considerable discussion.
Although the ³practical² discussion dominated the BOF
session, I believe we
still need to begin having serious discussions about how we
can
intellectually position the IA community through a
publication strategy.
An organic publishing effort may eventually yield a variety
of interesting
journals, but it will not yield the community mindset
necessary to plan or
develop a strong long-term proactive competitive strategy
for IA as a
domain.
My suggestion to conceptualize an ideal series of journals
with tight
editorial foci to which we may aspire may not be an optimal
solution, and I
am certainly open to other conceptions. Hopefully during
future events (or
on this list or alternatively in a blog space, which was
suggested by the
list moderator Mary MacDonald), we will consider long-range
positioning and
planning issues related to publishing in our emerging
domain.
____________________________________________________________
__________
Brian Arbogast de Hubert-Miller
Eugene Garfield Dissertation Fellow
College of Information
Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida USA
cell: 850-224-7261
email: brian informationarchitecture.com
Snail mail: PO Box 1335, Tallahassee, FL. 32302
____________________________________________________________
___________
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
---- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
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