23 MAY 2015 by ideonexus

 Write With Style

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style. These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bri...
Folksonomies: writing style
Folksonomies: writing style
  1  notes
 
12 JAN 2015 by ideonexus

 Prescriptivism and Descriptivism

So, you seem to be at an impasse. On the one hand, you have generations of grade school English teachers rightly warning their pupils that people might chuckle at them if they use the word ‘irregardless’. On the other hand, you have the scientific rigor of the modern linguistic community touting descriptivism as the torch-bearer of truth and enlightenment. Are you doomed to choose between a democracy of solecisms and a library of thousand-page tomes of writer’s regulations? Are things really ...
Folksonomies: language descriptivist prescritivist
Folksonomies: language descriptivist prescritivist
1   1  notes
 

These are general notes summarizing comments from audience members and speakers for this session:

  • Taking pdfs extracting text and semantically marking them up, hyperlinking reference lists to their source articles.
  • Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/
  • http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/computer-and-information-science/
  • Citations have no meaning the way we use them now.
  • Most papers aren’t cited, long tail graph (zitiny  ziphian curve graph?)
  • Citation Graph, collaborative filtering,.
  • Citations need context. How will that happen? Need to know why something was cited (ie. Disagreement).
  • We don’t disagree with papers, we disagree with claims made in papers. Why can’t a citation point at a place in the article?
  • Question: Is reference extraction beyond the scope of any non-commercial company? Mendeley is a company.
  •                Answer: There’s no single source of open bibliographic data.
  • Sage, SocialSciences,Crossref, webofscience, google scholar, etc – how useful are these sites. They provide metrics and recommendations, but not much more than going directly to the journal.
  • Social Networking in article recommendations, connect content to people, conversations around papers, systems don’t encourage conversations, people don’t want to participate.
  • Criticism of Mendeley: algorithms shoudl be open, academics should be able to define their own algorithms
  • Mendeley's plan is to extract reference data and make it publicly available and machine readable.
  • Criticism: academics need an open bibliographic data set.
  • Need to explain type of citation: positive vs. negative citations, valence terms, sentiment analysis/machine vs. human curated
  • Ontologies don't capture all reasons someone is citing something (ie. "Cited because I work for this journal." "Cited because Darwin will make you think I'm smart." "Cited because teacher required five citations.")
  • References are separated into their own section, removing them from the text. Unlike links, which are immediate.
  • Peer Review: example of a reviewer rejecting a paper because it didn't cite his own paper.
  • People need to make use of the REL attribute in HREF tags.
  • Citations can be used in a tribal sens, citing people in our camp and excluding others.
  • Description of citations as "frozen footprints in the snow"
  • Why do we need 1,000 citation styles?
  • Librarian: Questions about citations styles from students are constant and frustrating.
  • Orchid: cross-company effort to standardize citations.
  • Let people write citations however they want, but add an identifying number.
  • Mendeley is developing an open-source citation style editor.