Statement of Intended Professional Work 2005

My Style of work

Hands-on experimentation

I think of myself as a "scholar-geek" because I create, tweak, research, reverse-engineer, and hack the software tools that I use in my own research and teaching. I delight in squeezing the utmost possible functionality from the tools and infrastructure. Not only do I hope that this utility become a routine part of everyone's toolkit, but also because I think that we can advance the entire scholarly enterprise through the creation of better infrastructure and tools.

Interdisciplinary focus

In addition to being a scholar-geek, I'm also an interdisciplinarian or multidisciplinarian or trandisciplinarian (whatever the term of the day might be). And if you believe some of the knowledge pundits of the day, so is every scholar and knowledge worker: we all work across (or aspire to talk across) disciplinary lines today. I would hasten to add that interdisciplinarity hardly means the death of disciplinarity. Tools and content specialized for a particular discipline or group continue to be necessary and, in fact, foundational. But they are not sufficient. In the same way that we need to dialog across disciplinary boundaries, so it is that our tools and digital content and information also be "connectable" across the same boundaries.

Specific work for 2005

Some work for me to focus on this year:

Writing daily or as close to daily in my wikis and my weblogs as an integral process of anticipating, planning, reflecting on, and sharing what I'm learning and discovering.

Becoming an active user of and driver for the Scholar's Box by hands-on work, both in creating digital documents with the Scholar's Box and allied tools and in terms of programming the Scholar's Box.

Focusing on digital collections of bibliographic citations and images as the first types of collections with which to experiment in the Scholar's Box. In the long term, we want to create collections containing multiple types of digital content types. We will start with single content type collections to simplify the problem.

There are so many immediate good things to do with wikis and blogs, particularly with advancing the wiki and weblogs for the purposes of "personal knowledge publishing", the building of personal digital libraries, the publishing and sharing of collections, what I call "object embedded narrative". This is a hot area, with lots of interested parties looking at various pieces. Our work will probably fall in two areas: 1) just building up our conventional infrastructure in this area as a group, an activity that may or may not lead to any novel angles and 2) work at integrating our blogs and wikis with the other members of the Four Domains pf Interoperability, which I think will immediately yield novel and useful results. Some more concrete examples? Writing macros in MovableType or WordPress or MoinMoin for easy embedding of Scholar's Box collections and links to books, scholarly articles, etc.

Identifying in detail the large and small projects that can be taken on the move towards to the "Any Source/Type/Service Ideality". For example, hacking the clipboard, building Firefox browser extensions that will let me highlight text in my wiki and instantly publish the selection to my blogs.

Publishing the Scholar's Box and our various Firefox browser extensions as out as well-documented open source software so that others can help build it and use specific services.

Participating more deeply in the work at the CDL, including California Digital Library metasearch infrastructure -- but I really want to be the kid in the candy store for a bit with the CDL materials.

Publishing our findings in various venues as appropriate, including peer-reviewed journals and conferences

Sharing what we are learning in our meetings and my proposed Building Cyberinfrastructure Seminar.

No doubt this list will continue to evolve (on my wiki), but it is a good start from which I can build.

The opinions or statements expressed herein should not be taken as a position of or endorsement by the University of California, Berkeley. Nor should the opinions or statements expressed herein be taken as a position of or endorsement of the University of California, Berkeley. Links on these pages to commercial sites do not represent endorsement by the University of California or its affiliates.

IU Technology Architecture Lodge Random and not so random thoughts from Raymond Yee, primarily on the scholarly and educational use of the Web, libraries, educational technology, and information management

Home Print friendly version Scholar's Box Essay Series Current Projects Presentations and Papers Work on Educational Technology Interop RY's wiki RY's personal blog About This Site About Raymond Yee Interactive University Contact RY My blogroll RSS 2.0 feed for this site				Statement of Intended Professional Work 2005 Posted by Raymond Yee, 1/26/05 at 6:12:21 PM. I have been reflecting in a number of different ways on the type of work I am setting out to do in 2005. First, I have written Seamless Use and Reuse of Digital Content by Scholars, a formal statement of my current and future research interests. Second, I have written more personally on the style and approach which which I like to approach my work. A number of those reflections are listed below. Thirdly, I have tried to articulate in very nitty-gritty terms the specifics of my work. See below. My Style of work Hands-on experimentation I think of myself as a "scholar-geek" because I create, tweak, research, reverse-engineer, and hack the software tools that I use in my own research and teaching. I delight in squeezing the utmost possible functionality from the tools and infrastructure. Not only do I hope that this utility become a routine part of everyone's toolkit, but also because I think that we can advance the entire scholarly enterprise through the creation of better infrastructure and tools. Perhaps paradoxically, this work requires much play. Interdisciplinary focus In addition to being a scholar-geek, I'm also an interdisciplinarian or multidisciplinarian or trandisciplinarian (whatever the term of the day might be). And if you believe some of the knowledge pundits of the day, so is every scholar and knowledge worker: we all work across (or aspire to talk across) disciplinary lines today. I would hasten to add that interdisciplinarity hardly means the death of disciplinarity. Tools and content specialized for a particular discipline or group continue to be necessary and, in fact, foundational. But they are not sufficient. In the same way that we need to dialog across disciplinary boundaries, so it is that our tools and digital content and information also be "connectable" across the same boundaries. Specific work for 2005 Some work for me to focus on this year: Writing daily or as close to daily in my wikis and my weblogs as an integral process of anticipating, planning, reflecting on, and sharing what I'm learning and discovering. Becoming an active user of and driver for the Scholar's Box by hands-on work, both in creating digital documents with the Scholar's Box and allied tools and in terms of programming the Scholar's Box. Focusing on digital collections of bibliographic citations and images as the first types of collections with which to experiment in the Scholar's Box. In the long term, we want to create collections containing multiple types of digital content types. We will start with single content type collections to simplify the problem. There are so many immediate good things to do with wikis and blogs, particularly with advancing the wiki and weblogs for the purposes of "personal knowledge publishing", the building of personal digital libraries, the publishing and sharing of collections, what I call "object embedded narrative". This is a hot area, with lots of interested parties looking at various pieces. Our work will probably fall in two areas: 1) just building up our conventional infrastructure in this area as a group, an activity that may or may not lead to any novel angles and 2) work at integrating our blogs and wikis with the other members of the Four Domains pf Interoperability, which I think will immediately yield novel and useful results. Some more concrete examples? Writing macros in MovableType or WordPress or MoinMoin for easy embedding of Scholar's Box collections and links to books, scholarly articles, etc. Identifying in detail the large and small projects that can be taken on the move towards to the "Any Source/Type/Service Ideality". For example, hacking the clipboard, building Firefox browser extensions that will let me highlight text in my wiki and instantly publish the selection to my blogs. Publishing the Scholar's Box and our various Firefox browser extensions as out as well-documented open source software so that others can help build it and use specific services. Participating more deeply in the work at the CDL, including California Digital Library metasearch infrastructure -- but I really want to be the kid in the candy store for a bit with the CDL materials. Publishing our findings in various venues as appropriate, including peer-reviewed journals and conferences Sharing what we are learning in our meetings and my proposed Building Cyberinfrastructure Seminar. No doubt this list will continue to evolve (on my wiki), but it is a good start from which I can build.
Last update: Wednesday, January 26, 2005 at 6:17:36 PM. This site is using the Vanilla Manila 1999 theme. The opinions or statements expressed herein should not be taken as a position of or endorsement by the University of California, Berkeley. Nor should the opinions or statements expressed herein be taken as a position of or endorsement of the University of California, Berkeley. Links on these pages to commercial sites do not represent endorsement by the University of California or its affiliates.