Independent research sounds especially interesting if it encourages researchers to choose a medium that best fits their work.
Great post by @nayafiahttps://nadiaeghbal.com/independent-research …
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I don’t think of it like that. Journals build brands, and academics who contribute to the journals convert those brands into reputation for themselves, and thus into jobs. So the journals are competing on brand (mostly impact factor and similar), not the quality of the medium.
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To pick a slightly self-interested example: most ML researchers would (currently) rather have a NIPS paper than a distill paper, even though the latter is a much more interesting medium. Why? The former has a better chance (at present) of getting you a job
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This can and does change, but usually very slowly. One of the cleverest things done in establishing the preprint arXiv was to recruit leading physicists like Andy Strominger and Ed Witten to contribute in the first few days. Wham! Brand established.
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Great points. I was talking from a fuzzier perspective. Distill represents one shift where more time and effort goes into a paper, but going in the reverse direction and embracing more casual mediums also seems interesting
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For a lot of "learning in public" as
@nayafia put it, there aren't expectations about the medium you use in the first place. People can pick between blog posts, tweets, emphasizing visuals, switching up tone, playing w/ how data-oriented vs argument oriented their writing is, etc -
I'll be the 1st to admit that idk what more casual mediums might look like for academia. I may be totally off base. I'm just curious about how much is filtered out or obscured by a fixed medium that assumes a certain format, length, breakdown, rigor, presentation, etc
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A few: Bret Victor, 3Blue1Brown, Vi Hart, Satoshi, Eric Drexler, Ted Nelson (in a sense), Alan Kay (ditto). I decided to (mostly) stop writing papers in 2008, and to concentrate on more experimental media.
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Yup, and it's interesting to me that open science seems to be about replicating those forms in an open context (ex. open journals) instead of innovating on the medium itself. (
@michael_nielsen may disagree?
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In principle, I disagree - I’ve always been interested in open science as a venue for new media. In practice, there’s some of that, but many open science advocates focus mostly on old media.
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I see a few new science-specific forms. The "citizen science" crowdsourcing stuff like
@galaxyzoo &@inaturalist are new forms of science, in which scientists make up much of the crowd. There's growing uptake of scholarly annotation using tools like@hypothes_isThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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I might argue that the arXiv was very much a new medium, it's just hard to remember how the old system of mailed and photocopied preprints worked and how novel a daily email of preprints was.
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This is a mystery. Seems like if the same institutions are consuming and generating the content, that would provide more incentive for innovation, not less: more knowledge of the target audience and their needs, greater personal stake and interest in improvements.
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Just thought about that and realized that I couldn't think of any new medium in terms of research. There are only new mediums in the teaching part of academia: Online courses, MOOCs and virtual classrooms, etc.
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