Scientific web publishing offers an attractive bundle of phenomena for feminist technoscientific investigation. This article focuses on research articles in scientific journals and aims at identifying a range of exclusionary practices in the current publishing system, which need to be critically addressed. For this purpose, the functionalities of digital objects are studied using the analogy of a piezoelectric crystal as a transducer in obstetric ultrasonography (Karen Barad 2001). This is embedded in the idea that scholarly communication, and publishing in particular, is characterized by an economy based on gift-giving-for-recognition.
Digital objects as “transducers” in scientific web publishing | Claudia Koltzenburg
Published
by lena
on April 25, 2007
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Tags: apparatus, boundary practices, digital object, digital object in context, doic, feminist technoscience, file, gift giving, journals, Karen Barad, metadata, open access, research literature, Scholarly communication, scientific publishing, transducer.
I am very impressed by your article and your firm argumentation and analyses. I particular appreciate your discussions about gift-giving and recognition, about the importance of digital objects in context and Barad’s understanding of apparatus and its relevance in your article. I have one question or urgent request. Please include in the text your own understanding of the concept technoscience. I notice a number of varying understandings around and I think the article will benefit to have yours.
thank you very much for this excellent point. I have made my source available for reference in English by doing a quick translation of the useful distinction into three levels which was contributed to wikipedia in German on 17 June 2005 by my colleague Marion Mangelsdorf (University of Freiburg, Germany). My translation is done from a passage of today’s German version of the article. For my English version see version of 6 May 2007 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technoscience.
Will send you my updated version of “Digital objects…” later today. Apart from a short explanation of my own understanding of the concept of technoscience, my now current version 1.2 will contain the new full URL (plus /journal/) both at the beginning and at the end of the article (How to cite). I made another minor change: The link to the chosen Creatice Commons license (you are free to share and to remix the work under certain explicit conditions) now leads to the English language equivalent of the German licence.
… the link works better without the dot
Technoscience. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technoscience
Your article is an important contribution to the development of academic publishing in a digital world Claudia. I will read it more thoroughly next week, but I will mention it at the HSS 07 conference tomorrow. We have to understand that meta-data is different in the digital world than it was in the paper-world.
the current version of my article now is 1.3 (for the background to this see the newsblog at http://feministtechnoscience.wordpress.com/about/ - any experimental stuff of this or similar kind should go in the newsblog, so this space here in the journal remains dedicated to more open reviews, I guess)
This article has raised some very important and interesting questions that we as authors and readers have now the possibility to discuss in a productive way, as context (research publishing), subjects or actors (researchers, both readers and authors) and practices/dynamics (the publishing conditions) are here made clear and explicit.
I would like to reconsider some points. Please take into account that English is not my mother tongue and that technoscience is not my research field.
Publishing has of course many functions and hides many motivations. In some way this article asks us to rethink: why do we publish?
A researcher can be longing to publish to accumulate proofs for her/his academic career (publication as score), or to put a “brand on her/his calves” (publication as property), or, in the ideal case, to make new insights available (publication as communication and contribution). Publishing has a primary function: through the passage from the world of ideas to a sheet of paper to readers, researchers’ opinions or results are given a material consistency, I would say, a different “aura” or “authority”. This authority is the object of recognition.
Here comes one of the most interesting question. An author’s authority can be recognized only if her/his “gift” reaches the right public of readers. Claudia Koltzenburg has here given an important contribution. I would like to underline two points: her definition of the boundary of an entity “file” as “a kind of packaging indicator made up of a file name, a boundary sign, and a file format abbreviation” (par. 6), where is to point out that “packaging” is exactly what marketing experts manage, and maybe the metadata as a whole could be considered as “packaging”; and the very intriguing question reported in chart 6, par. 19, about the extension of the gift.
I would like to make two observations about the metadata of Koltzenburg’s digital object.
1) In the abstract she has used the term “exclusionary practices”, and it reappears in paragraphs 29 and 30. Why is this term not included in the keywords section, whereas here we find words as, for example, “journals”? Which “marketing – or whatever – strategy” should we “read” behind this selection?
2) In my opinion the article could perfectly work without using the transducer analogy (paragraphs 20, 21, 22, 23), even if I understand the reasons for setting this analogy (which the author explained at the end of paragraph 24). My point of view is that the title stresses only a particular aspect of a rich, illuminating series of remarks and interpretations.
Paragraph 33 contains a list that is very useful to reconsider the (hurried) decisions we as authors make when setting metadata and to be aware of what happens when we as readers access the web in search of literature. I would like to conclude with a question: in which ways could we apply this list and consider the gift-giving principle as well as open access strategies when dealing with e-learning projects?