Reading Avoidance

Jodi SchneiderWork in Progress presentation

DERI Social Software Unit2010-12-17

slide credit: Geoffrey Bilder

Context: “Beyond the PDF” workshop

• My goal: Provide use cases, drawing from library & information science research findings (What do we know about how scientists read?) and existing or needed ontologies

• Workshop Goal: Move “beyond the PDF” with better integration between papers & data– Identify a set of requirements– A group of willing participants to develop open

source code to accelerate knowledge sharing

Kinds of Reading (my theory)

• “Active Reading”– purposeful often non-linear reading,

often accompanied by skimming, scanning, highlighting, and note-taking

• “Just-in-time” Reading– delving into the literature at the end-stages of the writing

process, to scan for omitted literature or new findings

• "Reading Avoidance”– assessing and exploiting content with as little actual

reading as possible.

slide credit: Carol Tenopir

slide credit: Carol Tenopir

Freeing our time for new tasks!

Eisenstein, E. L. (1979). The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe. Cambridge University Press.

slide credit: Geoffrey Bilder

“In fact, researchers may be practicing active reading avoidance.

(Palmer, 2007; Renear, 2006, 2007)

Researchers are rapidly navigating through more material, spending less and less time with each item, and attempting to assess and exploit content with as little actual reading as possible.”

Intensification of longstanding practices

Indexing and citations help us decide whether or not articles are relevant … without reading them.

Abstracts and literature reviews help us take advantage of articles … without reading them.

The articles we do read provide summaries and discussions that help us take advantage of other articles… without reading them.

Colleagues, and graduate students, help us learn about and understand articles… without reading them.

And the apparatus (tables of contents, references, figures, etc.), distinctive formatting of text components (such as lists, equations, scientific names, etc.), help us exploit articles … without reading them.

Slide Credit: Carole Palmer

But researchers do “read”, in many different ways

probing in new areas conference lurking to web exploration

learning textbook-like explanations

positioning directed searching of topic

competing directed searching of people

scanning, stay aware reviews to alerting services & blogs

rereading personal collections

reading around following leads to thematic collections

Slide Credit: Carole Palmer

Other uses of the literature are equally important

consulting - experimental resource to identifyprotocolsinstrumentationcomparative results

compiling – customized personal collectionslaptops full of PDFs

extracting – core knowledge base “facts” for ontology development

building - source for database enrichmentannotation, evidence

Slide Credit: Carole Palmer

Death by Tabs (Not good for reading)

Fundamental papers

• Renear, Allen H., and Carole L. Palmer. 2009. “Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing.” Science 325:828-832. doi:10.1126/science.1157784(Open access ISWC 2009 workshop paper:http://esw.w3.org/images/c/ce/HCLS$$ISWC2009$$Workshop$Renear.pdf )

• Tenopir, Carol, Donald W. King, Sheri Edwards, and Lei Wu. 2009. “Electronic journals and changes in scholarly article seeking and reading patterns.” Aslib Proceedings 61:5-32. doi:10.1108/00012530910932267

Paper screenshots

• Swanson, D. R. (1986). Undiscovered Public Knowledge. The Library Quarterly, 56(2), 103-118. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4307965

• Xiaohua Hu, Guangrong Li, Yoo, I., Xiaodan Zhang, & Xuheng Xu. (2005). A semantic-based approach for mining undiscovered public knowledge from biomedical literature. In Granular Computing, 2005 IEEE International Conference. doi:10.1109/GRC.2005.1547229

Slide Credits

• Geoffrey Bilder. “Social Media and Scholarly Communication”. ISMTE 2010 Oct 19, Oxford, UKhttp://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/social-media-and-scholarly-communication

• James Evans, Carol Tenopir. “Electronic Publication: The Narrowing of Science and Scholarship?” 11th Fiesole Collection Development Retreat, Glasgow, Scotland, July 23-25, 2009 via http://digital.casalini.it/retreat/retreat_2009.html

• Carol Palmer. “Research Practice and Research Libraries: Working toward High-Impact Information Services” http://www.oclc.org/programsandresearch/dss/ppt/dss_palmer.ppt OCLC, Dublin, Ohio, June 19, 2008

Other related presentations• Palmer, Carole L. (2007). “Adapting digital information to scientific practices”.

International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers STM Spring Conference: The Next Generation: Endless Choices & Economic Constraints. Cambridge, MA, 24-26 April 2007. http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/700/palmer-stm-final5-07.ppt.pdf?sequence=3

• Renear, A.H. (2007). “How we will [^won’t] read in 2017”. Time Odyssey: Visions of Reference and User Services RUSA President's Program American Library Association Washington DC, June 25th, 2007, revised August 13, 2007.http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~renear/renearRUSA07.pdf

• Renear, A. H. (2007).” Standard domain ontologies: The rate limiting step for the "Next Big Change" in scientific communication”. The 233rd American Chemical Society National Meeting, Chicago, IL, 25-29 March, 2007. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/9258/acs07stmFinal.pdf?sequence=2

• Renear, A. H. (2006). “Ontologies and STM publishing”. STM Innovations, London, UK, 1 December, 2006. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/9259/stm06Final.pdf?sequence=2