The current image of consumer technology, personal computers and front-end applications, is one of simplicity; small boxes that house smaller components and microchips, departing further and further away from the hulking, esoteric, push-pin and vacuum tube monoliths of the past. This is, of course, ideal, as the growingly tech minded society compels its citizens to participate more wholly within its self-designated bounds.

 

 

But this picture belies the massive data swarm on the other side of the front end. We might only catch glimpses of it through our interfaces, but Big Data is consuming the world, for good and ill.

In their article “CRITICAL QUESTIONS FOR BIG DATA,” Danah Boyd & Kate Crawford characterize the concept:

We define Big Data as a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of:

(1) Technology: maximizing computation power and algorithmic accuracy to gather, analyze, link, and compare large data sets.

(2) Analysis: drawing on large data sets to identify patterns in order to make economic, social, technical, and legal claims.

(3) Mythology: the widespread belief that large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy (663).

This interplay implies the Big Data approach to research and thought, where the potential of technology to facilitate, manipulate, process, and analyse torrents of data roots the belief that Big Data holds meaningful value in understanding the world thus constructed.

Sciencescape very much falls under the banner of this paradigm: it’s data set, the universe of scientific academic research and journal articles. I am intensely interested in the site, because of its attempt to organize, for our ease of access, a nebula that doubles in output every nine years (Van Noorden). To this end, the site claims to have indexed 24 million articles.

This number, in itself, is not impressive, as big academic indexes are common. Instead, the novelty arises from Sciencescape’s method of presentation and management. Here is a video from their About section:

From this clip, it appears as though Sciencescape wishes to establish a web of scholarly data through computational algorithmic methods to pick out key concepts such as subjects, authors, institutions, etc., as a means to order them in a way that exposes their topic, field of study, and impact. Big Data methodology for Big Data sets, Sciencescape works to provide meaningful orientation in the realm of science at a level that would seem too grand for more traditional approaches. The site offers free accounts to access to their database, so let us now explore the site’s aspirations in their implementation.

The way we will discover the functionality of the site is through a contemplation of the elements as they present themselves on the guided tour of Sciencescape. I do this not only to easily distinguish features of note, but as a means to peer into the minds of the site’s creators; I want to get an idea of what they think as valuable, novel, and unfamiliar, in their approach to Big Data analysis.

First, the overall presentation of the site before log-in feels very much like the now familiar startup interface (though the company’s headquarters is in Toronto).

 

 

Very professional and enticing toward potential users and investors alike, this web page contains all the standard links to the information about the project and those behind it. Clicking on the about tab allows a user to learn about the functionality of the site. Of particular note, the publishing partners sub-tab:

 

 

From the about tab, we are also able to access the guided tour, which allows us to bypass log-in.

PAPERS

The first stop is a page for an individual paper:

 

 

This particular web portal holds many interactive elements. For instance, we can follow the writers and journal, into the past and into the future when new publications are added. If the paper is available to us, then we can receive a .pdf. Other web 2.0 mainstays like “Add to Library,” “Broadcast,” and “Bookmark” also appear, as well as buttons to facebook, twitter, and email.

At the bottom of the page, there are lists of citations to and from this specific paper, but also “recommended readings” and “fields.” I am not certain as to what factors go into the recommendations, perhaps relevancies with authors and topics, but the “Fields” tab interests me the most. The list is populated with associated concepts: all of which expand through time, in order to encompass other articles.

FIELDS

The next main section of the tour presents an example of these “Fields.” Displayed is the timeline associated with AIDS research:

These field pages, I think, really display the greatest value in Sciencescape. This research timeline shows the sudden jump in scientific awareness of AIDS during the period of April-July 1983, when 825 citations mentioned it. The three months before show only 30 citations. This tool is immediately helpful in accounting for the history of the disease as science has seen it.

The other significant value on this page is the “Eigenfactor,” which Sciencescape uses to rate papers’ impact. In the field of AIDS research, we see that a paper published in May 1983 influenced others to the greatest amount.

The Eigenfactor is one of the defining characteristics of whole engine:

The Eigenfactor algorithms take into account not only the citations, but where the citations come from.  This is similar to how modern search engine algorithms rank websites.  A citation from a highly referenced journal, article or author carries more weight than one from a journal nobody has read (https://sciencescape.org/eigenfactor).

With this factor, scientists have a potential metric for significance that accounts for the entire web of data, rather than just explicitly referenced citations.

THE FINAL STOPS

The last two sections of the tour deal with the facilities in place to allow someone to keep up to date on her research. She can follow elements, such as journals, universities, authors, and fields. New papers associated with these concepts then appear in her Feed as they are published. Also, an extra level of organization exists; called “Streams.” these groups can be constructed by the follower, as a means to further link the items of which she follows. She can sort by these streams to focus her attention on one area of association.

Overall, the tour was promising to me, as an information scientist. Ideally, this specific conglomeration of social and semantic tools should increase relevancy and visibility over the extreme output of scientific research. Nevertheless, I worry about the implementation of such algorithms over such big data sets; I am not a bio-scientist, and so I cannot judge how well Sciencescape’s metrics work in coordinating fields and impacts. Certainly, more inquiry is needed, but the concepts that underlie the site are compelling.

 

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Works Cited

danah boyd & Kate Crawford (2012) CRITICAL QUESTIONS FOR BIG DATA, Information, Communication & Society, 15:5, 662-679,

Van Noordan, Richard “Global Scientific Output Doubles Every Nine Years.” News blog. Web. 30 Nov. 2015. <http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-output-doubles-every-nine-years.html>

On the 10^th floor of Elmer Holmes Bobst Library lies a well-kept secret: the NYU University Archives. With only two full time staff, four part-time graduate assistants, and one part-time undergraduate student, the department is incredibly lean. This small staff supports roughly 800 unique patrons per year, with 55% of patrons affiliated with NYU, and 45% coming from outside the University. Though only formally created in the late 1970s, the department has been collecting materials since the University’s founding in 1831. The Archive is home to a range of collections, including items such as architectural renderings, administrative records, realia, busts, posters, audiovisual materials, mascots, and more. The Archive houses their collections onsite at Bobst and in a storage facility at Cooper Square, with 40% of the collection stored offsite in a warehouse upstate. Unlike a rare book and special collection reading room, the University Archives have a fairly flexible admission policy. Their reading room is open Monday through Friday, 9:30am to 5:00pm, by appointment only. However, this collection is not restricted to patrons with specific credentials (ie. academics), but instead is open to anyone with an interest in the Archive’s holdings.

Visiting NYU’s University Archives definitely brought up issues of access. The archives are open five days a week during normal business hours. A visit to the collection for anyone with a 9-5 weekday job would be impossible. Janet Bunde, the interim University Archivist at NYU, explained that the Archive hopes to extend their hours in order to better accommodate patrons who are only available on weekends. Digitization, of course, serves as a successful remedy to the challenges of physical access. However, a crucial issue facing many university archives and special collections, including the NYU University Archives, is the lack of funding available for digitization of records. NYU has only digitized an extremely small portion of their university archives, including 1,400 photographs, a small number of 35mm films, and a few documents. The collections that NYU has digitized have been made easily accessible through their digital finding aids, and are clearly organized and presented.

I applaud Bunde and her staff for their hard work to make their archives accessible to all, and it seems that they are making great progress toward opening the collection to an even broader audience. There are still, however, major issues across institutions as to priorities of funding. Where staff constraints affect such issues of access as reading room hours, digitization serves as the antidote. There is a one-time labor commitment of digitizing and uploading materials to a server, which results in inestimable hours of use by patrons. This includes, of course, the labor of website and database maintenance, but one could argue that this time is still minimal compared to the perpetual staff needs of operating a reading room, retrieving physical materials for patrons, and providing face-to-face reference support (which of course has it’s positives, as compared to digital reference support).

Another challenge that Bunde discussed was determining which materials are necessary to preserve. In a university as large as NYU, there is a significant amount of material that must be sorted through and culled on an annual basis. As the university is able to bolster its digitization efforts, issues of quantity will become even more pressing. As Roy Rosenzweig states, “the simultaneous fragility and promiscuity of digital data requires yet more rethinking –about whether we should be trying to save everything, who is ‘responsible’ for preserving the past, and how we find and define historical evidence” (Rosenzweig, 2003). This will become a challenge that Bunde and her staff will have to grapple with as they are able to increase their digitization efforts.

Ultimately, I was very impressed with the NYU University Archives’ commitment to open access for all. Bunde and her staff created a welcoming environment for researchers who may not be regular patrons of university special collections. As Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook state, “archives –as records –wield power over the shape and direction of historical scholarship, collective memory, and national identity, over how we know ourselves as individuals, groups, and societies” (Schwartz & Cook, 2002). I believe that NYU has worked to create an archive that is inclusive of the many dialogues of NYU and the surrounding community, both historically and in current day. I was impressed with their commitment to functioning as an archive for the community, and I look forward to seeing what types of materials their future digitization projects bring to light.

References

Schwartz, Joan, and Terry Cook. “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science 2.1-19 (2002): 2-13. Print.

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era”. The American Historical Review 108.3 (2003): 739. Print.