I’m currently trying to give Questia a chance. It’s an ebook library with a decent collection to a decent price. It’s better than It’s main competitors, I think, but I also think it is hard to understand how an interactive interface can be created so badly. I guess the DRM is getting in the way. The publishers does not allow them to do things smoothly, which is a huge mistake by all the ebook services I have tested. I am not sure how long my patience will last…
Now and then I get fed up with the action based ethics of modernity. What about the more holistic view of the Aristotelian virtue ethics? Where is the “person” in the (post)modern discourse about identities and actions? Does fragmented identities have to mean fragmented persons, and if not, what’s the relation?
By the way, there is no way of using the word virtuous in the Swedish language without sounding pious. There is knowledge - which is about the same as episteme, rational knowledge - and there is different kinds of practical knowledge. But where is the sense of wholeness? It’s not so strange that we are talking about fragmented identities when don’t even have a sound word for ‘knowledge’. And I guess English is in the same situation….
Are you tired of having to login and logout all the time if you have more than one gmail account? I was, but not any more. If you have your own domain you can can use it with Google Apps. I have a work-related gmail-account in one browser tab and a personal Google Apps address in another tab. If you want, it is possible to connect only the mail-part of google apps and have the other functions in google-based addresses.
I’m preparing a switch to Mac for my work computer, and are currently enjoying searching for new research software. One of the most exciting apps I came across for a long time is Papers. It’s a os x - software aspiring to be the iTunes of the research world. This means an iTunes-alike interface for all your pdfs and other documents, with cataloging, searching, reading, not-taking and export features. Vincent Noel writes about using Papers together with the new bibliographic features in Word 2008 for mac, but he also reports about some unsucsess due to word 2008 for Mac.
Yesterday I run across the blog All Embrasing… by an author calling himself horansome:
A Philosophy Blog (Patent Pending) on, about, around and devoted to the discussion of Conspiracy Theories. ‘All Embracing But Underwhelming’ is the author’s blog-of-progress (TM) detailing his travails, troubles and pleasures whilst working on his PhD project wherein he seeks to sort out Conspiracy Theories, mark out fallacies and generally have a good time. If you’d like to also have a good time with the author why not e-mail him at horansome-at-episto-dot-org.
I don’t think it’s possible to skip the field of conspiracy theory all together if you’re doing research about social knowledge and web 2.0. I’m not sure if 2.0 properties undermine or makes conspiracies easier to create or maintain. Probably both since 2.0 is a general boost of the possibilities for communication. Both conspiracy theory and 2.0 thinking problematizes the agency between ordinary people and authorities.
My unreflected reaction is that 2.0 knowledge properties counteract conspiracies since conspiracies grew in rather secluded thought realms. In this sense perhaps you could say that secluded social services like Facebook might be a better scene for conspiracies than the open realm of the blogosphere. In a blog you can always make your point - if the comment isn’t removed by the author - so the chance for a balanced view might be greater than in more secluded systems.
Researchers James Baker and Professor Susan Moore have written two papers investigating the psychological benefits of blogging:
Blogging can help you feel less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with your friendships, both online and face-to-face, new Australian research has found.
But people that was not blogging at this time but intended to, or wanted to blog:
were less satisfied with their friendships and they felt less socially integrated, they didn’t feel as much part of a community as the people who weren’t interested in blogging
source: Blogging boosts your social life: research - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
I am not sure what to read out of this. The second group sounds like the traditional folks who writes as some kind of Catharsis. Blogging makes writing easier, but i am not sure that blogging as a specific activity, not writing in general, is the right subject of these peoples urges. The result sounds rather planted. But still, the results are interesting.
More and more organisations are thinking about web 2.0. Blogging has been viewed both as a way of promoting an organization as well as unnecessary and time consuming. I guess that depends on the organisation and the blogger - and the situation as a whole. For some organisations promotion is one of the core areas. A University, for example, is driven by promotion. Promotion leads to new students, new researchers, new possibilities.
One of the problems is that universities and similar organisations have a graphic profile and do not want to be connected to blogging services as Wordpress.com or Blogger. On the other hand, they do not want common things like blogs in their fine publishing systems. Of course, this is a case of ignorance.
I know for a fact that some research bloggers would not like to be internalised in the universities publishing profile. My own blogging has to this day been done outside normal working ours, so I haven’t reflected on it.
But lately my thoughts have wandered in the direction of viewing blogging as a normal research activity. Blogging is a way of reaching outside your normal context. And for universities it would be a chance of promoting the research and experience of their researchers - and other staff too.
It could be done like this: Do you see the graphic in this post? View it as a stamp. It should be an official graphic following the organisation’s graphic profile - this was done quickly by myself in Photoshop as an example of how it could look like. The graphic could be placed in the sidebar and linked to a page at the university web site, where all their bloggers are listed and presented.
Ma.gnolia is a social bookmark service, like Delicious. Magnolias group- and archive-features makes it perfect for research. I have been using Magnolia beside Delicious since it was released two years ago, as a general bookmark manager. Recently I made a new account which will serve only as a reference repository for my articles and related research projects. You can check out how it looks by visiting my Magnolia page. At the time of writing it only contains 4 bookmarks, but it will grow rapidly.
Magnolia has all features of other bookmark managers, such as rss, bookmarklets for easy bookmarking, contact making, tags with tag cloud. But the features below stands out as perfect for research.
The archiving feature
The archive feature makes it possible to freeze a web page in time. This is useful if you have a reference to a web page which later is changed or removed. Due to copyright only you can view the archive copy, but you can take a screenshot and send it to however question the reference.
The group feature
Click the thumbnail for a bigger image of the group feature. In short I can give the group a name corresponding to my project or article I am writing. I can give it a custom avatar and it has its own tag cloud. When I am saving bookmarks I get the option to save to the group directly or I can do it later. A bookmark can belong to multiple groups, but it does not have to be in a group. You can have as many groups you want and the groups can be either completly open, open for viewing but only invited users can collaborate, or it can be completly privates - as my article project i the screenshot.
Issuu is a service for creating and sharing publications based on pdf-files. The publication above, I made in Impress (Powerpoint of Open Office) and exported to pdf and uploaded to Issuu. From Issuu I got a piece of code I pasted into this blog post. The embed code from Issuu can be emedded on practically all kinds of web pages.
Click on the arrow to use the mini reader or click somewhere else to read in a bigger reader.
The document Uncertainty and the Ghost of Plato is a kind of brainstorming text, and I used Impress to structure it. The presentation form can also be handy in future conversations and conferences.
This is the brand new research blog of Peter Giger. I blog about social knowledge- and research processes including tips about technology in relation to reserch.
PeterGiger.SE
