The evolving scholarly record: new uses and new forms

Abstract

This presentation will take a very broad view of the emergence of literary corpora as objects of computation, with a particular focus on the various literatures and genres that form the scholarly record. The developments and implications here that I will explore include: the evolution of the scholarly literature into a semi-structured network of information used by both human readers and computational agents through the introduction of markup technologies; the interpenetration and interweaving of data and evidence with the literature; and the creation of an invisible infrastructure of names, taxonomies and ontologies, and the challenges this presents. Primary forms of computation on this corpus include both comprehensive text mining and stream analysis (focused on what's new and what's changing as the base of literature and related factual databases expand with reports of new discoveries). I'll explore some of the developments in this area, including some practical considerations about platforms, licensing, and access. As the use of the literature evolves, so do the individual genres that comprise it. Today's typical digital journal article looks almost identical to one half a century old, except that it is viewed on screen and printed on demand. Yet there is a great deal of activity driven by the move to data and computationally intensive scholarship, demands for greater precision and replicability in scientific communication, and related sources to move journal articles "beyond the PDF," reconsidering relationships among traditional texts, software, workflows, data and the broad cultural record in its role as evidence. I'll look briefly at some of these developments, with particular focus on what this may mean for the management of the scholarly record as a whole, and also briefly discuss some parallel challenges emerging in scholarly monographs. Finally, I will close with a very brief discussion of what might be called corpus-scale thinking with regard to the scholarly record at the disciplinary level. I'll briefly discuss the findings of a 2014 National Research Council study that I co-chaired dealing with the future of the mathematics literature and the possibility of creating a global digital mathematics library, as well as offering some comments on developments in the life sciences. I will also consider the emergence of new corpus-wide tools and standards, such as Web-scale annotation, and some of their implications.