Joe Lieberman and the spectre of an Iran war

My occasional hobby is sending emails to my elected officials about important issues. The nice thing about this is that somebody, at least, reads them (enough to figure out what I’m complaining about) and I often get back a response with a moderately detailed position statement following a moderately coherent argument.

After the recent news about Iranian weapons in Iraq, which seemed like a possible repeat of the prelude to Iraq, I sent a letter to (among others) my senator, Joe Lieberman, urging him in the strongest terms not to let this turn into justification for another war fiasco. Fortunately, it looks like the White House is not going to use this to launch another war, but whether that was the original intention is an open question. Anyhow, here’s the message I got back from Joe:

Dear Mr. Ross:

Thank you for contacting me about the escalating situation in Iran concerning its nuclear program.

So now EFPs contribute to the “escalating situation” of the Iranian nuclear program? I’m confused. Tell me more, Joe.

As you know, the accession of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President of Iran has increased the concern of the United States, as well as our allies, due to his recent remarks regarding the annihilation of Israel and the United States, as well as his support for Iran’s nuclear program. President Ahmadinejad’s declaration that Iran had enriched uranium, and Iran’s refusal to date to suspend enrichment in defiance of a call by the United Nations (UN) to halt its nuclear program, further complicates an already troubling situation.

U.S. sanctions currently in effect ban or strictly limit U.S. trade, aid, and investment in Iran and penalize foreign firms that invest in Iran’s energy sector; but unilateral U.S. sanctions do not appear to have materially slowed Iran’s weapons of mass destruction programs or shaken the regime’s grip on power. Over the past two years, the Bush Administration has been engaged with our partners and allies, particularly European nations and Russia, to curb Iran’s nuclear program. Unfortunately, the Government of Iran has responded by reneging on multiple treaty obligations and other pledges and continuing to push forward with its nuclear program.

Hmm. I thought there was a distinction between Iran’s nuclear program and the issue of weapons of mass destruction. Guess not. Wait, I think I’m starting to understand. EFP (of dubious provenance)=IED=bomb=weapon of mass destruction=nuclear weapon=nuclear program. Ok, go on.

It also contains provisions that authorize assistance to peaceful pro-democracy groups inside and outside Iran and provides additional tools to curb money laundering efforts that finance and support weapons of mass destruction proliferation. I cosponsored an earlier version of this legislation (S. 333) in 2005, and I supported H.R. 6198. I was very pleased that the measure was adopted by the Senate and that it is now law. In addition, I supported S.Res. 633, which the Senate adopted by unanimous consent in December 2006. S.Res. 633 condemned a conference in Iran denying that the Holocaust occurred. The Conference was hosted by the Government of Iran and its President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

We cannot, and must not, stand on the sidelines while Iran continues to develop nuclear capabilities and threaten the security and stability of the world. I strongly believe the United States must work diplomatically with our allies as well as the UN to alleviate this situation. I believe all options for dealing with Iran’s quest to develop nuclear weapons should remain on the table. As your Senator, please be assured I will continue to monitor this situation closely.

So all options should remain on the table (such as pre-emptive nuclear strikes) despite the fact that UN inspections and extensive investigation by US and other intelligence agencies have revealed nothing to contradict the Iranian public position that it is abiding by the NPT? Given the candor of Ahmadinejad about Holocaust denial and the annihilation of Israel, it doesn’t make sense (to me at least) that he would in such strong terms not only endorse the NPT, but also state that developing nuclear weapons would be against his nation’s religious principles, unless it was true. It’s certainly prudent not to take the word from Tehran as gospel, and to make contingency plans, but can we at least refrain from saber-rattling until we evidence and/or statements from Iranian official to suggest that they actually are trying to develop nukes?

Maybe I should look at this optimistically: nobody actually read my message, and a computer automatically put it in the “Iran weapons of mass destruction” inbox based on keywords. It’s good that my senator has everything figured out already, so he doesn’t have to pay attention to the silly ideas of his constituents.

Wikipedia as a source

Yale Daily News ran a story on Wednesday, “Profs question students’ Wikipedia dependency“. I guess it’s a disturbing sign that I thought angry and vindictive thoughts about the student, freshman John Behan, who created a number of fake articles. I used to think that kind of thing was funny, and I feel like I should still (in principle, at least; Behan’s work didn’t even rise to the level of BJAODN). The article focuses on one fake in particular, “emysphilia” (turtle fetish). But as it turns out, emysphilia (Behan’s “most successful” article) was deleted rather quickly; its only traction came from syndication on Answers.com. It’s unclear whether anyone besides people with direct knowledge of the hoax and the Wikipedians voting to delete it even read the article; it’s not something one would just run into on Answers.com without searching for the non-existent term.

The YDN article goes on with some quotes from professors about how Wikipedia is not an acceptable academic source. The headline for the page 6 continuation is “Inaccuracies make Wikipedia an unreliable academic source”, which is a pretty mediocre summary of what the faculty actual say about the subject. One prof makes reference to the “rigorous editing standards of hard copy sources”, compared to an anecdote about a Wikipedia article (with accurate, referenced information) giving the wrong first name (James Boswell instead of John Boswell) for a source. Unfortunately, the professor failed to take any action; I just tracked down the article I presume he was referring to, which it took 5 seconds to correct. (I have my own share of anecdotes about contradictions between a hard copy scholarly source and WP where it’s the hard copy that is wrong, but I digress.)

Like most stories about Wikipedia as an academic source, the Yale story misses the point. Another professor hits on the legitimate basis for excluding Wikipedia as an academic source: it’s an encyclopedia. 5 years from now, Wikipedia is going to be more accurate than any general print encyclopedia (at least on topics that traditional encyclopedias actually cover). And for random contradictions between a book source and a referenced Wikipedia article, Wikipedia will be the correct one more often than not. But it still won’t be an acceptable academic source, except perhaps as a place to point readers for peripheral background information. Because it will still be a tertiary source.

This issue has been in the news a lot since the Middlebury College Wikipedia ban and the Chronicle of Higher Education story on it.

Here’s a similar blog post about the issue, from a clear-headed historian.

What the frack?

I generally resort to snobbery and my newfound east coast elitism when it comes to things like blog memes, but out of respect for Dave at Patahistory, I’ll play along.

5 Things You Don’t Know About Me

1. One of my tuxedo cat is missing.

(Courtesy of The Onion)

2. My aloe vera plant is named Al the third (the grandchild of my dad’s original Al, who is still thriving in Reno), and his children include Alvin, Al the fourth, Alistair, Alliam, Alexander, Albert, Allen, Ali, Allie, Alec, and about 5 others whose names I forget. Like many Americans, Al is obese (at about 11 kg and .6 m, he as a BMI just above 30); he actually has to be propped up against the window. Fortunately, he’s very charismatic (even if Faith doesn’t like him). As you can see, he gets plenty of attention from the orchid next door.
3. Despite the mean, petty, jealous, vindictive things Matt “teacher’s pet” Gunterman has been saying about me lately, I have nothing but respect for him. I especially respect his nose.
4. MSG is my favorite food additive. It’s good on just about everything. (Really.)
5. I sometimes wear a cat scarf.

What will Wikipedia be like 5 years from now?

With the continued growth of Wikipedia and its sister projects, it’s worth asking what the Wikimedia ecosystem will look like down the road. Here’s my vision of what it will and/or should be like.

Necessary functional improvements:

  1. Search. Wikipedia’s current internal search program is horrible. It is bizarrely sensitive to case, but lacks all the features we’ve come to expect from search. Quotation marks mean nothing. Results are often woefully incomplete (I often have to use a site-specific Google search to find what I’m looking for on Wikipedia). The interface is clunky, especially with all the check boxes at the bottom for different namespaces (and the fact that checking/unchecking only registers if you use the right search box, of the three available). But when search finally gets done right on Wikipedia, it will be a great thing; we’ll need a new verb to complement “to google” (“look it up on Wikipedia” just doesn’t have the same ring). Wikipedia search will be cross-project, with redirects and related entries (Wiktionary and Wikisaurus, Wikimedia Commons, articles in other languages) nested together. It should have some of the elements of Google’s search algorithm; the readable text of piped links should affect results, and results should be ordered by a sort of internal PageRank with the option of reordering them by size, date of last edit, etc.
  2. Stable versions and Approved versions. It’s been in the works for a while now, but there is still no system for managing stable articles where acceptable edits are few and far between, nor is there a good way to flag vetted versions (e.g., a version approved as a Featured Article). Semi-protection is a mediocre substitute for version control, while proposals to implement similar features manually have been too complicated for the community to accept. For stable, largely complete articles, new edits should not show up until they have been screened by one or a few other editors. And for ultra-stable articles, there should be an integrated system for revision and draft work while the consensus version remains viewable to readers.
  3. Audio/Visual accessibility. Because the major formats are all patented and could potentially have significant use limitations placed on them, Wikipedia uses Ogg files with free and open encoding to store and serve audio and video content. For the most part, users must go through a bit of trouble (i.e., downloading and installing codecs from off-site), although audio content now has rudimentary in-browser support. Obviously, the ideal would be integrated audio-video content without leaving the article; YouTube and Google Video have done this fairly well, though with proprietary technology (Adobe Flash with patented codecs). Video (both historical and user-created) will undoubtedly become a much bigger part of Wikipedia and Commons in the future.
  4. Unified login. Obviously, it would be convenient to have a single account for all the Wikimedia projects. It’s been in the works for a while now, but it’s more of a convenience for editors (and a correction of a design flaw) than a major improvement.
  5. Metadata handling. The current system of templates, categories, and other article metadata (beyond basic linking and formatting markup) is unintuitive, inconsistent, awkward, and intimidating to new editors, and the categories are difficult to navigate and far less useful than they could be. Something like a metadata namespace, for infoboxes, categories, Featured Article stars, interwiki links and the like, would be very beneficial.
  6. Categories. Related to the metadata issue, the category system needs to be completely overhauled. In the current system, categories must be divided and subdivided to maintain usefulness, and editors (new and established) often apply overly general categories to new articles. Instead, Wikipedia subdivides large categories into more specific ones. Broad categories like “American people” or “Songs” must be constantly monitored so they do not grow out of control. For example, for a given song, the subdivision branches into a wilderness of partially-overlapping subcategories like “songs by year”, “songs by artist”, “songs by lyricist”, “songs by nationality”, and “songs by genre”, along with a host of other possible orthogonal categories like “songs with sexual themes” and “cat songs”. Ideally, categorization would be both simpler and more flexible. Assigning broad categories (“songs”, “folk music”, “1963”, “protest”, “Bob Dylan”), with some semantic information (“is”, “from”, “related to”, “performed by”) should automatically create appropriate subcategories (Blowin’ in the Wind is a song and is folk music , from 1963, related to protest, performed by Bob Dylan).

Hoped-for functional improvements:

  1. Verifiability assessment. Eventually, Wikipedia will need a way to sort articles according to verifiability and sourcing (as a proxy for reliability, the direct measurement of which will always run into the problem of self-reference and the authority of editors). Readers should be able to tell immediately (before even beginning to read) whether an article is based on peer-reviewed articles and scholarly books, mainstream media sources, local or niche-oriented professional journalism, blogs and internet sites, primary sources, etc. Potentially, this could solve some of the perennial contentious issues about notability and the borderline of original research. The volume of material on minor topics (especially related to popular culture, current events, and minor/local institutions) is growing much faster than it can be strictly vetted (and deleted when appropriate) according to the current notability and verifiability guidelines, and there is a lot of material that is de facto acceptable, even if it doesn’t strictly comply with the current rules. And a lot of this is good, accurate material that readers and editors find useful. If material with few or potentially unreliable sources is clearly flagged as such, there will be less incentive to wage futile wars of deletionism on what is undeniably valuable. In other words, a compromise between elitist and populist visions of what Wikipedia should be.
  2. Discussion forums. I envision a discussion board for each article, separate from the talk page, where users (editors and readers alike) can discuss the subject of the article without the concern of trying to improve the article. This departs somewhat from the core mission of Wikipedia, but I think it would be beneficial is several ways. First, it would direct most of the irrelevant commentary away from talk pages, making collaboration among editors run more smoothly. Second, it could host ads for the support of the Wikimedia Foundation, without compromising the non-commercial nature of Wikipedia itself. And third, it would enhance the usefulness of Wikipedia at the borders of verifiability; readers who want more than the article has to offer can turn to the other forum participants for the speculation, rumor, and strained interpretation they seek.
  3. Stat tracking. Mainly for performance reasons, Wikipedia does very little in the way of internal stat tracking. But in the long run, it would be useful, both for identifying popular articles and for studying Wikipedia itself. In addition to hit counters for every article, the site should track (without retaining any potential identifying information) visit paths as readers surf from one article to another. And for those with editcountitis, some automatic sophisticated contribution analysis (like what can be done through JavaScript hacks by knowledgeable editors now) would be nice: things like total content added, deleted, histograms of edit size and frequency, etc.

So what will the future Wikipedia be like in a broader sense? Its cultural authority and perceived reliability will continue to increase, but surely both will begin to level off within the next few years. Traditional non-specialist encyclopedias will simply be irrelevant, and probably bankrupt. Given the degree of brand success Wikipedia has already achieved, the chances for a successful fork are quickly approaching nil. Citizendium seemed like it had an outside chance at becoming a viable competitor, but it has been managed poorly thus far and I think the window of opportunity is closing rapidly. Citizendium membership is turning out as odd mix of people who don’t edit Wikipedia because it doesn’t respect (their) authority enough, and because it respects authority (of published sources) too much; thus, many of the same issues that drive experts away from Wikipedia will show up in Citizendium if it grows large enough to matter. If it retains the GFDL license, Citizendium may have a place as a minor satellite of Wikipedia from which content is occasionally imported.

Wikipedia will also seriously eat away at the specialist encyclopedia market. I expect the viability of specialist encyclopedias will vary by field, according to which experts embrace and contribute to Wikipedia. In general, scientists (especially in the “harder” fields) and mathematicians have shown a great deal more enthusiasm than humanists, with social scientists somewhere between. (I find this ironic, because humanities fields have so much more to gain from an integrated and cross-linked ecology of knowledge; despite constant flux and discipline genesis at the borders and the current rhetorical vogue of “interdisciplinary” research, science topics are relatively self-contained compared to humanities topics.) It’s an open question whether the academic culture of the humanities will get on board in a significant way. Unfortunately, I think the Ivory Tower mentality and its paradoxical counterpart of academic careerism (especially in the current tight job market) are too entrenched; I expect participation just to continue with incremental gains through the recruitment of individual humanist Wikipedians.

As more and more people look to Wikipedia as their first (and often only) source for arbitrary information, Wikipedia will begin to seriously encroach on the market share of the search companies. It’s entirely possible that one or more of the major portals (most likely Ask.com and Yahoo!) will replace Wikipedia search results with mirrored content with added advertising. And if implemented well, some users might even prefer this; after all, ads results are sometimes just what you were looking for. (Similarly, Wikipedia itself might implement optional ads, which would only appear if explicitly enabled by users.) The ecosystem of value-added and exploitive businesses making a living off of Wikipedia will expand dramatically, which is bound to create plenty of unforeseen issues and controversies. But I don’t expect any major crises in that respect, since Wikipedia has always been built with the (legal and practical) potential for commercial exploitation.

The bigger problem will be professional PR and information management. In the next year or two, Wikipedia will have to create a system to deal with the complaints and requests of powerful economic and political entities. The recent Microsoft brouhaha over paid editing is the tip of the iceberg. It will be a challenge to create a system that is acceptable to the community but also acceptable enough to outsiders that they will use it instead of guerrilla editing. However, 5 years from now I think there will be some kind of stable equilibrium through a combination of an official system for dealing with accusations of bias from article subjects and vigilant groups of Wikipedians on the lookout for whitewashing.

In addition to encyclopedias, search, and PR, a number of other industries are going to feel pressure from the free content behemoth of Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Commons will cut drastically into the market for stock photography, although Getty Images and Corbis will still have control of plenty of images that can’t be reproduced, and free media from limited-access venues (like celebrity functions) will still be hard to come by. (Wikipedia has tried, unsuccessfully thus far, to get Wikipedian photographers into red carpet events and award shows.) The glut of easily available images is already prompting stock photography companies to go the MPAA/RIAA route of suing liberally over copyright.

Politically, Wikipedia will do a lot to foster the free culture movement and especially to improve the atmosphere for copyright reform. It’s probably too optimistic to expect a reduction of copyright terms within the next five years, but at least any further extension (beyond the atrocious Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998) should be unlikely. Unfortunately, there’s no good way to show people how lame 95 year copyright terms are until the great content from the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s starts to come into the public domain. (That stuff is our cultural heritage and ought to be in the public domain already; I think something like 50 years or the life of the author plus 20 is more than enough protection to serve the intended purpose of copyright.)

That’s all…the crystal’s gone dark.

Ed Larson comes to town

Edward J. Larson was the guest for my department’s colloquium yesterday. It was neat to get a chance to talk with him during the graduate student coffee beforehand, where I was the host (even if it was hard to get a word in edgewise). Larson is an interesting character for a number of reasons. His research interests are admirably sprawling; he’s a legal scholar as well of as a historian of science, and religion, and politics, and law. He was Frank Herbert‘s lawyer; as he told it, it was his job to call up Frank and tell him when he’d been at his foreign residence too long and had to get back home to avoid extra taxes. He studied history at Wisconsin under Ron Numbers, and he shares an inordinate number of interests with my advisor Dan Kevles (including eugenics, law, the Galapagos, Antarctica).

Like Numbers (and unlike the vast majority of scientists and philosophers), Larson takes an extremely balanced approach to his work on creationism and its permutations (see his two books, Trial and Error and Summer for the Gods). And in lot of ways, he’s in a perfect position to do something powerful and significant for the public discourse over Intelligent Design. He has a track record with his Pulitzer Prize-winning Scopes Trial book, which is well regarded by creationists, anti-creationists, and historians of science (no mean feat). By odd coincidence, Larson was a fellow of the Discovery Institute, doing unpaid consulting on their Cascadia Project (which is funded mostly by the Gates Foundation, even now). He left when they got into ID, but obviously his connection there just adds to his credibility on the topic. Larson was at University of Georgia for a number of years, but recently moved to Pepperdine University, where he still does both law and history. Pepperdine is a Church of Christ school (coincidently, the non-denomination both Matt Gunterman and I grew up in); Larson was raised a Lutheran (I think of the ALC variety, now part of the ELCA ), though I’m not sure how religious he is now.

Anyhow, the point of all this is that a book on ID by Larson would demand respect from a lot of corners. When I asked him why he hadn’t done more with it (his latest projects are on the election of 1800 and Antarctic exploration), he got defensive. On the one hand, he insisted he had in fact written a lot on ID (articles in an assortment of popular venues; the updated version of Trial and Error; public lectures like the one he’s giving this afternoon; his appearance last year on The Daily Show). On the other hand, he explained, Intelligent Design is extremely hard to pin down. Each of the main figures at the Discovery Institute has a different take on what exactly ID entails, and each is defending a different set of metaphysical doctrines (obviously, even if not explicitly). To further complicate things, there’s the tricky relationship between “Intelligent Design” and “intelligent design”, the utterly blurred continuum from Phillip Johnson to William Dembski to Michael Behe to Mike Gene to Francis Collins to Ken Miller. So Larson said that Intelligent Design isn’t a discrete historical topic, and that this kind of thing (cultural/intellectual history?) is not what he does. (He has written a general history of evolution, a concept at least as historically amorphic and flexible as ID, but I digress.) His understanding of the complexity of the issue (as opposed to the polemics that currently pass as scholarly analysis, which tend to have a monolithic view of ID) is exactly why he should write the book on it. I guess the real issue is that he doesn’t think ID is a significant issue in the long term, which I think is (for better or worse) may not be the case.

On a related note, Horganism has a pair of posts (part 1, part 2) about an interview with Francis Collins that are worth looking at.

Winter break

It’s been a while since I’ve post anything personal. The most interesting news is probably the trip to Europe Faith and I took with her Dad. There are lots of pictures on Flickr, but I’ll put up some of my favorites here:

“Cogwheel train to Rigi Kulm”

“Luzern swan moves closer”

“Luzern water tower”

“Historical re-enactment”

These pictures are all the results of my new camera, a Canon PowerShot S2. Unfortunately, I didn’t have it for Thanksgiving vacation (in Orlando with my family, including the cousins), which was also a great time.

Closing in on qualifiers

My first semester as a teaching assistant is done, and in about two months I’ll be taking qualifiers. I was pretty pleased with the way the course (Ole Molvig’s “History of Modern Science in Society”) went. I was disappointed with the amount of low amount of reading the class was willing to do; discussions were perpetually hamstrung because a large portion of the class didn’t do the reading in any given week. However, leading discussions was fun and I think I got a lot better at it as the semester went by. We used the Wikipedia assignment that I designed, which took a lot more work (on my part and the students’) than the original assignment. You can see the results here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ragesoss/HIST_236

(On a related noted, I wrote an article for the Wikipedia Signpost on Wikipedia assignments.)

As it turns out, I’m a hard-ass grader. (Technically, grades were Ole’s responsibility while grading was mine, but still.) History of Science, History of Medicine has the unfortunate reputation of being an easy major at Yale. So, especially considering the amount of work I required of them, many students were frustrated with the low grades (a B+ average, which is considered a bad grade these days). Now I have the reputation of a TA to avoid. But it’s hard to feel bad about it; grade inflation doesn’t do anyone any favors.

This semester will probably be different. I’m TAing for Susan Lederer’s “A History of American Bodies”, which has 7 TAs and possibly up to 300 students. That means the grading will be fairly uniform across sections and the overall distribution will probably be higher.

Matt Gunterman is back at Yale, and he’s the head TA, which means he has to run point for all the class logistics. Ha ha. Sucks to be him. He has a blog post about the first lecture. I’m glad he’s back, and I’m also TAing with my fellow 3rd year Brendan; it looks like we’ll do our orals on the same day, and we have two fields more-or-less in common, so I’m looking forward to having some orals prep discussions with him. It’s nice to have someone to bitch about orals with.

For the first time in my graduate career, I’m not going to audit or sit in on any extra classes this semester. In theory, that means I have more time for orals reading. But in practice, I can’t read for more than about four hours a day; after that, nothing sinks in and I lose all will to keep at it. Some people are capable of more sustained reading, but I think most graduate students are not (unless they’re popping Ritalin); qualifier preparation is like a hazing ritual. (At Yale, qualifiers are actually not so harrowing an experience, but they still have enough of the traditional elements to cause plenty of stress and induce plenty of depression.)

Speaking of Ritalin, I’ve been trying to convince Faith to score me some free samples from the pharma reps, but she won’t. (They give out whatever prescriptions medical students are on that are still under patent protection; unforunately, Faith’s meds just went generic but aren’t yet being produced by very many sources, so they’re hardly any cheaper but no longer free.) Since becoming a coffee and tea drinker, I’ve become much more attuned to the effects things like carbohydrates, salt, and caffeine. I want to branch out to self-testing of more psychoactive substances, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Oh well.

Top 10 Reasons Why Academics Should Edit Wikipedia

Top 10 lists are all the rage with the kids on the internets these days, so I thought I’d give it a shot with a list of reasons professors, graduate students, and other academics should be editing the Wikipedia [sic]:

  • 10.) It may be likely to assist in the overcoming of the predilection (i.e., inclination) to compose impenetrable prose, instead fostering the increased utilization of brevity.
  • 9.) You can cite your own work as a reference.
  • 8.) Articles in JSTOR don’t have hyperlinks.
  • 7.) You can write as many pages as you want, and use color images on every one.
  • 6.) Accessing Wikipedia articles doesn’t require a subscription.
  • 5.) It’s fun, easy, and gives you a warm feeling inside.
  • 4.) You have a responsibility to spread knowledge.
  • 3.) It’s easy to spot plagiarism when you’re the original author.
  • 2.) It fosters interest in what you do, and in the long run will strengthen the job market in your field.
  • 1.) People will actually read what you write.

Are there better reasons I missed?

HSS meeting in Vancouver, open journals, Wikipedia evangelism

Last weekend was the History of Science Society meeting in Vancouver, BC. Despite growing up in Seattle, I had never been to Canada before.

I gave my first scholarly paper (which I had tried out a week before at the department’s Holmes Workshop): “Natural Philosophy Images: Pedagogy and Popular Science in America”. I was in a panel with two other very good talks on physics education-related texts–one on 20th century Canadian high school textbooks, which fit well with mine on 19th century American textbooks, and one on children’s biographies of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. I’m really pleased with how it went; I got some good questions, and I had at least reasonable responses to all of them, as my Yale colleagues had prepared me well. Turnout was pretty good, really good for a panel of two early graduate students (myself and Michelle D. Hoffman of U. of Toronto), one guy not yet in graduate school (Trevor J. Owens, majored in history of science at Wisconsin), and one junior professor talking on a topic only marginally related to the rest (Steve Sturdy, a lecturer at University of Edinburgh who does history of medicine). I was really excited because David Kaiser was in the audience, but he left after the first two talks (i.e., right before mine).

One of the great things was talking with Adam Shapiro; his dissertation project, on the textbook industry and the Scopes Trial, is freaking awesome (and he has the kind of cultivated idiosyncrasy of dress and manner that I can appreciate).

As is typical at conferences, much of my best-spent time was with people from New Haven. I didn’t spend as much time meeting new people as I have at previous conferences, but no regrets. I did stay up drinking late into the night (along with Brendan) with the marvelous Gar Allen, which was great fun. And I met John Rudolph. And, in one of the great ego-inflating moments of my entire life, I was recognized by a stranger as… the writer of this blog. But beyond that, I mostly stuck with people I already knew.

John Rudolph invited me to work up my textbook research into something publishable, to submit for an upcoming special science studies issue of Science Education. Assuming I can find the time to do that (what with qualifiers hanging over my head) and that I could make it good enough to get accepted, it’s time to decide how seriously I want to take my free-knowledge ideals, since they conflict with my goal of actually being able to get a history job someday. I would like to only publish in open content journals… ideally, ones that support copyleft, but that’s not likely to happen any time soon. There aren’t really even any open content history of science journals (the closest things are History of Intellectual Culture and Science, Technology & Innovation Studies) or general American history journals (the closest thing is American Diplomacy). What needs to happen is for a broad flagship journal (like Isis or JAH) to totally retool for open content: increase the number of published articles drastically, invite contributions from a wider range, and start poaching from all the competitor journals. If it was done right, with a plan for expanding the editorial positions to keep pace with submissions and maintain quality, it could force the whole journal ecosystem to switch to open content. Before there was search, it made sense to have highly specialized journals. But at this point, it would make far more sense to get rid of the vast majority of paper publications and make open content online publication the standard.

Another variation on that theme… Despite the marked lack of enthusiasm for Wikipedia among professional science studiers in listservs (like the HOPOS and H-SCI-MED-TECH lists where I pump the History of Science Collaborations of the Month and get ignored), scholars express a fair amount of enthusiasm or at least convincibility when I talk to them in person about Wikipedia. The most effective line of argument (sadly) is not the “contribute to society” one, but the one about how creating high-quality free content expands the market for our work; what science studiers do has the potential to be popular, as far as scholarship goes, but not many people know how compelling our stories are. Even down to an individual level, it will probably pay off in career-prospect terms a few years down the road to have good Wikipedia articles about your area of expertise; it will whet people’s appetites for more, and give people (including the scholars who might hire you) an entry point into your particular esoteric specialty.