Making scholarly publications

accessible online:

Erdős and beyond

Prof. Jonathan P. BowenLondon South Bank University

United Kingdom

www.jpbowen.com

Lucean Freud (1922–2011)

“What do I ask of a painting [paper]?I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.”

• National Portrait Gallery, London• www.npg.org.uk/freudsite

Introduction• Prof. Jonathan Bowen• Mathematics, art, engineering,

computer science, softwareengineering, museum informatics

• Career: Oxford, Reading, LSBU• Visitor: King’s College London, Brunel,

Westminster, Waikato (New Zealand)• Pratt Institute (NY, USA – Museum Informatics)

• Electronic Visualisation and the Arts(EVA London conference, 10–12 July 2012)

Introduction• Online communities• Mathematical graphs• Visualization• Academic communities• Co-authorship• Citations• Databases• Google Scholar• Microsoft Academic Search• Academia.edu

Communities• Community of Practice (CoP) –

collection of people developing domain knowledge

• Academic communities – researchers, professors, scientists

• Body of Knowledge (BoK) – ontology for a particular domain

• Interdisciplinarity vs. Multidisciplinarity

Cultivating a CoP1. Design the CoP to evolve naturally.

2. Create opportunities for open discussion.

3. Welcome and allow different levels of participation.

Example – two communities

(arts and science)

Facebook TouchGraph connections

GoogleFirst webserver, 1999– already in a museum!

Technology

Google Scholar• http://scholar.google.com – publications & citations

• h-index (top h publications with h or more citations)

• i10-index (at least 10 citations)

Microsoft Academic Search• http://academic.research.microsoft.com

• Publications, citations, h-index

• g-index (top g with a total of at least g2 citations)

Top 30 co-authors as measured by the number of publications

Academic Search

co-author graph

Academic Search citation graph• Top 34 authors by number of citations

Supervisors and students

Alonzo Church and Alan Turing

Academic Search

genealogy graph

See alsoMathematics Genealogywebsite

Alan Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954)

• Centenary year in 2012– www.turingcentenary.eu 

• Andrew Hodges (Turing biographer)– Alan Turing: the Enigma (1983)– www.turing.org.uk

• The Turing Digital Archive (3,000 images)– King’s College Cambridge– www.turingarchive.org

• Jack Copeland’s Turing Archive (facsimiles)– www.alanturing.net

Turing’s Worlds (23–24 June 2012)• Department of Continuing Education, University

of Oxford – http://conted.ox.ac.uk/turing

Ivor Grattan-Guinness et al.

Happy Birthday Alan Turing!• Also Ivor Grattan-Guinness, historian of mathematics

and logic (born 23 June 1941)

The Erdős number

• Paul Erdős (1913–1996)– Hungarian mathematician– en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdős– Erdős number 0– Co-authored over 1,000 publications

• 511 co-authors– Erdős number 1– Co-authors of Erdős co-authors

• Erdős number 2• Etc.

Academic Search

co-author path

Robin Wilson, mathematician and co-author

Academia.edu • Academic networking website• Cf. LinkedIn (professional networking)• Includes affiliation to university and

department• Allows easy addition of books, papers,

answers, talks, teaching documents, research interests, CV, status updates, websites, etc.

• Add keywords for publication searching• Monitoring of access statistics

Academia.edu home page

E.g., lsbu.academia.edu/JonathanBowen

Academia.edu statistics

E.g., lsbu.academia.edu/JonathanBowen

Academia.edu search engine accesses

E.g., lsbu.academia.edu/JonathanBowen

Academia.edu document accesses

Last 30 days

Academia.edu document accesses

Last 30 days

Academia.edu top documents

Last 30 days

Academia.edu keyword searches

Last 30 days

Academia.edu country accesses

Last 30 days

Academia.edu top country accesses

Last 30 days

Non-free citations websites

• E.g., Web of Knowledge

• Thomson Reuters: http://wokinfo.com

• UK: http://wok.mimas.ac.uk

• OK if your university subscribes

• But not all do ...

Free publications websites• ACM Digital Library – CS professional body• BibSonomy – social bookmark and

publication sharing system• CiteSeerX – publications database• DBLP – CS bibliography, individual effort• Issuu – personal documents (PDF, ...)• Mendeley – reference manager,

academic social network• ResearchGate – for scientists, make your

work visible, 1.7 million members• Researchr – find, collect, share, review

scientific publications

Interdisciplinary conference• Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA)

London conference, www.eva-london.org – papers under www.eva-london.org/publications

• Artists through to computer scientists

• Next conference: British Computer Society offices, Southampton Street, Covent Garden, central London, 10–12 July 2012

• Related paper with Robin Wilsonto appear

The end!

Prof. Jonathan Bowen(FRSA, FBCS!)

jonathan.bowen@lsbu.ac.uk

www.jpbowen.com

Community of Practice (CoP)Social sciences concept• Wenger, E.: Communities of Practice:

Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1998)

• Wenger, E., McDermott, R.A., Snyder, W.: Cultivating Communities of Practice: A guide to managing knowledge. Harvard Business School Press, Boston (2002)

• A brief introduction by Etienne Wenger, 2006: www.ewenger.com/theory

Types of community• CoP on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Community_of_practice

• Online CoP (OCoP): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_community_of_practice

Other types of community

• Virtual community: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Virtual_communities

• Community of interest: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_interest

Fundamental Elements of a CoP

1. Domain: Common interest to be effective. E.g., museum education.

2. Community: Group of people willing to engage with others. E.g., teachers.

3. Practice: Explore existing and develop new knowledge. Use of museum for educational visits, using IT for pre/post support.

Community development

“The art of community development is to use the synergy between domain, community, and practice to help a community evolve and fulfil its potential.” – Wenger et al. (2002)

4. Develop both public and private CoP facilities.

5. Focus on the value of the CoP.

6. Combine familiarity and excitement within the CoP.

7. Find and nurture a regular rhythm for the CoP.

Stages of Community Development

1. Potential

2. Coalescing

3. Maturing

4. Stewardship

5. Transformation

Internet archive – www.archive.org

• MHS website

Google

• Museum label

Google – “museums”

Google search for “museums”

(2006)