Rhetoric of science: print vs. web
This session is moderated by Christian Casper:
There is no doubt that online communication environment is changing the way we use language. LOL. Scientific papers are an example of some of the most unreadable literature in existence, yet now that it is all online, will this change? Is the public access to papers going to induce scientists to keep lay audience in mind, as well as their scientific peers, when writing their manuscripts? Should readers’ comment and notes on papers be more formal than the comments on blogs? Why?
Discuss: I take these comments to heart specifically for chemistry publications where chemical names and terms result in the user needing a chemistry dictionary simply to understand the majority of what is being attempted to be communicated. My personal view is that one of the primary languages of chemistry is “molecular structure”. We’ve been working on the ability to read a paper and immediately see the structures associated with chemical names but on the path to this have been marking up species, proteins, enzymes, and so on and allowing links out to rich resources of information. I’ve covered this at some level here: http://www.chemspider.com/blog/a-new-presentation-regarding-chemmantis.html . While the approach to get there will likely be different these types of systems are necessary paths for the publishers in my opinion. Posted By: ChemSpiderman
Thanks, ChemSpiderman. I’m a recovering chemist, so your work is close to my heart — I have bad memories of many fruitless hours with Beilstein and Gmelin back when I was working in the lab!
Anyway, I’m looking forward to this session next week. Rhetoric of science on the web is the topic of my Ph.D. dissertation, which is in progress at NC State. My advisor and I also recently wrote an entry on digital rhetoric and science for a book in progress called The Encyclopedia of Science Communication, which is aimed at an undergraduate and beginning grad audience. The article hasn’t yet been edited, so I’m afraid I can’t share it here, but the main topics that we address in the article are audience, authorship, and genres and media. Some of the questions that we might discuss in our session are these:
Is the audience for scientific communication changing as it moves onto the web?
How might this migration be affecting how science is written on the web versus in print?
What are the ramifications for scientific authorship?
How might the interactive features in forums like the PLoS journals be changing our ideas of the roles of scientific authors and audiences?
We traditionally think of an author as someone who originates and controls a text. Although this idea has been losing ground since the mid-20th-century, before the rise of the Internet, might online communication be fundamentally changing the nature of authorship beyond what it meant in print media?
If the nature of authorship is fundamentally different on the web versus in print, how do we determine the credibility of an online text? Is this fundamentally different for web texts versus print texts?
James Zappen, a rhetoric scholar at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has written that rhetoric, which used to be frequently characterized as the art of persuasion, might even be changing in its essence from an art of persuasion to one of cooperation with the rise of networked electronic media. Is such a drastic change actually occurring?
Will the research article go extinct in the digital era or will it adapt to its changing environment? If the latter, what will it look like in the coming decades?
Our discussion could go in any number of directions. I submit these questions for your consideration, and I look forward to taking up some of them, and others that you come up with, next week! Posted By: Christian Casper
