Plus Ultra

There is always more beyond

I’m realising that I haven’t blogged at all this summer. That hasn’t been a conscious choice, but something that just happened (or, rather: didn’t happen) as the summer slipped away.

As the years go by, the difference between summer-me and winter-me just grows bigger and bigger. Summer-me wakes up by herself feeling rested and fresh, and looking forward to spending the day doing real-life stuff. Like building things, growing things and making things. Winter-me basically wants to sleep. Preferably until mid-March. If it hadn’t been for the alarm, I very well might have. I used to like winter, with the cold and the cosy, dark, long nights and the raging storms, but now it all sort of disappears in a perpetual need for sleep. And when I don’t sleep, I’m perfectly happy to immerse myself in the minutiae on the big Internet.

So, this summer, while I’ve certainly spent a good deal of time online, I haven’t really felt like engaging much in online things. The discussions and blogs and news that I invest so much mental energy in during the winter, leave no impression at all during summer. Most often I don’t even bother reading them. If I could, I’d spend all of summer outdoors, or at least doing some proper, old-fashioned hands-on work. Instead I’ve spent my time working on writing projects that have nothing whatsoever to do with new media or social software or the sad state of science journalism.

Only now, with the start of the new academic year, can I feel the parts of my brain that shut down in May, slowly waking up again. Whether it will translate into regular blogging, I have no idea, but there is no doubt that summer-me is starting to fade away. Maybe light therapy isn’t such a ridiculous idea after all?

A couple of years ago I wrote an article that I was, all in all, quite happy with. The subject was new and interesting, I had talked to several people and gotten different and quote-worthy comments from each of them, and the topic readily lent itself to well-structured and well-argued prose. I wrote the article up (it was relatively long) and sent it to the sources for quote check. One of them replied more or less like this: “It looks ok, I suppose. But I would have thought that an hour of interview might have resulted in a bit more than just two sentences.”

As a matter of fact, he did get more than two sentences, and probably slightly more than the other sources. But of course I see his point. I’m asking them to take considerable time out of a busy working schedule to talk to me, and then I give them just a sentence or two in the final article. I’ve just been working on another long, complicated article with lots of sources. I talked to each of them from 10-30 minutes, and ended up with 12 pages of transcribed interviews. The final text was to be 2 pages, including information that didn’t come from any of the interviewees. It goes without saying that most of what I had been told, would never make it into the article.

It would be nice if there was a way for me to just ask people exactly what I need for the piece, and then leave them be and not take up any more of their time. But I always found this difficult. In some cases, like the one I just worked on, I can’t say for sure which direction the article will take until after I talked to everyone, when I go through the material and try to get a feeling of what the main point is. I’m exploring a specific topic, and I don’t know whether my initial presuppositions will hold. Only by probing a bit in every direction, do I get a feeling of where I’m heading.

In other cases I have a pretty clear idea of what the story will look like, but making the interviewee tell you only what you already know, may easily lead to oversimplifying or narrowmindedness. I always prefer to have some more knowledge than what ends up in the article. The more I know, the more I can trust my judgment about what’s important. I always felt that when my articles exhaust the information I got from my source, that’s more a sign of sloppy work than anything else. It could mean I haven’t understood the topic properly. It’s happened lots of times that what turned out to be the most important, was only mentioned at the end of the interview, in a sort of by-the-way-ish manner. At least when I talk to scientists, the information tends to be more substantial and to the point the further into the interview we get. If I cut short, I’m losing important information.

This time I interviewed politicians, and fortunately they’re professional interviewees. Normally they don’t even ask for quote checks – they don’t have the time, and anyway they’ve been misquoted often enough that they know it’s not the big deal that less experienced people think. Still, two quotes after a 30 minute talk doesn’t really do them justice. That’s when one has to remember that one’s obligation is to the readers, not the sources.

The research magazine of the University of Bergen, Hubro, has a new issue out, and one of the articles from the new issue has been published on the website of the national newspaper Dagbladet.* I remember there was a bit of discussion at the university media center when Dagbladet a couple of years ago asked if they could publish our material on their website (I used to work there at the time). We asked ourselves (quite reasonably, I like to think): Why would the second largest mainstream newspaper in the country want to publish material that is, essentially, PR material for our university? We didn’t ask Dagbladet this question, so we never really got an answer, but if you pay attention, you’ll notice that Dagbladet also publishes articles for Gemini, the research magazine of the university of Trondheim. Whether they publish articles from the UiO equivalent, Apollon, I don’t know. At least I’ve never seen any.

Of course the Hubro articles aren’t written in the form of PR material. They’re proper, sciencey, journalistic articles that explain research (done at the University of Bergen) in an (hopefully) interesting and accessible way. But that doesn’t change the fact that the whole purpose of the magazine is to make UiB science visible to outsiders. I don’t remember the exact wording of Dagbladet’s request, but I remember they made it sound like a win-win situation: Hubro gets a bigger readership, and Dagbladet gets to present interesting, in-depth articles about stuff they wouldn’t have been able to produce by themselves. Put like that, it sounds wonderful.

Nevertheless, I’m puzzled by the arrangement. I’m willing to bet that most of the readers who read Hubro’s articles on Dabladet’s website, are ignorant of the fact that the article was produced by the university info machine. They think (I’m quite certain) that they read journalistic work produced by Dagbladet, work that is supposed to be independent and objective. That is, if they care at all. By all means, Dagbladet doesn’t try to hide the fact that the article was produced by someone with an interest in the work, on the contrary: they write explicitly that the article comes from Hubro, and even include a box with information about Hubro. But how many readers notice these things?

Like I said, at UiB we never really understood why Dagbladet would want to publish a public institution’s PR material on their website, but one can always have a guess. I think they assume that any article about research is “objective” in the sense that it’s centered around facts – because research equals facts, right? So it can’t possibly compromise the paper’s integrity if it publishes articles about research, even if the article is written by the institution where the research is done. Moreover, articles about research are, by definition, “serious” and “heavyweight”, so that far from discrediting the newspaper, they can only boost its reputation, regardless of where the article originally comes from.

Dagbladet is of course not the only paper to reason in this way (if, indeed, this is how the reasoning goes). Some years ago, the website forskning.no, the biggest source of science news in Norway, made an agreement with four national newspapers, at the newspapers’ request. The agreement gave the papers the right to publish articles directly from forskning.no as if they were the newspapers’ own. Now, forskning.no is owned in part by the Norwegian Research Council, and in part by a number of research institutions, among them our seven universities. The institutions contribute with articles to the site. That means articles from the info departments of the various institutions would eventually end up in the four newspapers, without any hint that they were institutional PR material (because those papers didn’t make it clear where they took the articles, like Dagbladet does). I don’t know if the agreement is still valid, but the fact that it was made at all, suggests that articles about research are somehow above the petty PR concerns that haunt so much of cultural journalism, for example. If this is true, I think it’s very interesting – and also a sign that science journalism isn’t quite there yet.

*And, being Dagbladet, they’ve taken the trouble of translating the article from nynorsk to bokmål. I wonder what the systematically nynorsk-writing Gudrun Urd Sylte thinks about that.

I’m not really sure how I got involved in this, but for the past few weeks I’ve been a regular guest when fr. Martinsen hosts her “comment the news” party via CoveritLive on her blog. Every working day at 6PM, the Norwegian radio channel P2 broadcasts an hour of in-depth news, which I can listen to from Paris via the Internet. (Lately the program also aires on TV, which is truly ironic: A TV program that just shows what happens in a radio studio.) Once or twice a week, fr. Martinsen sets up a CoveritLive-session on her blog, where people can comment on the program while watching or listening. Those who watch on TV, can comment on the appearance of the host and guests, and everyone comments on the content. If there’s something you don’t understand, others are usually able to fill you in. I participated the first time because I wasn’t familiar with CoveritLive and wanted to know how it worked, and then I kept on because it’s just a lot more interesting to listen to the news along with other people than doing it all by oneself. Sure, it’s difficult to follow the program and the blog session, and write one’s own comments, all at the same time, but it’s rewarding too. Now the broadcasting company’s technology hub, NRK Beta, has published a story about the project. They argue that such projects should be seen as “live focus groups”, and that the broadcasters should follow the discussions to get an instant feedback on their programs. The article also suggests that the media should use services like CoveritLive more extensively themselves, because discussing programs in real time with others gives an added value to the program. And yes, that’s my name at the bottom of the screen shot .

I’ve been fascinated by C.P. Snow’s concept of the Two Cultures ever since high school, so it’s sort of natural that I’ve been following the increased commentary leading up to today’s 50th anniversary of the Cambridge lecture that kicked the whole thing off. I’m not fascinated because I agree with him – far from it. You could say I’m mostly fascinated by how many other people seem to agree. Granted, when I was at university, my fellow science students would express sincere contempt for the humanities, and vice versa. But this phenomenon always struck me as a way of expressing identity by demarcation, more than anything else. Oh, and a fair bit of intellectual lazyness. At least I could never see any good reason why I should limit my own interests to the one tradition or the other.

I wish I could have gone to New York this weekend for the anniversary conference, but that would be taking it a bit far. (Update: But it was liveblogged here: Part I, Part II.) Instead, I’ve been following organiser Chris Mooney’s preparations on his blog, as well as some other essays and commentaries that have marked the occasion. They all seem to agree that we should leave the Two Cultures concept behind, but they differ a bit in their discussions of the possible relevance that Snow’s ideas have today. Those who are interested, go have a look.

I’m not sure if my memory serves me right – it seems somehow all too idyllic to be true, especially given the stories we hear about the everyday havoc that children are allowed to wreak in classrooms these days – but I seem to remember that sometimes my teacher would hand out work sheets or assign a number of math problems or something, and we would all sit working on them individually while the teacher would pace the aisles between our desks, keeping an eye out for pupils who looked in need of help. Whenever I could sense the teacher approaching, I would demonstratively turn my book or paper face down on my desk. Even as a child, I hated the feeling of being watched while working. I liked to show off the finished result, but I didn’t want anyone to see the half-baked drafts that led up to it.

Unfortunately, this feeling never quite wore off, and I guess that’s what I hate about accounting. The tax papers are due in a months’ time, and I’ve spent days tracking down all my receipts and printing documentation for every single work-related transaction I’ve been making during the past year. And I hate it with every neuron in my brain. Objectively, I can see why it needs to be done, and how it’s reasonable that business companies (even tiny ones like mine) should be accountable, and how it makes the whole tax thing more predictable. But surely it would be enough if everyone else did it? Surely I deserve an exception? Can’t they just take my word for how much I spent last year? My poor helper, who’s trying his best to teach me the intricacies of accounting, keeps pointing out to me which transactions are insufficiently documented, and I respond by sulking over the unreasonable demands made on my precious and limited time – time that could have been spent browsing the internet or reading up on random, interesting stuff with no clear relevance to my work. I try to think about the huge sums I’ll save by doing this work myself this year, but even that doesn’t help. It still feels like if someone demanded to see your diary in order to verify that your innermost thoughts were pure and consistent and politically correct.

Now, the only way I can punish the tax department for its indecent nosiness, is by finding every possible loophole that allows me to lower my taxes. Unfortunately, that requires documentation. One has to grudgingly admire the system, somehow.

There are several reasons why I can’t be bothered to watch the 7 o’clock news on TV anymore (apart from the fact that I don’t have a TV and my computer doesn’t work well with web-TV, I mean). One of the reasons is that Norwegian broadcasting has developed a particularly maddening form of journalism* which is used regularly on the evening news, as well as on the short news bulletins on the radio. It consists of simply reporting what someone said, and then ask someone with opposing views to say something too. It’s a sort of journalism that invariably leaves you with more unanswered questions, since no attempt is made to asses who’s more right, but it is very popular because it can be passed off as “objective” (presumably). Jay Rosen calls it the “he said, she said” journalism, and slaughters it at length in this post. I like his vision about how the so-called information society should help making this kind of journalism impossible to keep up in the long run (knock on wood). Few things would please me more.

Chris Mooney, who has been known to express his frustrations with “false balance” science reporting, has posted his reactions here. He’s not optimistic.

* Obviously, it’s not a strictly Norwegian phenomenon, but this is where I encounter it.

It’s lame and inexcusable that I haven’t put together my own Ada Lovelace Day blogpost.* But at least I’ve had a great time reading some of the posts that people in my blog reader have written, and better yet: Here’s a list of all the posts that have been reported to the organisers (they’ve also made a nice map with the blogs represented on it). That’s a great resource for anyone in need of female tech role models.

*I did toy with the idea of doing a post on Kara Thrace, based on that awesome episode in the first season where she’s stranded on a moon with a poisonous atmosphere, and while the whole fleet is out looking for her, she disregards the whole sit-down-and-wait-to-be-rescued procedure, finds this crashed cylon raider and determinedly sets about figuring out how it works, whereupon she fixes it and flies it back to Galactica. But I decided that writing about a fictional character on Ada Lovelace Day would be even more lame than not writing at all.

I’m late on this (too), but on the other hand, it’s not like it’s become irrelevant in the meantime. The Norwegian Research Council has penned new guidelines saying that all research that has received funding from the Research Council, should be made openly accessible. This may be done either by publishing the research in Open Access journals, or by making the published article available through digital (institutional) repositories.

There was a debate on the radio when the guidelines became known, between Arvid Hallén from the Research Council and Jørgen Lorentzen, researcher at the University of Oslo. Lorentzen stated that the guidelines were too strict, and that the Research Council should not decide where researchers should publish their articles. I’ve heard this argument a lot, but it doesn’t carry much weight with me; as Hallén correctly pointed out, most journals allow scientists to post their articles in open repositories after, or parallel to, publication in the journal. All it takes is for the scientist to request it. In those cases where the journal does not accept post-publication, the Research Council will yield to this. Once Lorentzen realised that it’s not about controlling where scientists publish their research, he proceded to say that the guidelines are obviously unnessecary, as they don’t aim to favour some journals over others. This is where I think he misses the point. The reason why we need this sort of guidelines, is that researchers don’t use the option of Open Access publishing. All Norwegian universities (I think) now have some sort of repository where researchers can post articles and other research material. The problem is, they don’t. There is no incentive for them to do so, it will not generate funding or prestige (it will generate more citings, but few researchers seem to be aware of that). Encouraging researchers to publish their articles in repositories after journal publication, which has been the official policy so far, has no effect. On the other hand, after heavyweight research- and funding institutions like NIH, The Wellcome Trust, Harvard Law School, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and now MIT have made OA publishing mandatory, there is a tendency that more journals change their policy and allow parallel publishing. That is why linking OA publishing to funding and/or to institutional mandate is necessary to achieve results.