I have written an essay advocating the adoption of open notebook science by the computer science community. The essay is self-referential in that it discusses the process of collaboratively writing papers online, and is itself written using MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. I invite suggestions and comments on the discussion page for the essay.
I have tried to keep the essay as impersonal as possible. The benefits given in the essay of keeping an open notebook apply to any scientist, but I especially have some very personal reasons, if not for advocating the practice, then at least for engaging in it myself. After all, the entire project of building this web site started out as an effort to overcome my writer’s block in writing my Ph.D. Research Proposal.
In a way, I’m making up for what I think I should have been doing since the beginning of graduate school, and maybe even earlier. I’ve been thinking about the effects of communications technologies on science and society since high school. But because my parents criticised me every time they found my name online, I was forced to keep my online presence to a minimum. Many of the things that I foresaw have come true or are coming true — but ironically without my participation, until now.
I’ve written about how I was unable to participate in collaborative paper-writing in a previous post, and also about how turning my attention to another topic was my defense mechanism whenever I became stuck and could not make progress on something. The more I thought about my inability to work, the more compelled I felt to think about how I would be working if I had absolutely no concerns about being criticised and was completely free to disregard the way things are currently done.
I was an extremely prolific writer in high school, in large part due to having had a lot of friends at the time with a large variety of interests. I would pass around my writings and get comments, which would inspire further revisions and motivate me to write even more. To become productive again, I need to replicate this kind of environment.
The number and variety of the people I regularly associate with nowadays have narrowed considerably since that time, partly as a result of having moved around for graduate school, and partly due to the nature of graduate school itself (especially the departmental segregation inherent to universities), but primarily because of my parents’ continual attacks against anyone I might associate with. The natural antidote to the waning of my social circle would have been to expand it through meeting people from other departments of the university, or by using online social networking tools, but I had for the most part done neither since starting graduate school. When I start interacting with more people again, I will try to build up my academic social circle through this web site.
For me, the archival features of blogs and wikis are much more important than the mere ability to keep a timestamped record of my work. I have a habit of destroying my own work due to the pain caused by my parents’ continual criticisms, and this technology makes it much more difficult to actually act on my self-destructive urges. I regret that I have lost a lot of my work in this way.
In the essay, I wrote about the fear that many people seem to have of getting “scooped”. I want to elaborate on this, but my perspective probably does not apply to most other people. First, I had the opportunity to be a part of the field of quantum computing early on when many of its important discoveries were made, but my parents had deprived me of this by forbidding me to continue my studies at the time. Subsequently, I have returned to the field, but without the background typical of most researchers. I’m therefore somewhat indifferent to being “scooped”, because it couldn’t possibly be worse than what my parents had already done to me.
Second, my experience has been that most of the time, I am stuck on some minor obstacle that (I imagine) someone with a more suitable background could easily overcome. The only problem is that I often don’t know who that someone is. Or, even if I had some people in mind whom I thought could clarify things for me, I may feel that my questions are too minor to bring to their attention or that it would be impolite to spam them (i.e., send them unsolicited e-mails).
It would have helped my progress considerably if I had a forum where I could freely discuss things that I don’t quite understand, with peers who are in a similar predicament but who have different backgrounds and training. Experts could then volunteer their insights without anyone feeling that they were imposing upon them. I suppose that such fora already exist in the form of newsgroups and so on, but that I simply haven’t made use of the resources actually available to me due to my self-imposed minimal presence online. But newsgroups are generally far too broad in scope. I think every computer science department should have an internal bulletin board system.
In any case, I would be glad to be “scooped” most of the time, if it meant that my time was freed to make progress where it was important instead of “re-inventing the wheel”. I suspect that this might be true of other researchers to various degrees.
I wrote in the essay that the low cost of starting a blog or wiki might motivate ambitious young people to get involved in science at an early age. When I was in high school, I was always looking for scientific data to play around with. I also used to enjoy reading the notebooks of historical scientists. Access to the notebooks of contemporary scientists is something that I definitely would have wished to have. Open notebooks could very well shape the careers of the next generation of scientists.
– davinci
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