Professionalization and Combining Methods

In an earlier post I discussed some topic modeling I did on the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).  That research showed that post 1892 (about 11 years after the journal begins publishing in 1879), there appeared to be a significant increase in discussion of methodology, society business, and other topics not directly associated with chemistry experiments.  Though I thought this was an interesting finding, at the same time I thought that it was best not to make too much out of this result.

Why should I not treat the results of this topic model as significant?  Topic modeling is, after all, an abstraction of the data.  I had the full text of all material from  JACS, and I then asked a computer to find which words had a statistically significant probability of appearing next to each other.  After doing that, I then categorized the data into “unexpected” topics (or topics on methods, society business, etc.) and “expected” topics (chemistry experiments of various kinds).  So, in essence I was dealing with an abstraction of an abstraction.  Thus, it seemed best not to say that this was a significant result when in reality it could have just been an artifact of my categorization of topic models.

I am beginning to change my mind on my earlier instinct, however.  Why? Just recently, I completed some additional statistical tests.  Recently, I created an additional data set comprising a sample of words from these topic models.  It contained 74 words which I thought might best signify discussion of “unexpected”/non chemistry topics.  I included words such as president, committee, election which would likely only show up in discussions of society business.  I also a few words like method which admittedly could appear both in chemistry articles and in articles about methodology of chemistry.  I then created a word frequency list for all of these words and subdivided them into two groups.  One group contained the 11 years prior to 1892 (from the journal’s beginning in 1879).  The other group contained the 11 years from 1892 to 1903.  My hope was to see if there was any kind of significant difference in these word frequencies right around the year (1892) my earlier graph showed that “unexpected topics were increasing.

Using SPSS, I compared these two groups using a dependent t-test.  My t-critical value (the number that determines whether the test was statistically significant) was 1.6.  My t-calculated (the number that measures whether the means of the two groups are statistically different from each other) was 7.6 with an effect size (measure of magnitude between two means) of 0.89.  Therefore I can say that there is actually quite a significant difference between the word frequencies of these two groups.  Word frequencies for words about society business and methods increase significantly post 1892.

What does all of this statistical work really do for me?  First, I think that these statistical tests show that the topic models (and my categorizations) actually did show that something important was happening in the journal.  Indeed it seems that the journal is publishing more about methods and society business after 1892.  Furthermore, I think that combining methods like topic modeling and statistical methods can prove quite useful.  Nonetheless, I think that traditional humanistic methods can also be important.  My next step will be to go back to the articles where these words appear and see what they are talking about.  So, these other computational and quantitative methods helped me to discover a pattern in the journals that otherwise I would likely never have noticed.  I look forward to seeing where this research goes.

Universalization of Knowledge

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Should knowledge be available to everyone? How do we create ways to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful?”  No, I am actually not talking about Google, but rather about the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when people like Paul Otlet actually had similar ambitions, and created the Mundaneum to achieve the goal of creating universally accessible knowledge.  Otlet also hoped that by doing this, he would advance the cause of world peace.  To me, it seems that we are fighting similar battles today.  Will open access to knowledge create a virtual utopia where all knowledge about every topic is available?  What institutions are needed to ensure the reliability of information?

A first step in answering these questions in a historical context happened at a conference I attended recently called the “The Science of Information: Universalization of Knowledge in a Utopian age.”  The Utopia being discussed was the period between roughly 1870 and 1940 when figures like Otlet, William Pepper, and others were working to make information available and accessible to the world.  Otlet created the Mundaneum; Pepper helped to found the Free Library of Philadelphia (among other institutions).  Participants at the conference noted, however, that during the later part this period (1930s and 40s) figures like Adolf Hitler also began their working at creating a “utopia” that was very different, and the American government also worked to create better surveillance (for good or ill depending on your point of view) of people within and outside of their borders.

In all, the conference really was about what I would term scholarly communication, and in order to talk about scholarly communication, it is necessary to talk about several related concepts including science, information, and the idea of universal knowledge.  The participants noted that these concepts actually had multiple (sometimes not completely compatible) definitions in fields like history, information science, literature, and architecture (the disciplines of just a few of the participants).  Also, many of the speakers would not have identified themselves as researching “scholarly communication,”though some of them would have.  In my view, the diversity of participants and their inability to agree on definitions of some of the basic concepts simply demonstrates how difficult it can be to research the history of a field like scholarly communication which itself is not particularly well defined.

More importantly, however, I think the fact that this conference had enough people coming from all of these fields shows a recognition that this area of research is important.  Interestingly, nearly all of the speakers also made allusions to current political events happening worldwide (the election of Trump, Brexit, and the rise of populism).  It seems to me that in the same way that the internet had its figures like Otlet who believed that the internet would create a Utopia.  Now, we are beginning to see the other (dystopian) side of that dream.

Perhaps by understanding the history of a previous time in which similar Utopianism started in the 1870s with a belief in unending progress and ended in 1940 with two world wars, we can try to better understand the role that communication (and particularly scholarly communication) played.  Alex Csisizar, one of the speakers at the conference, has argued that “We need richer, more nuanced ways of talking about the collective belief that take into account the complexity of scientific interactions and how those forms evolve along with regulatory frameworks used for evaluating scientific claims relevant to public policy.”  I could not agree more, and hopefully conferences like this provide the first steps in more interdisciplinary discussions that address the topics that scholars like Csiszar have identified.  Moreover, perhaps such conversations about scholarly communication can help to drive productive agendas for the future.  At a time when we are debating the very role that science plays in society, and scientists are marching for better recognition.  It seems to me that these historical conversations are extremely relevant in today’s world.

(Image described at https://beyondarchives.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/paul-otlet-world-city/)

Authenticity in Scholarly Communication

At a time when all of us are thinking more about what makes something authentic or true, I’ve been trying to apply my random musings as much as possible to my scholarly and professional expertise.  What makes a source of scientific (or humanistic for that matter) information “authentic?”  In information science, we have some frameworks for thinking about these issues, and perhaps we need to think about them even more earnestly at a time when our institutions of academic authority are being questioned.

Often in science and technology studies we discuss the idea of affordances, or ways in which we take action.  These affordances often take shape in three ways:  cultural, social, and material.  The analogy most frequently used to describe these is a house.  A cultural affordance is the blueprint (the underlying principles for building the house); social affordances are the ways people use to build the house (architects, construction workers, mortgage brokers); material affordances are the objects like the actual physical house.  In terms of scholarly communication, we can think of cultural affordances being the underlying philosophy of scholarship and higher education; social affordances are the ways we carry this out (scholarly associations, peer review systems, publishers); material affordances are the physical artifact like a journal (either in print or more often nowadays digital).

In my view, when the cultural affordances have skewed, then the other affordances begin to do the same thing.  To use the house analogy, if continually create strange blueprints, eventually you start building houses that fall down.  It seems that this is exactly the state we are in for scholarly publishing.  In the early nineteenth century (and before) universities saw themselves as teaching institutions, and over time, when research became more prominent within scholarly associations (like the American Chemical Society), research frequently became more tied to industry.  I wrote a bit about this in the context of two scholars, Theophilus Wylie and J. Lawrence Smith in a previous post.  In that post, I noted that Wylie considered himself a teacher, Smith considered himself a researcher and felt that research should be tied to industry.  This link between universities and industry is one that I think we need to investigate more fully.

In the nineteenth century German model of higher education that the United States eventually imported was built fundamentally to create professionals needed for the state (bureaucrats and other clerical workers).  The concept of bildung, or the Romantic ideal of knowledge for its own sake, was often used to elevate the professional status of professors themselves, who in previous centuries had been devoted to staffing the ranks of professional clergy and devoted, at least theoretically, to understanding God. In the United States, I think, there was a fundamental difference between the kinds of professionals the universities were creating.  Rather than trying to make future bureaucrats or future ministers (though admittedly many universities were doing that too), they de facto began making future managers and workers in industrial and business professions.  Thus, professional scholarship, despite the rhetoric about it being just disinterested knowledge pursued for its own sake, one could argue, was actually meant to serve industry and the needs of the business sector.

One hundred years later, this blueprint for scholarship does not seem surprising.  Scholarship, at least according to some, must become even more accountable to society for practical results that can be monetized for the use of industry.  Furthermore, universities should do more to train people for professional jobs in various industries.  In my view, to go back to the idea of cultural affordances, it seems that universities have a blueprint that says at the top, “Knowledge for its own sake,”  and then goes on to outline a method for researching and training professionals for the use of industry.  Is it any surprise that the social and material affordances, after 100 years of attempting to reconcile this underlying disconnect, are broken?

Perhaps now is a time to re-examine the cultural affordances of higher education.  In scholarly communication it seems that we often focus on the social or material affordances.  We ask, for instance, whether we need to reform journal publishing with open access (a material affordance), whether we need to change peer review or tenure and promotion (both social affordances), but we can’t change either of those things without first dealing with our cultural affordance, or our blueprint.  What should a system of higher education really look like and what is its purpose?  Everything else flows from that, and it seems to me at least that we can’t fix scholarly communication without first determining what the purpose of scholarship is.  Right now it seems that its purpose is to serve industry (despite the higher ideals we might tell ourselves).  What should its purpose be?  In the nineteenth century, Germans reformed their higher education system.  Americans re-purposed it into something that has served it well for 100 years.  Perhaps now, at a time when the entire system is being questioned, it is time for another reform.

Boundaries of Natural Philosophy

One of the issues important in scholarly communication is the concept of boundaries within particular disciplines.  In the nineteenth century, as the concept of modern disciplines is first being developed, understanding these boundaries becomes even more difficult.  Theophilus Wylie is actually an interesting case study for understanding how the disciplines of natural philosophy and physics was first developing.  Between 1884 and 1886, Wylie became a professor of Physics in addition to being a professor of natural philosophy.

Wylie it seems was more of a natural philosopher than a physicist (at least in the modern sense of the term).  For him the ultimate task of a scholar was to find the ultimate origins of the forces acting upon the universe.  Physical forces were ultimately controlled by God who was the ultimate cause.  Yet Wylie also recognized the importance of the kinds of observed phenomena that science could provide in helping to explain those ultimate causes.  Additionally, in order to truly determine ultimate causes it was essential, for Wylie at least, to be a “wise” and moral person who could understand and utilize the tools of both science and religion in order to understand the ever increasing mysteries of nature.  Though the discipline of physics changed significantly in how it discussed these issues during the late nineteenth century, Wylie did not. In his diary on May 11, 1890, only a few years before he died, Wylie wrote “there is a great (first) cause — intelligent — Nature, the developer by which quoting Isaiah — the way will be prepared. Prepare ye Way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God, &c. This is what science is doing.”  Thus Wylie still sought to utilize both scientific and religious techniques even toward the end of his life.  For him these were the boundaries of natural philosophy, a discipline altogether different from, though perhaps closely related to, modern Physics.

Interestingly, Wylie’s own students criticized him because of his lack of changing with the times.  In the 1880 issue of The Dagger, a student publication rating professors and commenting on Indiana University news, one rather scathing critique of Wylie commented that he “knows almost nothing outside of physics and astronomy, and in these even is forty years behind the time. . . .  It is unnecessary to add that this incubus should be removed from the chair of Physics.” While one hesitates to put too much credence in the writings of a single student, Wylie’s own definitions show how defining disciplines is still a tricky concept and was even more so in the late nineteenth century when the modern idea of disciplines was still in formation.

Philosophical Transactions

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Lately I’ve been working on a kind of pre-history of scholarly communication in the United States by looking at what is often referred to as one of the first scholarly journals in the world, the Philosophical Transactions of the the Royal Society of London (the Journal des Sçavans being the other).  Though the story is often repeated that the Philosophical Transactions became the first mode of scientific communication.  The story is actually a great deal more complicated.  Noah Moxham has suggested that the articles that later appeared within the Philosophical Transactions were actually a combination of two kinds of content, correspondence that provided news from around Europe and registration of discoveries noted within the public register of the Royal Society. It also seems that there other factors that also contributed to the Philosophical Transactions becoming such a major broker for research communication.  The evolution of the Philosophical Transactions from a newsletter of correspondents around Europe and facilitated by a single editor (Henry Oldenburg) to a register of knowledge claims from around Europe was also result of the confluence of both construction of authority and a particular social context within England.  All of these factors allowed for the creation of a new genre of material that appeared in Philosophical Transactions, which eventually became the genesis of what we might now recognize as the research article.

Authority in the case of the Royal Society was a combination of governmental power, driven by a social need for gentlemen to achieve patronage within England and also a governmental infrastructure that imposed a kind of self-censorship and avoidance of controversy through a system of licensing presses.  Such a system encouraged a particular authority, that of the editor, to serve as a kind of middle-man who channeled the authority of the prince and the society toward individual authors from whom, in a way, the editor himself derived authority because the more scientific practitioners the editor knew, the more valuable his expertise as a source of information.

In the case of the Royal Society, the editor, Henry Oldenburg, was well-positioned with other scientists throughout Europe, but at the same time he existed in a social context that was different from Europe.  He lived among people who valued modesty and had to seek a wide array of potential patrons in order to sustain themselves.  Such social norms led to particular institutional realities within the Royal Society such as mutual witnessing of experiments (which was not particularly unique to England), and, more importantly, a distributor of credibility within England and over time, even outside of it.

The Royal Society’s position as a purveyor of credibility allowed Oldenburg to distribute that authority to his network of correspondents.  It also allowed experimenters within the society to distribute it more locally to those who registered their work in the meetings of the society.  As Noah Moxham has suggested, these two forces of publishing materials from a network of correspondents and registering  the credibility of experiments eventually combined with the already existing journal to create a system whereby individual authors would register their work by publishing it in the Philosophical Transactions.  This combination of various authorities, social contexts, and practical realities created an interesting combination of characteristics for articles within the Philosophical Transactions, and these characteristics would now be considered fundamental attributes of any research article in an academic publication.

Thus perhaps one can view the Philosophical Transactions not so much as a modern scholarly journal as much as a framework that helps to lead to certain defining characteristics of scientific writing within England.  This framework was created by a variety of social factors including the nature of authority and social norms among the writers of the Royal Society.  All of those social realities affected the creation of the genres within the Philosophical Transactions like the research article, and these social realities along with their links to the genres within the journal need to be better understood not only for modern scholarly communication, but for its origins in the seventeenth century as well.  Moreover, it is important to understand which of these norms came to America when journals like the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society and the American Journal of Science began to appear.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Philosophical_Transactions_Volume_1_frontispiece.jpg)

American Journal of Science

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(Second Edition of the first volume of the journal, available at from Carnegie Mellon’s digital collection)

Prior to the professional scholarly journal system of today, there was only one major journal for American science,  the American Journal of Science which still exists today and is focused on geology.  In the nineteenth century, however, the journal focused on every scientific topic.  The table of contents for the issues of the first volume (pictured) includes:

  1. Mineralogy, Geology & Topography
  2. Botany
  3. Zoology
  4. Fossil Zoology
  5. Mathematics
  6. Miscellaneous
  7. Physics, Mechanics, & Chemistry
  8. Fine Arts
  9. Useful Arts
  10. Agriculture & Economics
  11. Intelligence

Each article is roughly two to three pages and each contains an “intelligence” section which seems to be general news.  This section continues into the twentieth century, when the journal was more focused on geology, but the intelligence section will talk about important findings of Physics & Chemistry, and other scientific areas.

The journal was founded by Benjamin Silliman and later edited by his son. There is a good overview of the foundation of the journal, and of course multiple references to it, but so far I have not been able to find any articles using a computational approach to analyzing its contents.  In particular, I think it would be a great candidate for the topic modelling and query sampling techniques I have used earlier.  I haven’t done much of this in the past (I intended to do so for the Journal of the American Chemical Society), but this journal may even be a good candidate for a network analysis since it would contain a large number of scientists in the United States and potentially would show the network as it was beginning to split into different disciplines.  Fortunately, there is also over 100 years of textual data available for this journal in the public domain, making it a potentially very rich source.  I am going to see if some initial tests may get some interesting results, and I’m looking forward to seeing whether this journal helps understand the professionalization of science and the origins of the scholarly communication system in even more interesting ways than the Journal of the American Chemical Society has done so far.

Scholarly Communication, Universities, and Industry

I have been working on an upcoming presentation comparing Theophilus Wylie and J. Lawrence Smith, based on some of the work I’ve mentioned in previous posts.  I thought it might be interesting to think more about the ways in which these two men, though both chemists, both university professors, and both working during the same period of time, seem to have such markedly different practices for disseminating their scholarship.  By understanding those practices more fully, I think we may be able to ask some new questions about the role of the university, what, if any, relationship it should have to industry, and, moreover, how the answers to those questions relate to the ways we should think about disseminating “knowledge.”

J. Lawrence Smith seems in his writing to be highly critical of education.  In addition to saying that teaching makes men “an educational drudge,” Smith goes on to say in the same speech that, “Our universities (or rather our so-called universities) are too numerous. . . It would be far better to have fewer scientific schools.”  In essence Smith is criticizing the fact that science is becoming taught in too many places, and science is being taught badly in his view.  Smith thinks it would be better to have a smaller number of schools that teach “pure science” (or what we might call basic, theoretical science) well.  There is a bit of a contradiction though, because even though Smith advocates for better scientific research, at the same time, he also suggests that science should be more practical and serve the needs of industry.  Smith goes on to become a researcher at the Louisville Gas Works later in his life and in his presidential address from 1873 (referenced multiple times in this blog now), Smith says, “Let us ever bear in mind that it is abstract scientific ideas which underlie in these modern days, all discoveries conducive to man’s progress” (italics Smith’s not mine).  In a way Smith clarifies what he means by that remark in another article in the American Chemist in 1874 where he says, “In our days a useful discovery is scarcely made or a happy application of one found out, before it is published, described in the scientific journals, or other technical periodicals. . . . From these multiplied and diverse efforts. . . arises an industry which has no sooner sprung into existence than it becomes important and prosperous.”  Thus science should help to create productive and useful industries.

Wylie on the other hand seems to repudiate much of what Smith seems to be advocating.  First, Wylie in early in his diary (1836, before he came to Indiana) admits to his talent for teaching, “Teaching comes quite natural to me.  I fear that it will be the trade into which I will eventually sink.”  Furthermore, in an undated talk “On Education” he criticizes those who advocate teaching for what he calls “practical arts” (of which one might perhaps include industry) and denigrates people who “are unable to go beyond first rudiments of knowledge, it is often time lost in endeavoring to develop powers of the mind which nature has not given them.  For them something preeminently practical, which a machine might do – which can be done with the hands and without the brains is certainly best.  It is nearly the same too with respect to those whose sole object is to make money.”

Thus it seems that at least on the surface of things these too men vehemently disagree.  Yet, the story may also be more complicated than it first appears.  Wylie and Smith met when  J. Lawrence Smith gave an address at Indiana University on the opening of the new science building. According to Wylie’s diary for July 15 of 1874, Smith’s talk was “both good and appropriate.”  Though we do not know exactly what Smith talked about, Wylie seems to approve of it.  This is also especially interesting considering that one year earlier Smith had said that there were too many scientific schools, and then he later opens one of them at Indiana University.

In all, I think that this seeming contradiction, has to do with the two men’s views on the role of higher education in American society, and, hence, how scholarship should be disseminated.  I think that both men agree on the importance of “pure science” in the curriculum.  I think that they would also agree that students should be taught not simply in order to create products, but to be able to do higher level thinking.  There are two areas on which I think they might disagree more vehemently.  The first is the role of what Smith in his 1873 address calls “philosophizing” which he thinks is a role unsuited to scientists.  Wylie on the other hand devotes entire sermons to the intersections of science and religion.  The second is the role of teaching.  Wylie obviously sees his primary role as a teacher; Smith does not.  As a result of these differing philosophical views, Smith publishes many articles, and Wylie tries to pass his knowledge on to students through his lectures and speeches.  Even today, universities still deal with the relation (or lack of it) between teaching and research.  I think that another way to look at that question would be to say what is the purpose of scholarly communication?  Does it include teaching? Under current definitions the answer would definitely be no.  According to Smith that would be a correct answer.  According to Wylie it would be the incorrect answer.  It may be time to investigate which one of them was actually right.

Scholarly Communication as a Historical Process

Scholarly communication is a relatively recent field of study that Christine Borgman  has suggested goes back to the 1960s and 70s, but really only became prominent with the advent of new information technology in the 1990s and early 2000s.  Borgman defines scholarly communication as “the study of how scholars in any field (e.g. physical, biological, social, and behavioural sciences, humanities, technology) use and disseminate information through formal and informal channels” (p. 414). and goes on to say that “essential elements such as the scholarly journal article are remarkably stable and print publication continues unabated, despite the proliferation of digital media” (p. 413). Furthermore, Borgman identifies two research areas within scholarly communication.  First, there is the study of the structures of scholarly communication that can be revealed by scientometric and bibliometric analyses.  Second is the process of scholarly communication which encompasses how and why scholars publish.  Much of the literature on scholarly communication has focused on what Borgman defines as structure.

Such scholarship has suggested that “individual imperatives for career self-interest, advancing the field, and receiving credit are often more powerful motivators in publishing decisions than the technological affordances of new media.”  These conclusions rest on a particular line of thinking advocated by researchers such as Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information citation index who has stated that “Those of us who have worked in the field of scientometrics and its antecedent bibliometrics almost universally recognize the debt we owe to Robert K. Merton” (p. 54).  Merton focused on the importance of status as a motivator for scholarly communication.   Garfield measured such status with a very particular method: citations within journal literature.  Other scholars, namely Scott Frickel and Neil Gross, when discussing the approach of Merton and others to measurement of status argue that “we find it difficult to believe that the quest for prestige and status is the sole motive shaping intellectual innovation” (p. 211).  In other words, there may be another way of investigating the ways in which what Borgman defines as the “process” by which scholarly communication forms and sustains itself.

My work, I think, focuses on the “process” of scholarly communication, or, how it developed in the ways that it did and why it did so.  In my view, history is the best way to answer such a question.  In the United States, the earliest journals were founded in the mid to late nineteenth century. Therefore, there are many sources that can help to understand the ways in which scholars institutionalized the communication of their research.  By looking at the careers and debates of scholars from the the mid to late nineteenth century, it may possible to determine the contours of their discussion about scholarly publishing before it developed into the modern system described by Borgman and Harley.  Moreover, these nineteenth century debates may help to think about how modern discussions regarding scholarly communication.  In fact, I think that this debate still continues today.  Steve Miller has stated that “we are entering a new age for public understanding of science,  it is important that citizens get used to scientists arguing out controversial facts, theories, and issues” (p. 119).  The question is, how can these historical debates help us to answer these modern questions.  I hope that by understanding the historical process of scholarly communication, I may be able to answer that question.

Open Access Alchemy

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One of my first posts when I launched this blog asked the question,  why don’t alchemists share?  Another scholar I mentioned in that post, Pamela Long, has discussed the issue of authorship and secrecy.  She has also written about the separation and mixing of two kinds of practice, artisinal (or for lack of a better analogy “applied” work) and academic (work performed at universities.  She argues that there were “trading zones” in which people moved between these two spheres with relative fluidity.  She also notes that in the modern age, such trading zones are less fluid because of current requirements (university degrees, licensure, etc.) to be considered a professional.  For the most part, Long is discussing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but her arguments could apply equally well, I think, to the mid to late nineteenth century. That period was one where the professional “modern” requirements Long mentions were just beginning to form. The question is, where were the trading zones in a pre-professionalized, scientific community?

The political cartoon at the top of this post provides a potential answer.  It dates from 1887 and satirizes the presidential aspirations of James G. Blaine who had just lost the 1884 election. It depicts three newspaper moguls (Charles Anderson Dana, Joseph Pulitzer, and Whitelaw Reid) trying to make gold for Blaine’s future ambitions (he was expected to run again in 1888).  What does this have to do with scholarly communication?  The cartoon tacitly shows that the presidential campaign was not entirely in the hands of the politicians, but, in the hands of the publishers (newspaper owners) who formed public opinion on these issues.  Scholarly communication too is about the media and the places where scholars choose to discuss their research.

My post about the publication careers of Theophilus Wylie and J. Lawrence Smith is just one example of the ways these two men shaped their careers by choosing different kinds of publishers. I noted that Wylie seemed to choose a public audience (including popular newspapers), whereas Smith chose only (or at least primarily) an audience of other scientific practitioners.  What do these respective choices tell us about how these two men saw their roles as a professor and researcher, and whom did they see as their colleagues?  I am merely speculating at this point, but I would suspect that Wylie would have seen himself primarily as a teacher and in the same company as other teachers within the state of Indiana.  His papers seem to consist of many addresses on education that were prepared for other teachers, and Wylie also published in a teacher’s journal.  Smith, on the other hand, seemed to dislike teaching and wanted to pursue only research.  In fact at the end of his life, he left academe in order to pursue research within industry.

In the modern world, scholarship is increasingly dictated by the impact scholarship has.  That can be measured by metrics like impact factor, eigenfactor, altmetrics, or others.  Nonetheless, all of these impact metrics are useless if one first does not ask questions that professors like Wylie and Smith (at least implicitly) asked themselves. Who is your audience?  How do you want to affect their perceptions?  At the time when scholarship was professionalizing, these two men had very different answers to those questions.  More importantly, in the same ways that publishers (broadly construed) shaped the fates of politicians like Blaine, publishers also shaped the careers of people like Wylie and Smith.  Wylie published with newspapers and other largely public venues.  Smith published primarily in Silliman’s journal, controlled by a fellow academic.  Such publishers help to reach audiences and shape public perception in various ways.  No doubt they will continue to do so in the future.

To go back to my original question of why alchemists don’t share.  One might answer it simply by saying that they had no need to.  Alchemists were trained as practitioners in an “art form” by masters within the same field; those masters no doubt did share with others in their field in some informal ways.  Scientists on the other hand, felt a need to have a different kind of impact.  If Theophilus Wylie were alive today, I suspect he might have supported movements like science communication or history communication, both emphasizing discussing scholarship to non-experts.  Smith, rightly, might have argued against Wylie, saying that science should be subject to rigorous peer review, ensuring its quality.  Neither of these approaches is wrong, but the answer to modern scholarly communication is in a balance between the two.  Alchemy was not shared because it was communicated only to fellow practitioners; on the other hand alchemy was more practically based and of more use to members of the public (after all who doesn’t want more gold).  Science was communicated more publicly through journals in order to have a larger impact.  At the same time, science publishing became more closed as scientists began to talk more to each other and less to the general public and their language became more impenetrable.

The key to these contrasting viewpoints that people like Wylie and Smith might still have, is the same as it was in the nineteenth century: publishers.  Publishers helped to find audiences.  Publishers helped to craft the messages of sciences.  Publishers helped to make material more widely known.  Today, publishers need to help create the kind of “trading zone” that Pamela Long discusses in which applied practitioners and scholarly experts can meet freely.  In other words, perhaps we should find a way to facilitate open access alchemy.

(image from the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Distillations magazine, https://www.chemheritage.org/distillations/magazine/political-potions)

A Tale of Two Chemists

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I was thinking more about my post last week that discusse the publication record of Theophilus Wylie, and was wondering how his record might compare to other scientists of his time.  One of the scientists I have also written about in relation to the American Chemical Society, is J. Lawrence Smith, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a founder of the American Chemical Society, professor, and writer of an address on how science should be practiced.  I thought it might be interesting to compare their respective scholarly publication records.  Needless to say, they are very different.  I think there is something important about what these two records of publication tell us about scholarly communication (such as it was in the nineteenth century).  These two scholars address very different audiences, and clearly have divergent views on the role of an academic in society.

Smith published about 145 articles in his lifetime.  A full listing of them can be found in a tribute to Smith published by Benjamin Silliman (editor of Silliman’s Journal/the American Journal of Science).  In reviewing these publications, they seem to be the kind of publications one would expect from a scholar (even today). They are research articles, and they are published in journals intended to be read by other scholars.  Most of the publications appear to be in Silliman’s journal (which would make sense because it was the only major American scientific journal at the time).  Smith also published in some other chemistry journals and some international journals as well.  Thus, in many ways, J. Lawrence Smith seems to be publishing in ways that might be similar to a modern chemist.  Importantly, the audience for which Smith seems to be writing is primarily other chemists, most likely those employed at other universities.

Theophilus Wylie was also a chemist; yet, his publication is very different.  Altogether, Wylie published just 7 items (at least that I could track down) including:

  1. Catalogue of the Library of Indiana State University (1842)
  2. Letter on gold found in Indiana read by Prof. John Frazer, Journal of the Franklin Institute (1850)
  3. Teeth and Bones of Elphas Primogenius, Lately Found Near the Western Fork of the White River in Monroe County, Indiana” in American Journal of Science (Silliman’s Journal) (1859).
  4. Baccalaureate Discourse to the Graduating Class of Indiana State University” Indianapolis Journal Company, Printers (1859)
  5. Andrew Wylie, D. D., First President of Indiana University” in the Indiana School Journal (1860)
  6. Interesting Report of Prof. Wylie of the State University.” Indianapolis Journal (1869)
  7. Indiana University: Its History from 1820, when Founded to 1890 (1891)

The catalogue is not attributed to Wylie, but is likely his work.  Only two of the articles were distributed in scientific journals, but seem more similar to his article in the Indianapolis Journal than they do to any kind of research article (like what Smith was publishing).  All of Wylie’s  articles in both the academic journals and the Indianapolis Journal are really geological reports (keep in mind that mining and geology were linked to chemistry in the nineteenth century, many of Smith’s articles are also on geology) that could be of interest to a fairly broad audience.

Is it possible to draw any conclusions from this very different publication record between Wylie and Smith?  I think it is, Wylie seems to be writing for a very different audience, the public.  In this case, Wylie seems to be writing for an audience that would include those interested in using the library (library catalog), all people interested in geology (academic and newspaper articles), students at Indiana University (Bacalaureate address), and all people interested in the history of Indiana University (book on the history of Indiana University, and biography of Andrew Wylie).  On the other hand, it would seem that  Smith sees the role of a scientific author as one which reports only to fellow scientists (which would be in line with what Smith advocates for in his address to the AAAS), Wylie seems to see his role of scientist as a person dedicated to the public.

Therefore, one might question whether these two chemists have competing views about what “scholarly communication” (in this case meaning dissemination of their ideas) should be.  Perhaps as we think about reform of the scholarly communication system currently, it might be worth thinking about the seeming division of roles exemplified by both Smith and Wylie.  What is the role of the scholar to the public?  As I said in my post last week, I am not advocating for a return to Wylie’s point of view, but I do think that scholarship should play a more public role.  The publication of Theophilus Wylie shows that prior to the formation of the current scholarly communication system, others thought that way as well, and can perhaps serve as a way for modern academics to think about the role of publicly disseminating their ideas.

Image Credit: (Left, Theophilus Wylie, image from https://wyliehouse.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/t-a-wylie-4.jpg and right, J. Lawrence Smith, image from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/John_Lawrence_Smith_by_Tony_Rogue%2C_1854.jpg)
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