Scientific Writing and New Patterns of Scientific Communication
Workshop in association with the
5th International Conference on e-Social Science,
Maternushaus, Cologne, 24-25 June 2009
Workshop organisers: Julian Newman (Glasgow Caledonian University), Esther Breuer (University of Cologne)
http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/conference-09/
This workshop aims to promote dialogue and debate around the interrelationships among scientific writing, language learning and use, and the impact of web culture and "Web 2.0" technologies upon the practice and communication of science. On the one hand it has been held that the linguistic styles of web culture are at odds with the academic conventions of attribution in the cumulative effort that is science. On the other hand, the Open Science movement claims that massively distributed collaboration can be brought about by making clear accounts of methods, data and results freely available on the internet.
Scientific writing is difficult to learn. In particular, the writer must learn to construct an argument within the conventions of a discipline, balancing the need to show originality with the need to ground the argument in a body of existing knowledge and relevance structure. Appropriate use of citation, and setting citation within appropriate argumentation, is a significant aspect of writing skill. Learners, to a greater or lesser extent, model their writing on sources which they treat as exemplars: however learning to cite is a complex skill that is developed in conjunction with the use of argumentation. The workshop starts, therefore, from the position that the Web agenda for scientific communication should take account of research on learning to communicate and of research on argumentation support, as well as of the potential of Web technologies to create environments that can promote access to shared scientific content.
Recent controversies surrounding new methods of scholarly communication, exploiting so-called "Web 2.0" technologies, implicitly raise issues concerning the need for science to be communicated in multiple genres. New forms of communication for scientists, influenced by "Web 2.0", include specialised "social networking sites" – sometimes referred to as "MySpace for Scientists" – which host blogs and discussion boards, and may support the setting up of collaborations, "referral sites" which support the tagging of interesting items from the literature, and/or online reference management, Wikipedia-type secondary information sources and online videos of experiments and/or visualised data. Scientists have always had informal registers for "talking shop", discriminable from the communications of the formal journal paper: the issue inevitably arises, whether they now need to develop special writing or production skills for the dissemination of ideas and results in new media. Will this require "unlearning" the current academic conventions, or learning to code-switch between "paper" and "web" styles and registers?
The organisers welcome contributions from researchers and practitioners involved in these problems from a wide range of disciplines and specialisms. Participants should submit a position-paper of around 2000 words by 4th May 2009. The final workshop programme will be published on 18th May 2009.
The workshop will take place on the first day of the conference, 24th May 2009. The fee for attendance at the workshop only will be £150 or £65 for students (earlybird rate, available until 26th April 2009). [Full conference £300/£150.] Prospective workshop participants requiring a response to their submission before 26th April should submit a draft of their position paper by 22nd April.
Submission of position papers: Please email as an attachment to
esciencewriting@googlemail.com
Please use one of the following file formats:
• MS Word Compatibility Format (.doc)
• RTF
• PDF
• HTML
Use of the paper template available from the conference site is encouraged.
Conference details
For full details of the Conference, see http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/conference-09/
Glasgow Caledonian University is a registered Scottish charity, number SC021474
Times Higher Education award winner 2008: outstanding international student support
http://www.gcal.ac.uk/news/pressoffice/releases/241008.html
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