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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 741. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London Hosted by King's Digital Lab www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org [1] From: Jim RoviraSubject: Re: [Humanist] 33.737: on using academia.edu (36) [2] From: maurizio lana Subject: one experience with academia (67) [3] From: maurizio lana Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.733: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons (74) --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 2020-04-07 23:57:30+00:00 From: Jim Rovira Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.737: on using academia.edu Tim -- Thanks for responding. Yes, I am using the paid version of the site, so I get more information. I get a list of names and links to profiles. Some of these are anonymous, but most of them are actual names with faces and contact information through the site. I have five books out, and I don't have that kind of information about any of my readers unless they happen to self-identify as one of my readers -- say, I meet them at a conference, or they write a review, or they email me or contact me some other way. I do get number of pages read or downloads through academia.edu, but it doesn't evaluate the care with which my files were read. Honestly, you seem to be holding the site to a standard that doesn't exist for any other publication format in the entire history of publications, from the existence of scrolls to codexes to printed books to the internet. No author has ever had anything other than sales numbers until very recently, which means no author could ever know if a reader has ever actually read his or her work, much less if they read it carefully or intelligently. That kind of knowledge has been very rarely had by authors throughout the entire history of the written word. I'm unsure why you think this site can or even should provide that kind of information. Academia.edu doesn't dehumanize a process that was previously humanized, because the process was never humanized as you describe to begin with. For the most part, no author has ever known who reads his or her work or how they read it. I'm trying to work out in my mind the number of readers Shakespeare has had compared to the number of readers he personally knew about, and the difference is staggering to me. He probably has a sense of the number of people who watched performances of his plays during his lifetime, but since then? I can't even begin to process what he might have thought of readings of his works had he known about them, and more than that -- why it should matter to me, except as an insight into Shakespeare himself. Jim R --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 2020-04-07 15:11:54+00:00 From: maurizio lana Subject: one experience with academia Øyvind, i had a similar experience: for 2 or 3 days i searched with Google Scholar for articles about e-learning which i found all over, obviously: academia, researchgate, but also publishers websites. and "now" i get email messages announcing publications about e-learning. i didn't get anything like that before those 2/3 days. i think that in order to understand more one should do some very focused searches differentiated between academia and researchgate, and then wait for what announcements one receives and analyze them first of all by provenance. best maurizio Il 06/04/20 10:09, Humanist ha scritto: > --[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Date: 2020-04-05 14:57:14+00:00 > From: Oyvind Eide > Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.730: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons > > ... > > I had, however, one experience I would suggest anyone with knowledge and > interest could duplicate or confirm in other ways. I have an Academia.edu > account (directly, not via google or anything) which I use sometimes to download > articles. However, I have no automatic login; I usually access the page without > being logged in. I accept cookies (otherwise many things do not work at all) but > acceptance settings are set to accept cookies from the website being visited > only. So this is what happened: > > 1. I searched for and found a paper. > > 2. The link led me to Academia.edu. I did not log in, I just looked at the > reference (and could not download it, which I did not need anyway). > > 3. Within minutes I had an email from Academia.edu suggesting 10-15 other papers > on the same topic. > > So it seems to me that they link cookie information to information about logged > in users also when the user is not logged in and then do their marketing based > on that. > > Outrageous? Not sure. But I am really happy that alternatives such as Humanities > Commons do exist. Choice is important. And I hope they can operate also with > colleagues working in countries currently under boycott by the country in which > the servers are located (which in the case of Humanities Commons is USA, right)? -- http://maurobiani.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/patrick-george-zaky-libero.png ----- Maurizio Lana Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici Università del Piemonte Orientale piazza Roma 36 - 13100 Vercelli tel. +39 347 7370925 --[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 2020-04-07 13:07:47+00:00 From: maurizio lana Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.733: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons hi everyone the discussion is very interesting and for me it shows in perspective four main themes which appeared here and there but are really central: 1. the distance between tenured people and independent researchers 1. the availability (or not) of access to one or more institutional repositories (mainly related to have or not a tenure) 2. the (until now?) small authoritativeness of humanities commons (HC) - compare it for example with that of ArXiv 3. the academic pressure "to be known": which is insane and can easily be dismissed as such by those who have a position, but which is substantially the only, main, bright road which every newcomer has face to herself to try to enter academia or at least to be heard (to be read) by those in academia. 1. the distance exists not only in terms of incoming money, but also in terms of 'benefits' which are fundamental for the research: first of all free access to a good amount of monographs or journals. you are out and you find that academia.edu (AE) and researchgate (RG) offer you a lot of accesses to publications otherwise impossible to gather, unless you pay exorbitant prices (did anyone notice prices like 80, or 90 $ or ⬠for 1 article?). so you subscribe to a free plan to AE and RG. 1.1. you write a paper - and if you are in academia you have at least 1 place where to put it, the institutional repository of your institution; if you are outside, you haven't; but even if you are inside, the institutional repository can be 'elusive': mainly focused to the internal needs of the institution and not to the need of the author to be seen and known - for example it only seldom appears in general searches (it's the case here in Italy for the IRIS repository). instead you put it in AE and/or RG and you enter a realm of contacts with people having similar interests and are regularly notified of publications by those people and about those types of studies. not bad, especially since no one else does it so thoroughly and for free (having to receive recurrent invitations to go premium is minor annoyance, in this respect). 2. if you are in "physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics" your independent, world-known and authoritative repository is arXiv. a well thought paper put (published) there can become discussed and known all over. take 20 humanists all over and ask them what is HC; and take 20 physicians, mathematicians, computer scientists, and ask them what is arXiv - and you have a measure of the road HC has to do before becoming something that can replace or surpass AE and RG. nevertheless HC could and should probably be conceived has _having to become_ the "humanists' arXiv". until HC remains a small hidden gem it cannot exert a strong positive influence in the global humanities community (be it, the community, digital or not: publishing and sharing in digital doesn't mean being/having to be a digital humanist). 3. in many research areas, research and people doing it are measured simply on indexes. being known is a way to try to better your numbers. anything against people trying to better their numbers? me not. anyone succeeding in changing this situation, despite all their proclamation about the limits, unfairness, biases, ecc. of the way the numbers work when judging the quality of research? i don't see any change. so, beside criticizing AE and RG with very good reasons (which i share, and in fact i teach them in my courses!) i think that we need to understand to which real needs AE and RG give an answer - until these needs don't go away, or until we don't devise better ways to answer those needs, AE and RG will be there. best maurizio -- http://maurobiani.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/patrick-george-zaky-libero.png ----- Maurizio Lana Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici Università del Piemonte Orientale piazza Roma 36 - 13100 Vercelli tel. +39 347 7370925 _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
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