Dear Colleagues,
On Feb 9, 2013, at 4:25 PM, Ken Friedman wrote:
> Rather than the problem of mining the full PhD thesis, I was describing the problem of mining the bibliographies within the thesis. To know whether a thesis bibliography is worth mining, one must read and evaluate the thesis.
CHB - I believe you are still in denial here. If one is searching a bibliographic database by keyword or targeted language one does not need to read the thesis for which the bibliography was generated . You only need to search for a citation of potential interest to you using keywords or targeting language, find it, read the abstract if you want to learn its context, judge its source and proceed to the cited text if you think it might fit your interests.
Ken said- "The web does make serious scientific and scholarly projects available, and openaccess is a major change, but of people with a PhD publishing peer-reviewedscientific and scholarly content, the same rough (publishing) percentages obtain.
CHB - I believe that the peer review process can not keep up with what is being produced, constrains and delays accessibility unnecessarily, requires a tremendous effort, and may not be the model to follow in the future.
Ken also said "The problem is that making all the bibliographies of PhD thesis projects available will not provide contextualization. You can render them searchable with enough technical work if someone is willing to pay for the work. Contextualization requires a different set of skills and tools."
CHB - I have suggested that identification of the source, and access to the abstract and keywords, all provided by the author of the bibliography, would provide adequate contextualization. I have no idea what other contextualization would be needed or worth the effort to generate it.
Ken's suggestion that using what is already accessible through sources like the Library of Congress, the British Library, academia.edu, university libraries, etc. is very welcome. In my opinion a guide to their use and links or guides to their services should be made available to students in every PHD program. It might also include a digest of authoring aids like Endnote and Zotero. He seems to have access to the financial means to produce that and make it available through academia.edu or some other repository.
Ken - "I taught students to use their minds in certain ways and they taught themselves the subject.
Among the things that students learned was how and why to compile a reference list, how to write a reference citation, how to read a citation and understand the information it contains, the difference between a reference list and a bibliography, the difference between a bibliography and an annotated bibliography, and so on.This was an intensive three months course with extensive opportunities for practice and coaching."
CHB - I have no doubt that this was an excellent learning experience. Perhaps the resulting bibliographies, once contextualized, by identifiers, an abstract, and keywords, could become exemplary models in the database or wherever they could be accessed.
Thank you Ken
Chuck
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