This was a talk given at the Digital Humanities 2012 conference in Hamburg by Michael Pleyer, a coauthor on the paper and on the blog ReplicatedTypo.com.

1. AC ADE MIC RE S E ARC H IN THE
BLOGOS PHE RE :
ADAPTING TO NE W OPPORTUNITIE S AND
RIS KS ON THE INTE RNE T
RC A DL T U R J M SWN E S S À G O E T ,
IH R I A E , A E IT R , E N .R B R S
T
H N A L T E M H E P E E , BL B N O
A N H I L, I A L LY R I E Z N
T C L
Michael Pleyer
University of Heidelberg
michael.pleyer@hggs.uni-heidelberg.de
@symbolicstorage
www.replicatedtypo.com

2. Introduction
•
What do researchers want?
– Interdisciplinary research ideas
– Wide audience
– Easy Collaboration
– New ways to present, analyze, and discuss data
– Publish results and theories freely
– Rapid feedback
•
Blogging offers these.

3. Introduction
Positives:
– New ideas can be presented and discussed
easily
– Faster than a traditional journal peer-review.
– Can engages the public about ongoing
research (Think funding bodies).

4. Introduction
Negatives:
– Easier to push before letting ideas stew.
– Side-steps proper assessment.
This could dilute the impact of relevant research.

5. Introduction
We review whether blogging can become
part of research.
Case study: ReplicatedTypo.org – our blog
on language evolution.

8. Replicated Typo
Topics:
•
Central Theme: evolutionary approaches to
language and culture.
•
Reports on recent publications and
conferences,
•
Basic introductions to Linguistics, Evolution,
mathematical modeling and animal signaling.

9. Replicated Typo
Similar Blogs:
•
Many, many linguistics blogs. Mainly –
LanguageLog.
Language Evolution:
•
Babel's dawn, Shared Symbolic Storage,
Culture Evolves!, Biolinguistics Blog.
•
Babel’s Dawn has published a book directed
at a general audience about the theories he
developed on his blog (E.B. Bolles, 2011).

10. Replicated Typo
•
Our aims as science bloggers on Replicated
Typo are:
– to highlight and discuss new research on
language evolution;
– to engage with the general public by presenting
language evolution research in an accessible
way;
– to be a platform for open science research into
language evolution.

11. The Use of Blogs
Discussions of posts on our own blog have lead
to:
•
Revisions / New avenues of research new
avenues of research
•
Collaborations
•
Clarifications of research by the authors of
the studies reviewed.

12. Publishing Code
Releasing code on our blog has lead to
interactions that benefited both the readers and
the researcher.
We hope that model transparency and the
sharing of code can help foster links between
language evolution and other fields who use
similar techniques and technologies (biology,
informatics, etc.).

13. Blogs vs. Articles
•
There is no universal consensus on the
method or acceptability of citing ideas from
blogs.
•
This devaluing of research and criticism
appearing in open forums risks obstructing
research.
•
Cf. #ArsenicGate

14. Other Issues
•
Concerns about standards and plagiarism are
particularly important for blogs that are used
to disseminating original work in progress.
•
A particularly sensitive issue is public access
to experiment data and model code.

15. Student Benefits
•
Writing for blogs can benefit students. They…
– Encourages wider reading.
– Forces engagement with cutting-edge topics.
– Help integrate students from diverse
backgrounds into a particular language
community.
– Can help with networking.

16. General Aim
We hope that presentation of research and
discussion on the internet can, in conjunction
with journal peer-review, lead to more
productive, accurate and progressive research.

17. And Aims Here
•
We aim to raise discussion about these questions:
– Can blogged research be taken as seriously as peer-
reviewed research?
– What are the risks of publicly accessible research?
– Is research blogging adaptable to other fields, in particular
fields involving minorities or low resource groups?
– Are there particular concerns with running experiments or
soliciting feedback online?
– Is the field of academia doing enough towards public
engagement on the internet?

18. Thank you for your attention!
21/07/12