Projectories

Open access journals can be compared to musicians who release their music on myspace or on the Pirate Bay. Rather than being locked into copyrights owned by large corporations, open access content flows free. This seems to be a growing movement in academia that aims to circumvent the publishing houses that have made academic publishing big business.

The question is when ISI ranking will be replaced with an open alternative, perhaps taking into account several types of data like the 0xdb for movies. Currently, according to Wikipedia, there are a billion English speakers on a “basic” level, hopefully such an index might allow “international” to be broadened to include the 400 million native Spanish speakers (600 million if you count the Portuguese speakers who could probably decipher Spanish), or the billion+ that can read Chinese characters. Why English should be the only lingua franca of academia is a good question.

See: Open access in STS or On Academic Productivity

Alf Rehn over at Text Sushi has been thinking about academic productivity lately, on one hand he rants on writing books , on the other he wants assistants to do it…

Sarcasm aside, I think these two posts really capture the risks with the publish or perish system. If every academic has to increase their research output there is bound to be people finding ways to circumvent the system: publishing with a mulittude of authors, makings students and assistants do your job, recycling the same ideas in different articles.

The increasing pressure to publish isn’t really an increasing pressure to research… It’s an increasing pressure to find creative ways to publish. Fordist research production… I’m thinking “Word Research Article Plugin”: File -> Export -> Article or “It looks like you’re writing a scholarly article? Do you want to start the Article Wizard.”

On monday the UN 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 starts.

I’ve been thinking about human rights for a time. Can human rights be universal? Can a single set of rights be valid in different cultures?

On one hand my social-liberal side wants to say “of course”, there are some rights which are universal and must be accepted by everyone everywhere. On the other hand I also feel that the thought of a universal rule about human conduct is absurd: values and judgments change over time and space.

This conflict between local and universal is often a burning problem in discussions on Islamic head coverings and secular western culture. I heard an interview on Swedish radio with an Egyptian feminist scholar who argued that head coverings were a matter of fashion, deep belief and choice — not something that could be defined by secular law. The Burka or Niqab really poses a crucial question in relation to human rights. Which rules are to be obeyed? The religious customs, protected by article 2, or secular Egyptian laws preventing the use of head coverings.

The problem is that the rules set forth in the universal declaration are contradictory: the freedom of religion sometimes stands in opposition to, for example, equality before the law. This illuminates a basic problem of stating that the declaration is universal — it is written from the point of view of values from a certain time and place.

But what is the alternative? Often I believe some kind of situated pragmatism is called for, where local conditions are weighed against the universal. But this also denies the power of creating a Universal law valid for everyone.

Here is an invitation to a literature seminar at the Royal Institute of Technology. For the English speakers: sorry about the language.

LITTERATURSEMINARIUM OM ANDREW BARRY, POLITICAL MACHINES (2001)

Per-Anders Forstorp, docent och lektor i kommunikation på CSC kommer att
inleda diskussionen framförallt kring det första kapitlet i boken.

Tid: Torsdag 6 december 2007, kl. 14-16
Plats: Torget, Lindstedtsvägen 5, plan 6, Skolan för datavetenskap och
kommunikation, KTH

Abstract

Teknik- och vetenskapsstudier (STS) har utvecklats under de senaste
trettio åren med ett fokus särskilt på aktörerna i innovationsprocesser
och de politiska frågor som väcks i samband med dessa. Ofta har teknologin
och det politiska kommit att skiljas åt, men det är mycket som talar för
att analyser bör utvecklas där de studeras tillsammans: teknologi och
politik bör ses som integrerade i varandra. I sin bok Political Machines:
Governing a Technological Society (2001), argumenterar den brittiske
kulturgeografen och sociologen Andrew Barry för detta men även för att den
politiska analysen inte bara skall äga rum i anslutning till politiska
institutioner och identiteter, utan också i anslutning till den nya
tekniken. Han fokuserar på en mängd olika saker som är “inskrivna” i
teknologin, t ex nätverkande, nya medier, interaktivitet, standardisering,
teknologiska risker, etc. genom att kombinera olika forskningsfält som
kulturgeografi, politisk sociologi och antropologiska studier av teknik
har Barry initierat ett nytt och viktigt fält inom forskningen där det
analytiska objektet är teknik/politik i dess integrerade form.