There’s a community of people here who use the R language to get stuff done known as the R Usergroup Manchester (RUM). We meet monthly to learn from each other. At the last meetup on 29th June, I gave a joint talk with Stavrina Dimosthenous about quarto.org and its predecessor bookdown.org. Following Stravrina’s quick introduction to Quarto, I gave a lightning talk about some of the pros and cons of using bookdown to write books.
Since the talk was recorded, I’ve posted the video below, which is a lo-fi Microsoft Teams recording, which doesn’t include any of the Q&A that followed.
TL:DR; Bookdown and quarto are useful and very well documented tools for publishing books that can help you overcome some of the (many) limitations of Learning Management Systems like Blackboard. If you’re writing anything book shaped in your teaching (or elsewhere) I reckon that bookdown/quarto are good tools that are worth learning as they’ll help you to get stuff done.
Thanks Kamilla Kopec-Harding for organising and hosting the talks, a promotional poster for which, you can see below. đ
References
Wickham, Hadley, and Garrett Grolemund. 2017. R for Data Science. OâReilly UK Ltd. r4ds.had.co.nz.
Xie, Yihui. 2017. Bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown.
Xie, Yihui, Christophe Dervieux, and Emily Riederer. 2020. R Markdown Cookbook. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook.
Last month I attended a three day Training of Trainers (ToT) course at the University of Glasgow. Run as an interactive workshop, the course was designed to help leaders of Wikipedia training events to improve their delivery and organisation. Having participated and run several Wikipedia events in the past, such an Ada Lovelace event earlier this year, I was keen to learn how do things better. Here’s a report on the workshop, with some bonus extra curricular Glasgow goodies thrown in for good measure. Thanks again Sara Thomas and Bhavesh Patel for organising and delivering the course.
… work in partnership with organisations from the cultural and education sectors and beyond in order to unlock content, remove barriers to knowledge, develop new ways of engaging with the public and enable learners to benefit fully from the educational potential of the Wikimedia projects.
Most of the workshop participants (pictured top right) were from Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum (GLAM) institutions and a few educational and charitable ones too. Over the three days, here is what we covered:
The second day revisited design skills while touching on delivery skills and group work. This covered elocution, voice projection, body language and an examination the range of experiential activities that can be utilised in workshops. We also discussed aspects of Dave Meier’s accelerated learning (with feedback) and finished the day up with teams preparing for activities for day three.
Day three: The Show Must Go On
The final day of the course finished with the participants divided into four small teams. Each presented a on hour mini-session and had it critiqued by peers. This enabled us to learn from;
Our own mistakes
Other peoples mistakes
Copying / stealing other peoples good ideas, of which there were plenty. Thanks Abd, Daria, Doug, Eoin, Ian, Tara, Ian, Madeleine, Marianne, Saeeda, Tore, Sara and Bhav!
Overall, this was a really useful and memorable training course, one of the best training courses I’ve been on. The content, participants, location were all great and I felt empowered by taking the course as well as making useful contacts from a range of different organisations. It had a clearly defined purpose, well chosen activities and participants, with nothing irrelevant presented. There were tonnes of practical ideas to put into practice straight away which I look forward to doing in 2020. If you’d like to do the course, get in touch with Wikimedia UK.
While in Glasgow, it would be rude not to take advantage of all the bonus extra curricular activities the city has to offer:
Bonus 1: People Make Glasgow Hospitable đ´ó §ó ˘ó łó Łó ´ó ż
They say that People Make Glasgow, and Glaswegians are very hospitable. In between training sessions our host Sara showed us around the city, including the University cloisters (etc), Inn Deep on the banks of the River Kelvin and Curlers Rest in the West End. Sara’s impressive knowledge of Glasgow and its history is wikipedian in its depth and breadth.
To me, Glasgow and Manchester feel like sibling cities separated at birth. If you’re English, Glasgow can feel like a Scottish Manchester. Perhaps Manchester feels like an English Glasgow to the Scots? Here is the case:
Second city syndrome đĽ: As second cities, both Glasgow and Manchester live in the shadow of their more famous capitals, Edinburgh and London. Both cities are the âbelly and gutsâ of their respective nations. Glasgow had its docks, Manchester had its cotton. While both trades are long gone, they leave similar post-industrial legacies on the culture and infrastructure of their respective cities.
Shipping đ˘: Ships, shipping, docks, ports, quays and wharfs run deep in both cities. Glasgow built ships on the River Clyde while Manchester used ships for export and import of goods on its Ship Canal.
Football â˝: Love it or loathe it, the fitbaw connection between Glasgow and Manchester is strong [1,2]. Scrolling through the list of Manchester United managers I count not just one, two or even three but FOUR Glaswegians. Matt Busby (Belshill is basically Glasgow), Tommy Docherty, Alex Ferguson and David Moyes. Is this a coincidence or catholicism? [1,2] Who knows, but my hypothesis is that being shouted at in a strong Glaswegian accent can make teams perform better (although it didn’t work very well for Moyes). I wonder how many Glasgow kisses Alex Ferguson gave his overpaid prima donna squad to keep them in line? Strangely, the fitbaw manager connection isn’t reciprocated: I can’t find any Mancunians in the list of Celtic managers or the list of Rangers managers
Bonus 3: King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut đ¸
Glasgow is home to the legendary King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut. This humble venue, relatively small with a capacity of only 300, has hosted an impressive range artists including Coldplay, Radiohead, Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Manic Street Preachers, you name it, they’ve played King Tut’s. Curious to find out what all the fuss was about, I arranged to meetup with an old Glaswegian friend for a drink at the venue. Assuming the gig that night would be sold out we asked at the bar who was playing. Turns out they had a handful of tickets left, so we spontaneously bought a pair to see Blanco White. Mixing Andalusian and Latin American influences, Blanco White play melancholic but beautiful tunes using a variety of instruments including the Charango [3]. Part of the reason King Tut’s is legendary is Glaswegian audiences are lively, and it was fun to see the band visibly moved by what Josh Edwards, the lead singer told us was: âeasily the best reception we’ve had in months of touringâ.
Bonus 4: Like a Brudge over troubled water đ
Looking for a walk, run or ride in Glasgow? There are some great routes around the city like the Glasgow River Clyde Bridges, with at least 21 bridges to cross the Clyde on. On an early morning run, I couldn’t find any of the âbridgesâ, but there were plenty of âbrudgesâ and some fantastic scenery along the Clyde. Och aye!
Dry January: can you abstain from toxins like alcohol and social media for a month?
Here in the UK, there is an annual tradition known as Dry January. It’s pretty simple, in the wake of all the festive indulgence (đť), around 4 million people voluntarily abstain from alcohol for the month of January. Why? Because they can save money, sleep better, lose weight [1] and even raise money for charity in the process. If you haven’t tried it yet, Dry January is an enlightening (and enlivening) challenge.
But dry January needn’t just stop at alcohol. Other toxic social lubricants are also available. Have you ever wondered what life would be like without the distraction of social media? Ever tried going without? Go dry by switching off all your social media for a month – just to see what happens. Is social media as toxic as alcohol? Could going cold turkey (đŚ) for a month be beneficial to your health and those around you? Switch it all off, meaning:
No [insert your favourite social media here]. How far you take it will depend on how you choose to define social media…
Abstention requires a bit of planning and preparation, but if you tell your friends now, you could experiment with switching off all your social media for the month of January. Will you be able to handle the Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) [2]? Will your quality of life improve?
The idea of digital detox has been around a while and there are several ways of doing it. You can either go the whole hog like Jaron Lanier and just delete everything [3]. If that’s too drastic for you, try using blockers or timers set to zero minutes. Since the most toxic forms of social media are typically found on smartphones, there’s a few options for detoxing:
Abstaining from alcohol can be beneficial for your physical and mental health. [2] Abstaining from social media could probably help too. Why not give it a whirl and see for yourself?
As this is last (and first!) post here for 2018, have yourselves a happy winterval and a healthy new year in 2019.
De Visser, R.O., Robinson, E. & Bond, R., (2016) Voluntary temporary abstinence from alcohol during âDry Januaryâ and subsequent alcohol use. Health Psychology, 35(3), pp.281â289. DOI:10.1037/hea0000297
Lanier, Jaron (2018) Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Bodley Head, ISBN: 978-1847925398 jaronlanier.com/tenarguments.html
PubMedication: do you get your best ideas in the Pub? CC-BY-ND image via trombone65 on Flickr.
Many people claim they get all their best ideas in the pub, but for lots of scientists their best ideas probably come from PubMed.gov – the NCBI’s monster database of biomedical literature. Consequently, the database has spawned a whole slew of tools that riff off the PubMed name, with many puns and portmanteaus (aka âPubManteausâ), and the pub-based wordplays are very common. [1,2]
All of this might make you wonder, are there any decent PubMed puns left? Here’s an incomplete collection:
PubCrawler pubcrawler.ie âgoes to the library while you go to the pub…â [3,4]
PubChasepubchase.com is a âlife sciences and medical literature recommendations engine. Search smarter, organize, and discover the articles most important to you.â [5]
PubCast scivee.tv/pubcasts allow users to âenliven articles and help drive more viewsâ (to PubMed) [6]
PubFig nothing to do with PubMed, but research done on face and image recognition that happens to be indexed by PubMed. [7]
PubGet pubget.com is a âcomprehensive source for science PDFs, including everything you’d find in Medline.â [8]
PubLons publons.com OK, not much to do with PubMed directly but PubLons helps you “you record, showcase, and verify all your peer review activity.”
PubNet pubnet.gersteinlab.org is a âweb-based tool that extracts several types of relationships returned by PubMed queries and maps them into networksâ aka a publication network graph utility. [10]
GastroPub repackages and re-sells ordinary PubMed content disguised as high-end luxury data at a higher premium, similar to a Gastropub.
PubQuiz is either the new name for NCBI database search www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gquery or a quiz where you’re only allowed to use PubMed to answer questions.
PubSearch & PubFetch allows users to âstore literature, keyword, and gene information in a relational database, index the literature with keywords and gene names, and provide a Web user interface for annotating the genes from experimental data found in the associated literatureâ [11]
PubScience is either “peer-reviewed drinking” courtesy of pubsci.co.uk or an ambitious publishing project tragically axed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE). [12,13]
PubLick as far as I can see, hasn’t been used yet, unless you count this @publick on twitter. If anyone was launching a startup, working in the area of âlickingâ the tastiest data out of PubMed, that could be a great name for their data-mining business. Alternatively, it could be a catchy new nickname for PubMedCentral (PMC) or Europe PubMedCentral (EuropePMC) [15] – names which don’t exactly trip off the tongue. Since PMC is a free digital archive of publiclyaccessible full-text scholarly articles, PubLick seems like a appropriate moniker.
PubLick Cat got all the PubMed cream. CC-BY image via dizznbonn on flickr.
There’s probably lots more PubMed puns and portmanteaus out there just waiting to be used. Pubby, Pubsy, PubLican, Pubble, Pubbit, Publy, PubSoft, PubSort, PubBrawl, PubMatch, PubGames, PubGuide, PubWisdom, PubTalk, PubChat, PubShare, PubGrub, PubSnacks and PubLunch could all work. If you’ve know of any other decent (or dodgy) PubMed puns, leave them in the comments below and go and build a scientific twitterbot or cool tool using the same name â if you haven’t already.
References
Lu Z. (2011). PubMed and beyond: a survey of web tools for searching biomedical literature., Database: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation, http://pubmed.gov/21245076
Hull D., Pettifer S.R. & Kell D.B. (2008). Defrosting the digital library: bibliographic tools for the next generation web., PLOS Computational Biology, PMID: http://pubmed.gov/18974831
Hokamp K. & Wolfe K.H. (2004) PubCrawler: keeping up comfortably with PubMed and GenBank., Nucleic acids research, http://pubmed.gov/15215341
Hokamp K. & Wolfe K. (1999) What’s new in the library? What’s new in GenBank? let PubCrawler tell you., Trends in Genetics, http://pubmed.gov/10529811
Bourne P. & Chalupa L. (2008). A new approach to scientific dissemination, Materials Today, 11 (6) 48-48. DOI:10.1016/s1369-7021(08)70131-7
Kumar N., Berg A., Belhumeur P.N. & Nayar S. (2011). Describable Visual Attributes for Face Verification and Image Search., IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, http://pubmed.gov/21383395
Featherstone R. & Hersey D. (2010). The quest for full text: an in-depth examination of Pubget for medical searchers., Medical Reference Services Quarterly, 29 (4) 307-319. http://pubmed.gov/21058175
Kim T.K., Wan-Sup Cho, Gun Hwan Ko, Sanghyuk Lee & Bo Kyeng Hou (2011). PubMine: An Ontology-Based Text Mining System for Deducing Relationships among Biological Entities, Interdisciplinary Bio Central, 3 (2) 1-6. DOI:10.4051/ibc.2011.3.2.0007
Douglas S.M., Montelione G.T. & Gerstein M. (2005). PubNet: a flexible system for visualizing literature derived networks., Genome Biology, http://pubmed.gov/16168087
Yoo D., Xu I., Berardini T.Z., Rhee S.Y., Narayanasamy V. & Twigger S. (2006). PubSearch and PubFetch: a simple management system for semiautomated retrieval and annotation of biological information from the literature., Current Protocols in Bioinformatics , http://pubmed.gov/18428773
Seife C. (2002). Electronic publishing. DOE cites competition in killing PubSCIENCE., Science (New York, N.Y.), 297 (5585) 1257-1259. http://pubmed.gov/12193762
Jensen M. (2003). Another loss in the privatisation war: PubScience., Lancet, 361 (9354) 274. http://pubmed.gov/12559859
Dubuque E.M. (2011). Automating academic literature searches with RSS Feeds and Google Reader(â˘)., Behavior Analysis in Practice, 4 (1) http://pubmed.gov/22532905
McEntyre J.R., Ananiadou S., Andrews S., Black W.J., Boulderstone R., Buttery P., Chaplin D., Chevuru S., Cobley N. & Coleman L.A. & (2010). UKPMC: a full text article resource for the life sciences., Nucleic Acids Research, http://pubmed.gov/21062818
John Peel comtemplating Drum & Bass via bhikku on Flickr.
If you’ve filled your boots with the wall-to-wall glastonbury festival coverage, you might find it curious that many people have little or no interest in new music, choosing instead to listen to the artists they liked in their formative years and loyally sticking with them for life. John Peel put it another way:
People do find it curious that a chap of my age* likes the things that I like but I do honestly feel that it’s one of those situations where everyone’s out of step except our John, because in any other area of human activity – theatre, literature or something like that, you’re not supposed to live eternally in the past, you know, you’re supposed to take an interest in what’s happening now and what’s going happening next and this really all that I do, it seems to be a perfectly normal and natural thing to do.
*John Peel was a spritely 50 years of age at the time of the interview where he said that in 1990Â [1]. Isn’t it curious that, as Peel said, new music is largely considered to be the exclusive domain of âyounger peopleâ, while new theatre, new technology, new art, new science and new anything-else is not? Wonder why that is?
If you never got around to buying Peter Suber’s book about Open Access (OA) publishing [1] âfor busy peopleâ, you might be pleased to learn that it’s now freely available under an open-access license.
Open Access is open access I'm happy to announce that my book on OA (Open Access, MIT Press⌠http://t.co/eOyftQI1Pc
— Peter Suber (@petersuber@fediscience.org) (@petersuber) June 18, 2013
One year after being published in dead-tree format, you can now get the whole digital book for free. There’s not much point writing yet another review of it [1], see Peter’s extensive collection of reviews at cyber.law.harvard.edu. The book succinctly covers:
A lot of the (often heated) debate about Open Access misses an important point about open access being for machines as well as humans, or as Suber puts in Chapter 5 on Scope:
We also want access for machines. I donât mean the futuristic altruism in which kindly humans want to help curious machines answer their own questions. I mean something more selfish. Weâre well into the era in which serious research is mediated by sophisticated software. If our machines donât have access, then we donât have access. Moreover, if we canât get access for our machines, then we lose a momentous opportunity to enhance access with processing.
Think about the size of the body of literature to which you have access, online and off. Now think realistically about the subset to which youâd have practical access if you couldnât use search engines, or if search engines couldnât index the literature you needed.
Information overload didnât start with the internet. The internet does vastly increase the volume of work to which we have access, but at the same time it vastly increases our ability to find what we need. We zero in on the pieces that deserve our limited time with the aid of powerful software, or more precisely, powerful software with access. Software helps us learn what exists, whatâs new, whatâs relevant, what others find relevant, and what others are saying about it. Without these tools, we couldnât cope with information overload. Or weâd have to redefine âcopingâ as artificially reducing the range of work we are allowed to consider, investigate, read, or retrieve.
It’s refreshing to see someone making these points that are often ignored, forgotten or missed out of the public debate about Open Access. The book is available in various digital flavours including:
Suber, Peter. Open Access (MIT Press Essential Knowledge, The MIT Press, 2012). ISBN:0262517639
Clair, Kevin. (2013). Kevin Michael Clair reviews Open Access by Peter Suber The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 39 (1) DOI: 10.1016/j.acalib.2012.11.017
If you’ve built a personal library of scientific papers in Mendeley, you won’t just want to delete all the data, you’ll need to export your library first, delete your account and then import it into a different tool.
Disclaimer: I’m not advocating that you delete your mendeley account (aka #mendelete), just that if you do decide to, here’s how to do it, and some alternatives to consider. Update April 2013, it wasn’t just a rumour.
Exporting your Mendeley library
Open up Mendeley Desktop, on the File menu select Export. You have a choice of three export formats:
It is probably best to create a backup in all three formats just in case as this will give you more options for importing into whatever you replace Mendeley with. Another possibility is to use the Mendeley API to export your data which will give you more control over how and what you export, or trawl through the Mendeley forums for alternatives. [update: see also comments below from William Gunn on exporting via your local SQLite cache]
Deleting your Mendeley account #mendelete
Login to Mendeley.com, click on the My Account button (top right), Select Account details from the drop down menu and scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the link delete your account. You’ll be see a message We’re sorry you want to go, but if you must… which you can either cancel or select Delete my account and all my data. [update] To completely delete your account you’ll need to send an email to privacy at mendeley dot com. (Thanks P.Chris for pointing this out in the comments below)
Alternatives to Mendeley
Once you have exported your data, you’ll need an alternative to import your data into. Fortunately, there are quite a few to choose from [3], some of which are shown in the list below. This is not a comprehensive list, so please add suggestions below in the comments if I missed any obvious ones. Wikipedia has an extensive article which compares all the different reference management software which is quite handy (if slightly bewildering). Otherwise you might consider trying the following software:
Citeulike.org, a web-based application owned by Springer, [update: citeulike is not owned by Springer, although they have sponsored them in the past] see also @citeulike
Papers, also owned by Springer and available on other platforms besides Mac, see also @papersapp
One last alternative, if you are fed up with trying to manage all those clunky pdf files, you could just switch to Google Scholar which is getting better all the time. If you decide that Mendeley isn’t your cup of tea, now might be a good time to investigate some alternatives, there are plenty of good candidates to choose from. But beware, you may run from the arms of one large publisher (Elsevier) into the arms of another (Springer or Macmillan which own Papers and ReadCube respectively).
Van Noorden, R. (2013). Mathematicians aim to take publishers out of publishing Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature.2013.12243
Hull, D., Pettifer, S., & Kell, D. (2008). Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web PLoS Computational Biology, 4 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204
Attwood, T., Kell, D., McDermott, P., Marsh, J., Pettifer, S., & Thorne, D. (2010). Utopia documents: linking scholarly literature with research data Bioinformatics, 26 (18) DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btq383
The UK’s premier Digital Research community event is being held in Oxford 10-12 September 2012. Come along to showcase and share the latest in digital research practice – and set the agenda for tomorrow at Digital Research 2012. The conference features an exciting 3-day programme with a great set of invited speakers together with showcases of the work and vision of the Digital Research community. Here are some highlights of the programme – please see the website digital-research.oerc.ox.ac.uk for the full programme and registration information.
New Science of New Data Symposium and Innovation Showcase on Monday 10th: Keynotes from Noshir Contractor [1] (Northwestern University) on Web Science, Nigel Shadbolt (Government Information Adviser) on Open Data and a closing address by Kieron O’Hara (computer scientist) – with twitter analytics, geolocated social media and web observatories in between. Also the launch of the Software Sustainability Institute’s Fellows programme and community workshops.
Future of Digital Research on Tuesday 11th: Keynotes from Stevan Harnad on “Digital Research: How and Why the Research Councils UK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised” [2], Jim Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) on “Broad Data” (not just big!), and Lizbeth Goodman (University College Dublin) on “SMART spaces by and for SMART people”. Sessions are themed on Open Science with a talk by Peter Murray-Rust, Smart Spaces as a Utility and future glimpses from the community, all culminating in a Roundtable discussion on the Future of Digital Research.
eâInfrastructure Forum and Innovation Showcase on Wednesday 12th opens with a dual-track community innovation showcase, then launch the UK e-Infrastructure Academic Community Forum where Peter Coveney (UK e-Infrastructure Leadership Council and University College London) will present the “state of the nation” followed by a Providerâs Panel, Software, Training and Userâs Panel – an important and timely opportunity for the community to review current progress and determine what’s needed in the future.
There’s a lot more happening throughout the event, including an exciting “DevChallenge” hackathon run by DevCSI, software surgery by the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) and multiple community workshops – plus the Digital Research 2012 dinner in College and a reception in the spectacular Museum of Natural History in Oxford. Digital Research 2012 is very grateful to everyone who has come together to make this event possible, including e-Research South, Open Knowledge Foundation, Web Science, the Digital Social Research programme, our Digital Economy colleagues and the All Hands Foundation.
We look forward to seeing you at Digital Research 2012 in Oxford in September.
References
Lazer, D., Pentland, A., Adamic, L., Aral, S., Barabasi, A.L., Brewer, D., Christakis, N., Contractor, N., Fowler, J., Gutmann, M. & (2009). Social Science: Computational Social Science, Science, 323 (5915) 723. DOI: 10.1126/science.1167742
Stevan Harnad (2012). Open access: A green light for archiving, Nature, 487 (7407) 302. DOI: 10.1038/487302b
bbc.co.uk/programmes as a QR Code by /Sizemore/ Mike Atherton on Flickr available under a creative commons licence
Over at @BBCSport and @BBC2012 there are some Olympian feats of big data wrestling going on behind the scenes for London 2012 [1]. While we all enjoy the Olympics on a range of platforms and devices, a team of twenty engineers is busy making it all happen. It’s great that the BBC, unlike other large organisations, can talk openly about their technology and share hard-won knowledge widely.
Back in 2006 the BBC published another impressive application that allowed users to search and browse over 75 years of programme data. The programme was built from  metadata, not the actual audio and visual data from the TV and Radio, but the data that comes after-data, information about the programmes from an internal database known as Infax [2,3].
It allowed users to find weird and wonderful things. For example, you could browse all the programmes that Alan Turing or Albert Einstein had appeared in or search for all the programmes with Jennifer Ehle. You could query it as well, to list all episodes of Dr Who in the order they were aired. It wasn’t so much Big Data as Big Metadata, [4,5] potentially useful for improving the viewing and listening experience of the audience.
At the time of its launch, Dave Beckett @dajobe blogged about it, Matt Biddulph wrote some release notes, Tom Loosemore said a few words, backstage clocked it and I scribbled some notes too. Being a proof-of-concept âexperimental prototypeâ, the app eventually disappeared into the great bit bucket in the sky. The only visible trace of the catalogue today is the blog posts above and the message below which greets you when you visit the site:
âThank you for your continued interest in the BBC Programme Catalogue. The BBC is now looking into how this data can be incorporated into its programme information pages.â
You can still get some BBC programme metadata from bbc.co.uk/programmes and bbc.co.uk/archive. Every programme has publicly available metadata but only a fraction of what was in the open catalogue. Although the app has gone, lots of the data must still be there somewhere. Take for example, the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games…
The metadata that is currently available
The metadata for each BBC programme can be found via its own page, so the opening ceremony programme has metadata available in xml and rdf which tells you several things including this synopsis:
âCoverage of the opening ceremony, which officially starts at 9.00, with the eyes of the world focused on the Olympic Stadium as the 30th Olympiad is officially declared open by Her Majesty the Queen. Film director Danny Boyle is set to produce a stunning cultural show ahead of the athletes’ parade, during which over 200 countries are expected to be represented. This is followed by the official opening, the arrival of the torch and the lighting of the cauldron.â
The metadata also tells you that this particular programme was presented by Sue Barker, Huw Edwards, Gary Lineker, Jake Humphrey and Mishal Husain. The Executive Producer was Paul Davies and there’s a bunch of other stuff: date of first broadcast, links to related information and clips but that’s about it.
The metadata that used to be available
The great thing about the open catalogue was that it went into lots more detail than above. So, for the Olympics ceremony, the participants in the programme would have been listed as Danny Boyle, Daniel Craig, Thomas Heatherwick, Elizbaeth II, Paul McCartney, Rowan Atkinson, Bradley Wiggins, Kenneth Brannagh, Steve Redgrave, J.K. Rowling and so on. For each contributor, you could see what other programmes they had been involved in, not just recently broadcast ones, but those going back 75 years. You could also see who had collaborated with who and when their first broadcast was and so on. It didn’t just document the Ăźber-famous people either, it went into just as much detail about other people you might not necessarily have heard of like Frank Cottrell Boyce, Callum Airlie and Jordan Duckitt. It was great stuff, but neither the archive or current programmes seem to have this level of detail.
Meta-conclusions
It’s a bit of a mystery where all the lovely BBC metadata went, it’s probably just sitting on some servers somewhere, inaccessible to the outside world. With my licence fee paying hat on, this seems a bit of a waste. I’ve asked everyone I know, including people at the beeb, but have drawn a blank. Most have shrugged their shoulders and pointed to the useful but slightly impoverished /programmes and /archive which is why I’m writing this post on t’interwebs.
Maybe the Olympic task of curating all that data makes it un-sustainable. Perhaps somebody decided there is no point competing with wikipedia where wiki-nerds curate programme data for free? It’s possible you can’t justify serving big metadata without giving the actual data (programmes) too? Maybe there’s a shiny new application in the pipeline to replace the catalogue, currently being worked on or an upgrade to @ArchiveAtBBC & @programmes so they include much more data. Could there be issues with publishing this kind of personal data on the web which meant the whole thing got canned? Nasty copyright issues could probably sink a project like this too. Who knows…
Does anyone reading this know the answers? If you do, I’d love to hear from you.
Karen Loasby (2006). Changing approaches to metadata at bbc.co.uk: From chaos to control and then letting go again, Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 33 (1) 26. DOI: 10.1002/bult.2006.1720330109
Andrius Butkus and Michael Petersen (2007). Semantic Modelling Using TV-Anytime Genre Metadata, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4471 234. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-72559-6_24
It has been an eventful year in the boxing ring of scientific publishing since the last set of figures were published by Thomson-Reuters. A brand new journal called PeerJ launched with a radical publish ’til you perish business model [1]. There’s another new journal on the way too in the shape of eLifeSciences – with it’s own significant differences from current publishing models. Then there was the Finch report on Open Access. If that wasn’t enough fun, there’s been the Alternative metrics “Altmetrics” movement gathering pace [2], alongside suggestions that the impact factor may be losing its grip on the supposed “title” [3].
The impact factors below are the most recent, published June 28th 2012, covering data from 2011. Love them or loathe them, use them or abuse them, game them or shame them ⌠here is a tiny selection of impact factors for the 10,675 journals that are tracked in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) ordered by increasing punch power.
WARNING: Abusing these figures can seriously damage your Science – you have been warned! Normal caveats apply, see nature.com/metrics.
* The Russian Journal of Cardiology is included here for reference as it has the lowest non-zero impact factor of any science journal. A rather dubious honour…
** The Cancer Journal for Clinicians is the highest ranked journal in science, it is included here for reference. Could it be the first journal to have an impact factor of more than 100?
References
Richard Van Noorden (2012). Journal offers flat fee for âall you can publishâ, Nature, 486 (7402) 166. DOI: 10.1038/486166a
Jason Priem, Heather Piwowar and Bradley Hemminger (2012).  Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact arxiv.org/abs/1203.4745
George Lozano, Vincent Lariviere and Yves Gingras (2012). The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers’ citations in the digital age arxiv.org/abs/1205.4328
O'Really? 
