{"id":2264,"date":"2016-08-09T16:35:38","date_gmt":"2016-08-09T16:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/?p=2264"},"modified":"2016-08-09T18:02:51","modified_gmt":"2016-08-09T18:02:51","slug":"recon-2016-my-favourite-small-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2016\/08\/09\/recon-2016-my-favourite-small-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"ReCon 2016 – my favourite small conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

ReCon has become my favourite small conference about publishing and research. It\u2019s held each June in Edinburgh. I attended it\u00a0in 2015\u00a0and really enjoyed it. There were stimulating presentations on non-trivial topics, and plenty of interesting conversations over coffee and lunch. So I went again this year with high expectations that were not disappointed.<\/p>\n

A few librarians attend, plus many researchers (mostly early career), some publishing people and information industry people. It is more research-focused than the UKSG<\/a> or R2R<\/a> conferences, and (to my mind) is more focused on cutting-edge topics.\u00a0 There is also a<\/span>\u00a0Hackday on the day after the conference but sadly I wasn’t able to attend that this year. Last year I learnt a lot from the Hackday.<\/p>\n

Here is some of what I found most interesting about the conference. You can watch videos of the talks on the ReCon website.<\/a><\/p>\n

Citation<\/h2>\n

Geoff Bilder<\/b> (from CrossRef) is one of those people who is physiologically unable to give a boring talk. He promised us a rant but his talk, while vivid, seemed too carefully argued and well-worded to be designated\u00a0a rant. He called it \u201cThe citation fetish\u201d.\u00a0 He reminded the audience that c<\/span>itations can be inaccurate and distorted, leading to excessive concern with impact factors, h-indexes and the like. Then he complained that these metrics\u00a0have gained too much influence on decisions about research careers. So far, so familiar.<\/p>\n

Then Geoff surprised us by pointing out that we use the wrong words in connection with citations.\u00a0 <\/span>When we talk about citations<\/em>, we are talking about the inclusion of an article in a reference list. This is wrong we shouldn\u2019t use \u2018citation\u2019 to denote the number of times an article is listed in a reference list. These are just references.\u00a0<\/em>Rather, when counting citations we should count each time an article is cited\u00a0in the citing article. A cited article may be referred to several times in a citing article – but will only appear once in the reference list. This may seem a nit-picking point (I admit to thinking this) but Geoff suggested it is symptomatic of a problem with our citation habits – a concern with credit over reproducibility.<\/p>\n

He also drew attention to \u2018citation\u2019 practice in the more informal world of blogposts. Typically a blogpost may include a link (just a hyperlink rather than a formal citation) to another web page (blogpost or something else). Sometimes a blog post may link to something which is in fact a DOI, i.e. a part of the world of formal literature. Sometimes blogposts may have more formal list of references at the end, with in-text citations. Some may include footnotes with links in.\u00a0 <\/span>In blogs all of these different styles of citing and linking are intertwingled<\/a> (I\u2019d not heard this word before, but apparently it was coined by Ted Nelson). As bloggers we\u2019re not thinking that hard about how we cite\/link.\u00a0 <\/span>We all do it, mixed up-wise.<\/p>\n

Now Geoff got serious. He highlighted the Force11 data citation principles<\/a>. The first three of these are: importance, credit\/attribution, evidence. Geoff stated that the principles put too much emphasis on credit\/attribution rather than on evidence (reproducibility), putting the cart before the horse.<\/p>\n

I think this was the main point of his talk: citation practice should be at the service of reproducibility<\/strong>. Citing should be a way to help readers\/researchers to follow through the arguments in a paper<\/strong>, and the execution of the research reported.<\/p>\n

Focusing too much on credit\/attribution harms this link. It occurs to me that there is a kind of diachronous Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work when we start to measure citations – the act of measuring affects future citation practice and thus deems all future measurements suspect.<\/p>\n

Geoff enjoined us not to think magically about citations but to think critically and to doubt everything we think about citations.<\/p>\n

After his talk I felt that we could quite profitably\u00a0have sat around discussing what he said for the rest of the day. But sadly there were more talks to listen to. Luckily they were also thought-provoking.<\/p>\n

Research data<\/h2>\n

Mike Jones<\/b> (from Mendeley) had the difficult task of persuading us that we should be happy to trust his company (owned by Elsevier) with our research data.<\/p>\n

I must confess I had missed the announcement <\/a>that Mendeley now offered a data repository service<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It seems to have been around for about a year, though it was in beta for much of that time. Mendeley data is setting up as a competitor to broad\u00a0repositories such as\u00a0Figshare<\/a> and Dryad<\/a>, and will also work with Hivebench, recently acquired<\/a> by Elsevier. Clearly Elsevier are putting together their own data ecosystem.<\/p>\n

Mike rehearsed the well-known reasons underlying the current surge of interest in data sharing and data repositories. I liked his listing of the phases of data curation:<\/p>\n

Storage (rescue) – Shared (needs incentives) – Discoverable (metadata) – Comprehensible (well-described\/structured) – Valid (curation, review). <\/i><\/p>\n

Finally, Mike mentioned that\u00a0 <\/span>they are developing a search engine called Data Search which will search across multiple data repositories. Jim Procter on Twitter pointed out<\/a> \u00a0that its effectiveness will depend on the metadata.<\/p>\n

I think it is useful to have another service in this general data repository space, but I think Elsevier will have an uphill battle to secure the trust of the research community. One of the questions from the audience highlighted this aspect.<\/p>\n

Data viz<\/h2>\n

A major theme of the conference was data visualisation<\/strong> and there was a group of talks about this. Clearly it\u2019s an on-trend topic as Nature also had a feature about it recently. \u00a0 <\/span>http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/the-visualizations-transforming-biology-1.20201<\/a><\/p>\n

Jo Young<\/b> gave an introduction to the topic, taking us rapidly through the history of data visualisation from 1786. William Playfair \u00a0<\/a>invented several ways of visualising data. John Snow, with his famous map showing cholera hotspots grouped around a water-pump, was another pioneer, along with Florence Nightingale and Edward Tufte.<\/p>\n

Jo gave us quite a broad definition of data visualisation, noting that IKEA self-assembly instructions can be categorised as such (personally I\u2019d say they were fiction).\u00a0 <\/span>Others include: Barplots, Boxplots, Network diagrams, Choropleths,\u00a0 <\/span>Videos, Images \/ photos, Tables. I realised I am quite ignorant about this subject as I’d never heard of a ‘chloropleth’.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d never heard of Anscombe\u2019s quartet <\/a>either but Jo explained that it is a set of four small datasets having the same statistical features. However when visualised the datasets are revealed as being quite different. This provides a really persuasive example of the value\u00a0of using dataviz.<\/p>\n

Jo finished by giving some simple guidelines for designing data visualisations. She said that\u00a0<\/span>we are better at distinguishing different heights than different angles, so pie charts are not always the best choice for displaying data.\u00a0 <\/span>Other advice included:<\/p>\n