Into the Blogosphere
Like many
who first venture into the blogosphere, Sean Carroll, a senior research
associate in theoretical physics at Caltech, wasn’t sure where it
would take him. But when he wrote his first post on the Preposterous Universe
blog on February 29, 2004, he set out on a path that would make him one
of the most-read scientist-bloggers around.
More than
three years after his first post, Carroll is still going strong. He’s
since abandoned the Preposterous Universe, and for two years has been
writing for Cosmic
Variance, a blog he shares with a group of physicists and astronomers,
drawing 4,000 visitors a day. Their posts often spark lively discussions,
with comments from professional scientists and the general public alike.
Carroll, who is the most frequent contributor to the blog, was recently
invited to speak about cosmology at YearlyKos, an annual convention of
mainly liberal bloggers and like-minded political activists. This year’s
convention even featured a debate among the Democratic presidential candidates,
showing the growing influence of the blogging community.
Although
it tends to center on physics and astronomy, Cosmic Variance gives the
scientists the opportunity to write about anything they like, whether
it be politics or the Harry Potter finale. According to Carroll, part
of the purpose of the nonscience posts is to show the human side of science.
“We’re all very concerned about people in elementary school,
and especially girls and groups who don’t traditionally become scientists,”
Carroll says. “We want to show them scientists are human beings,
that being a scientist is something they can do someday, and that it’s
not that scary.” Additionally, he says the blog gives the public
an inside glimpse of what scientists do and think. Carroll recently wrote
a three-part series on how an idea grows into a full-fledged research
paper, from scribbling equations over a drink at a bar to finally posting
the work to arXiv.org, the online depository for papers in physics, astronomy,
mathematics, computer science, and related fields.
At first,
Carroll wanted to link to as many physics blogs as possible, but with
more than 50 now listed on Cosmic Variance, he says he’s since given
up. Despite the proliferation of physics blogs, Carroll is not very optimistic
about them taking a more prominent role in physics research. From posting
papers on arXiv.org to e-mail, the current way in which physicists communicate
is already efficient. Blogs, however, could serve as a place for specialists
and nonspecialists to interact, chipping away at the barriers separating
academia from the general public. Still, most physics blogs are written
by students or nonscientists who are interested in physics—and not
professional physicists, Carroll says. “I think physicists have
been slower to catch onto blogs than people in the social sciences or
humanities,” he explains. “Physics is more of an esoteric
topic where we talk to each other rather than the outside world.”
For instance, blogging in technical detail about the cosmological effects
of Lorentz-violating vector fields—one of Carroll’s areas
of research—probably has a limited audience. For him, Cosmic Variance’s
purpose is clear. “We don’t have a lot of goals other than
us having fun,” he says.
One social
scientist and blogger is Caltech’s Professor of Political Science
Michael Alvarez. (A feature article about his work begins on page 12).
As part of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, which he codirects,
he started the Election
Updates blog. Unlike Cosmic Variance, this blog has a research-oriented
purpose of disseminating news and developments among those in the field
of voting technology. According to Alvarez, readers include other academics,
policy-makers, those who build and develop voting machines, political
junkies, and others who may not be in the circle of academic political
scientists. “Our role is to push research out into the community,
to people who normally won’t be exposed to it,” he says.
When he started
the blog two years ago, a couple of blogs devoted to election politics
already existed. But none focused on voting technology, and that’s
where Election Updates found its niche. The blog, which Alvarez runs with
Thad Hall, an assistant professor of political science at the University
of Utah, features a small group of contributors. The blog receives about
150 views a day, but when election season comes up, so does the number
of hits. The site saw more than 16,000 total visitors last November, when
his graduate students and colleagues were constantly updating, he says.
“It was almost a full-scale operation.”
What’s
the future of blogs in academia? Alvarez anticipates that soon, the open,
online communication afforded by blogging could become a regular part
of political-science research. Caltech Library Services already uses blogging
technology to disseminate research papers in all fields. Its Open
Access Authoring @ Caltech site posts papers written by Caltech researchers
that have been published in so-called “open access” journals.
These journals don’t require a subscription, supporting themselves
by other means such as subsidies from institutions or universities or
by charging the author a production fee.
Meanwhile,
Alvarez wants to take further advantage of this new platform, and in particular,
to explore multimedia possibilities. His first post, in fact, was a podcast,
an audio recording of his own commentary. He and his colleagues also posted
their own YouTube videos of election sites. “There’s a lot
of interesting things you can do with the technology,” he says.
“We’ve only scratched the surface.”
As blogs continue to evolve, so will their roles—whether for disseminating research, bridging the gap between academia and the public, or just for fun. “The power of this is pretty profound,” Alvarez says. —MW
