begin again in earnest - photo br flickr.com user found_drama, Rob Friesel, CC-licensed

Dipping your toe into academic publishing can be a daunting experience. Rob Weir offers some practical tips for researchers who want to publish without perishing.

Many of Weir’s tips are the stuff of common sense: have something substantial to say; pay attention to grammar and punctuation; write clearly; avoid waffling.

Another useful tip: beware the curse of knowledge. Understanding too much about your subject can sometimes get in the way of good communication. It’s less likely to happen when you are writing for a peer-reviewed journal in your academic field; writing an opinion piece for a daily newspaper requires more care for clarity and explanation.

Because of their inherent structure — small panels of art presented sequentially to tell a story — comics are a natural fit for new technologies like phones and iPads.

Creators and publishers are already finding ways to provide an enriched reading experience through these devices. What hasn’t yet emerged is a business model that will pay for the sustained development and production effort — unlike a novel, a strip comic never reaches “The End”.

This unusually candid blog post describes the process and the financial returns of expanding one of the web’s most popular strips into new mobile apps.

“…the job of the copy editor is to do the first pass on a piece, when the manuscript is ‘set up,’ that is, set in type for general distribution… The copy editor does not make any interpretive changes… [Next] One of the query proofreaders, on a day when she is not OK-ing a piece, reads the galleys of a piece that is scheduled for a future issue, fixing spelling and punctuation, of course, but also making more subtle suggestions… When a piece is scheduled to run in the magazine, we read it again, twice… The OK-er then has the duty of reading the piece yet again…”

That’s a total of five copy-editing passes for each article. “This takes as long as it takes,” says Norris, “and we don’t rush out at 6.00pm” when the working day is officially over.

Lori Franklin suggests the ideal copy editor is someone who worries about details and is comfortable with absurd conversations.

“The job has its perks—an accumulation of random knowledge, for instance—but it also has its side effects… Once you train yourself to spot errors, you can’t not spot them. You can’t simply shut off the careful reading when you leave the office. You notice typos in novels, missing words in other magazines, incorrect punctuation on billboards. You have nightmares that your oversight turned Mayor Bloomberg into a ‘pubic’ figure.”

Though she has moved on to another type of editing job, Lori Franklin confesses there’s still a strong copy-editing streak within:

“I can’t help it if I think unnecessary quotes are funny, as if signs are trying to be ironic. Or if I’m turned off by guys who spell it ‘definately.’”

Danielle Corsetto illustrated this personality type perfectly in her online comic, Girls With Slingshots — click image to see the full-size original:

Web comic, above: Girls With Slingshots, by Danielle Corsetto - episode 849

In which vocabularies are expanded

Nice one, Howard!

I sent that video’s URL to the head of the university where I work. He has a sense of humor, so might appreciate it, but he’s not the type of performer Rosenberg is.

Our vice-chancellor is known for his great intelligence and his willing to listen to a variety of ideas and opinions. He’s also good at conveying in writing the sincerity that’s obvious when you see him in person.

Here’s an example of an email sent by the vice-chancellor to all staff this week. It could have been simply a yawn-inducing list of names with a brief “thanks everyone” to close. Instead, here are the final few sentences:

“We can all recall the lecturers we found inspiring, and a new generation is about to discover the exaltation created by teachers who bring a story to life, make clear a difficult concept, get to know their students and share their passion for ideas.

“Such students will remember the start of semester in 2010 as that hidden gate in a low wall that leads to a life barely glimpsed until now. Thank you to the staff who have worked so hard to make the campus ready for the influx, to the professional staff and student volunteers who have done so much already to make students welcome through activities and student centres, and to the academics about to begin again the great adventure of learning.”

Enthusiasm, generosity and a reminder of why we’re here. That’s a good way to start the year.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace - statue of Nike, now held in the Louvre

Perhaps the Nisroch article caught my eye because I work at an organisation whose:

• corporate logo features Nike, the Greek goddess of victory (and was created long before the sports-shoe company)
• HR/finance enterprise system is called Themis, after the Greek goddess associated with good counsel, proper custom, procedure and social order
• new CRM(ish) enterprise system is named for Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, motherhood, magic and simplicity

Can you see a theme there?

Computer system administrators have a long history of naming their machines, networks and gadgets after gods, pop-culture figures, music composers… anything that comes in groups and provides a mental model, a metaphorical framework that helps people to organise their understanding of the analogue reality it describes.

For example, I know of one organisation that named its mailserver TARDIS and its webserver Metabelis — the webmaster was a Dr Who fan. (TARDIS is the name of the Doctor’s spaceship and Metabelis was an important planet in the Jon Pertwee storylines of the mid-1970s.)

Another enterprise named its webservers for birds — galah, budgie, parrot — and another used the names of Russian composers. If you could remember one name in a series, the theme of the series gave you a mnemonic for recalling the other names.

Another organisation named its array of proxy servers after Snow White’s seven dwarfs. This is a particularly effective example of ‘framing’: hearing the names of two or three machines, you immediately know that there should be seven in total, and with a bit of concentration you would be able to name them all. The reference to a well-known fairytale provides additional information that helps you understand the system’s size and shape.

We often don’t know or recognise the frameworks that affect our behavior and thinking. Frameworks can be a powerful tool for designers, information architects and writers. Understanding an end-user’s mental model of a task or situation can give the designer or IA clues about how to organise and present information. And the organising principle will, as often as not, be based on some kind of underlying cognitive framework.

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Suggested further reading:

• Indi Young’s how-t0 book: Mental Models: aligning design strategy with human behavior
• Donna Maurer’s presentation at Oz-IA (slides and audio) about George Lakoff’s work on categorisation — and how we regularly blur the boundaries between the categories we create
• Wikipedia article about cognitive linguist George Lakoff; his ideas about the relationship between the physical brain and the language of our metaphors are particularly relevant here

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The second headline reads: Brown moves ahead with plans for slavery. Easily misunderstood!

This image (right) is a snippet from my RSS feedreader. It shows three headlines from the Boston Globe’s education section. Because the feedreader appears in a small ‘portlet’ within my web browser, space for headlines is limited — anything more than 45 characters gets automatically truncated.

Thus the second headline in the image reads:

“Brown moves ahead with plans for slavery”

Hmm. Probably not quite the image Brown University wants to convey about itself. In fact, it’s better known as a leader in liberal arts and humanities education.

It’s ony when you click the headline and read the entire article that things become clear — Brown University is building a museum to collect and exhibit items relating to the history of slavery. So the headline in my feedreader should have said:

“Brown U plans slavery museum”

This version of the headline clarifies that “Brown” is the university, not some random person named Brown, and conveys the idea that the museum about slavery does not yet exist, but that the university is actively working to create it.

The phrase “moves ahead with” is the culprit here. It’s an example of sloppy writing, adding nothing substantial to the meaning of the headline. Worse, it takes up unnecessary space and prevents the important, meaningful word “museum” from appearing in the feedreader display. A similar effect would occur in search results for this article, or if I were reading the Boston Globe online via my mobile phone or PDA.

Online communication uses lots of microcontent, small chunks of information that can be automatically identified and re-used by multiple applications.

Common examples of microcontent:

Headlines, captions on images, subheadings, link text, the text in a web page’s <title> tag, and an email subject line

To write great headlines, you need to master three things:

1. an understanding of the rules of grammar
2. a grasp of how web applications use microcontent (I’d suggest starting with content management systems, blog publishing software, search engines and RSS feedreaders)
3. regular practice and feedback

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References

William Strunk Jr (1918): The Elements of Style. See especially the section titled “Omit needless words”

Jakob Nielsen: Write for reuse (article 2 March 2009), Microcontent: headlines, page titles, and subject lines (article 6 September 1998) and list of articles about writing for the web

Wikipedia articles about microcontent and the related concept of microformats

The byline says the article was posted 7 minutes ago and updated 8 minutes ago, which is logically absurd.

I saw similar inconsistencies on other ‘breaking news’ articles at the same web site. Articles in the ‘breaking news’ category can be updated several times in a single day, or even within an hour or two of first being published.

The timestamp is added to such stories so that readers know how fresh that breaking news really is. In contrast to a site that’s updated only once or twice a day, you are more likely to trust — and return to — a news web site that seems to be abreast of current events.

A well-built content management system should be able to automatically insert the timestamps and check that they are consistent. It’s worth making certain that your CMS is configured correctly to enable this.

Earlybird registrations are open now, and close next Tuesday 9 September.

Earlybird registrations are A$660, or A$550 if you quote the discount code MR0243. Register online at the conference web site.

The conference will be held in Sydney, on the weekend of 20-21 September.

Who should attend?

• Designers of navigation, organisation, labelling and search systems that help people find and manage information more successfully,
• Librarians, webmasters, and content owners responsible for creating taxonomies and information architectures,
• Application developers who design web and software solutions and select the technologies and staff to support them,
• Project and business managers needing to understand the benefits and challenges of information architectures in electronic information spaces.

[cross-posted at SneedleflipsockTheBlog]

Source: xkcd.com, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, maths and language.