Presenting Academic Research Online

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Presenting Academic Research Online
Beauty
Challenge
The
and
of

• Edgar Huang, Ph.D.
• ehuang_at_iupui.edu
• School of Informatics
• Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

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Searching for an Ideal Streaming Technology

• By June 2006, U.S. home broadband adoption had
  reached 60.
• High-speed Internet-connected households are
  expected to grow from 194 million in 2005 to 413
  million by 2010.

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Searching for an Ideal Streaming Technology

• A 2005 study by AccuStream iMedia Research shows
  that the consumption of streaming videos is
  positively correlated to whether the consumer has
  a broadband connection.
• Content aggregators, including portals like AOL,
  Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and providers like Apple,
  are in the early stages of providing video
  services. They are slowly defining the future of
  television online.

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Searching for an Ideal Streaming Technology

• Streaming technologies drive the development of
  online video.
• Watching streaming videos these days, however, is
  not as easy as watching TV because there are too
  many incompatible standards.
• A study on streaming video production and viewing
  experience is needed to investigate the issues
  like
• Accessibility,
• image quality,
• encoding efficiency,
• bandwidth detecting efficiency and
• cost of setting up streaming.
• Why is this project important?

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Searching for an Ideal Streaming Technology

• In mid-2006, my colleague and student Clifford
  Marsiglio worked with me on this project.
• I am a trained researcher, and Clif, a manager of
  the IUPUI Testing Center, is an online testing
  expert.
• We did our literature search and review, tested
  out our two on-demand videos, one 10-min long and
  the other 30-sec long, encoded with five
  technologies, Flash, QuickTime, Real, VX30, and
  Windows Media.

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Searching for an Ideal Streaming Technology

• We posted our test survey online and debugged it
  in our two-week pretest. Then we invited new
  media experts all around the country via the NMC
  Listserv, AEJMC VisCom Listserv, VideoHelp.com
  Forums, and some other venues to test the videos.
• This is a test placed in the real world and based
  on a non-systematic random sample.
• I conducted descriptive statistical analysis on
  the data collected by Clif. Based on the ranking
  scores each streaming technology received for
  each individual factor, an averaged performance
  ranking score is assigned to each technology.

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Searching for an Ideal Streaming Technology

• At the New Media Consortium 2006 Summer
  Conference in Cleveland, OH, we presented a
  poster on this study, and the poster won a
  Judges Choice Award.
• For some authors, this is not a bad ending to say
  the least, and earning an award might be the end
  of the project.
• For folks at the NMC, they thought differently.
  In order for more people to see the posters, they
  posted all the posters in Second Life (SL) and
  convened a mini-conference there. Today, our
  poster is still located on the NMC Campus in SL.

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Searching for an IdealStreaming Technology

• For Clif and me, we decided that this study
  deserves an even bigger audience who are
  interested in this topic and may very well
  benefit from our study.
• For the next two months, we expanded the writing
  and constructed a Web site for the study.
• Today, this study can be found at
  http//www.iupui.edu/nmstream.

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Searching for an Ideal Streaming Technology

• So far, the site has attracted the interests of
  professionals and scholars from all around the
  world.
• Several blogs mentioned and discussed the site.
• I received quite enquiry emails regarding the
  study.
• Duke Universitys IT department linked their site
  to our study.

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The beauty of Self-publishing

• The readers have quick and easy access.
• The author gets a much bigger audience.
• Research projects on practical issues, which are
  normally not considered by academic journals but
  needed by professionals, are a good fit for
  online publishing.
• Any mistakes in a study can be corrected and new
  information can be updated quickly and easily.
  Wiki can be a good helper.
• Multimedia features can be incorporated into the
  presentation, which is impossible for print
  publications.

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Models of Academic Online Self-publishingUniversi
ty-sponsored repository

• Online self-publishing is picking its momentum.
• arXiv.org is an online repository sponsored by
  Cornell University Library provides open access
  to 391,851 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics,
  Computer Science and Quantitative Biology.
• Faculty from all around the world can submit
  their works to the repository.

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Models of Academic Online Self-publishingPublic
library-sponsored fee-based journal

• This month, the San Francisco-based non-profit
  Public Library of Science will launch its first
  open peer-reviewed journal called PLoS ONE,
  focusing on science and medicine.
• Like its sister journals, such as PLoS Biology,
  PLoS Medicine, and PLoS Clinical Trials, PLoS ONE
  will make research articles available for free
  online by charging authors to publish.
• How much? 750/piece for now, but soon to be
  1,250/piece.

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Models of Academic Online Self-publishingPublic
library-sponsored fee-based journal

• Unlike articles in other PLoS journals that
  undergo rigorous peer review, manuscripts in PLoS
  ONE are to be posted for the world to dissect
  after an editor gives them just a cursory look.
• Its too early to tell how useful this open
  airing will be.

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Models of Academic Online Self-publishingPublic
library-sponsored non-fee-based journal

• Another open peer-reviewed journal, Philica,
  launched in early 2006 allows authors to upload
  their research at no cost and without any peer
  review.

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The Challenges of Self-publishing

• Are such journals creating junk science?
• How will self-paid publications be respected by
  tenure and promotion committees in universities?
• Wouldnt a publisher publish it if it were worth
  publishing?

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Two successful cases

• In 2002, the reclusive Russian mathematician
  Grigori Perelman created a buzz when he bypassed
  the peer-review system and posted a landmark
  paper to the online repository, arXiv. Perelman
  later won the Fields Medal this year for his
  contribution to the Poincare conjecture, one of
  mathematics' oldest and puzzling problems.

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Two successful cases

• Edward Tuftes self-published books
• Beautiful Evidence (2006)
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
  (2001)
• Visual Explanations Images and Quantities,
  Evidence and Narrative (1997)
• Envisioning Information (1990)
• are all widely used in high education.

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Lessons from the two cases

• The success of self-publishing online or off-line
  largely depends on who you are and how much new
  contribution you have offered to the scientific
  or creative conversations.
• Since no or little peer-review process is
  involved in online self-publishing, credibility
  of the author is important. Such credibility can
  be confirmed by a brief academic credential of
  the author.
• To show the new contribution of the study, which
  is usually revealed by the peer-review process,
  dont be shy to post any critical feedback by the
  academic community and/or industrial community as
  an alternative of peer-reviews.

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• Thank you!
• Dr. Edgar Huang
• ehuang_at_iupui.edu