MITPressLog

The New Perils of Being a Couch Potato Academic

In case any of you book-spurning technolators out there are reveling in the hope that our digital manifest destiny is close at hand, take a look at the cautionary evidence that the Wall Street Journal's John Letzing put forth before you forsake your local academic library for the Google Book Search.

Tales of the Internet's unreliabilty as a research tool have been swapped for years, and you may have noticed that Wikipedia has recently taken quite a beating in the press. Tackling a different angle of this issue, Letzing talks with Geoffrey Bowker, author of the new book Memory Practices in the Sciences, about how infomation is getting marginalized or lost. The digitization process is unavoidably incomplete, leaving certain realms of scholarship behind. If scholars fail to get out and scour through the stacks, the users of digital databases are left "hoeing the same kind of territory."

Pablo Boczkowski furthers this point by accusing many academics of "failure to get out of their chairs." He is dismayed that people don't go to libraries anymore to research and thus cheat themselves of the "serendipity of accidental discoveries" and the "unexpected gems" that so helped him research his book, Digitizing the News.

The Wall Street Journal Online has the digital article. Your local libary has that lovely old book smell.

Studying Computer Science Shouldn't Just Be a Guy Thing

Bush unveiled his Jobs for the 21st Century program during his recent State of the Union address, putting forth a set of initiatives intended to prepare school kids for the math and science jobs that are increasingly important for US economic growth. Scott Carlson, in a recent piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription), points out that it is still vital that we consider provisions for ensuring that women are not excluded in the pursuit of today's hot computer jobs.

At the end of the '90's, women's enrollment in computer science programs rose dramatically. Carlson cites Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women and Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, which chronicles the research and reforms that Carnegie Mellon made in order to increase the percantage of women in their computer science programs from 7% in 1995 to 42% in 2000. While that was great progress, the last half decade has seen a dip in enrollment by women shows us that the battle's far from over. Fortunately, programs like CWIT and Women@SCS are creating a culture for women and girls to find mentors, role models and a community in the field. Claudia Morrell at CWIT assures us that "it's simply a matter of time before. . . this will no longer be a problem".

Let's hope we hear some noise about this aspect of the issue in the political debate heats up on Bush's plan. It's certainly worth maintaining and active interest in it (write your rep!). Oh, and when discussing this issue, remember the lesson of Harvard President Lawrence Summers.