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Speedy Neutrinos, Data, and the Humanities
Like a lot of people, my Twitterstream blew up yesterday with the news from CERN about the possibility that neutrinos have been clocked breaking the speed of light. As a former physics major, this wigged me out, not least because it would mean that neutrino at that speed would have imaginary mass (at least according to the same Special Relativity that's at the heart of the tizzy).
But that's not the news that helps us hack the humanities. Instead, it's this characterization about what's happening right now:
But the group understands that what are known as "systematic errors" could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit, and that has motivated them to publish their measurements.
To paraphrase, "Our conclusions might be completely wrong, so we're going to publish not just the results, but all the data, so others can help us figure it out."
Contrast that with the common response to online publishing among humanists, that they cannot let their conclusions out into the world until they are really certain, and their arguments are really solid. In short, be certain, then publish. CERN is doing the opposite with their knowledge. The specific uncertainty motivates them to publish the core data so others can help produce certainty, one way or another. It'd be like instead of submitting an article to a journal, you publish online not only your argument, but also all your research notes (say, via Zotero).
It's a difference between the humanities and sciences in how we view the creation and confirmation of knowledge, and one that I think we should pay more attention to.
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"Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world. To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy."
-- Alan Kay, "Computer Software", Scientific American, September 1984
I'm patrick_mj on Twitter
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sharing the intermediate stages
I completely agree. Of course, the difference is driven by differences in the nature of the research scientists and humanists usually pursue. A lot of projects in the humanities are not about new data -> conclusions, but about reframing old data with artful and precisely phrased interpretation that only starts to become persuasive when it's mostly done.
But when we are discovering new material, or building new tools, I think "sharing the intermediate stages of the work" ought to become a normative expectation. That could mean sharing the citations, or new archival material itself, or a dataset, or an API or web app that interacts with the dataset. Sharing the underlying data is a way of "making our results repeatable."
Couldn't agree more
There are certainly some aspects of process in the sciences that could stand more "opening up," particularly in relation to the academic advancement process where creating artificial scarcity has made the example above much less common that it could/should be.
But the difference in the humanities, except in a very small group, is striking... for many different, but ultimately costly, reasons.
Data
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