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From: harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.misc
Subject: The Net's Potential in Scholarly Communication
Message-ID: <1069@mind.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 30-Jul-87 16:29:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: mind.1069
Posted: Thu Jul 30 16:29:04 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Aug-87 10:40:25 EDT
Organization: Cognitive Science, Princeton University
Lines: 57
Keywords: Re: "Symbol Grounding Poll"
Xref: mnetor news.admin:764 news.misc:809


Mike Anderson 7L-63 <anderson@BOEING.COM> wrote (in e-mail, quoted
with permission):

>	[I'm] intrigued by your goal of developing the potential of the net as
>	a medium for serious intellectual exchange...  worthwhile to start
>	a new group dedicated to exploring that issue... by testing it as
>	you have been doing, not by discussing it...

>	lengthy quotes of responses, followed by repetition of earlier points
>	that seem not to have been understood or accepted, could be replaced by
>	the poster paraphrasing what he/she understood the respondent to have
>	said, and what the original poster actually intended...  

>	I didn't vote in your poll, but if I had I would have voted to
>	continue the discussion.

Thanks for your thoughts on Net discussion. I agree that there was a
good deal of profligate and unreflective overquoting, but the
mechanism of quoting and requoting is also one of the strengths of
email and net-discussions, when used in a serious and selective way.
(E.g., it helps maintain continuity for those who missed the prior
iteration; but properly used it can be *much* more powerful than that.)

The only sense in trying to launch the new kind of use of the Net that
I have in mind in a new group would be if it had a guaranteed wide
initial readership (as comp.ai does). Otherwise it would just be a small
inbred palaver instead of the broad demonstration project it must be
if it is to have any influence on the evolution of net communication.

I'm continuing to think of ways, though. One possibility might be to
hard-publish the four or five discussions I've already generated, but that
would require permissions from all concerned and would entail lots of
coordination problems. (I've saved all the files though.) Another would be
to get bitnet or one of the other academic networks to put together a
critical mass of scholarly readers who agree to participate for a while -- say
four or five months, logging in daily or so to follow the discussions.
*Then* I could promise to get quite a few different topics going in
different disciplines. And if the quality of the participants is
sufficiently high, I guarantee the entire experimental readership will
become addicted for life (as I seem to have become).

>	for recruiting readers, one possibility that occurs to me is to post
>	in mod.ai or comp.ai notices of current discussions in the discussion
>	newsgroup.  Also, if an introduction [to the topic under discussion]
>	were posted to appropriate newgroups, it might serve to recruit readers
>	to the discussion newsgroup.  This approach might gradually lead to
>	a critical mass in the discussion newsgroup so it could serve as a
>	serious test of netmail as a forum for intellectual discussion.

Good idea (although there's still the problem of getting the other
scholarly disciplines on the Net in force in the first place). But now what
do the Net gods and others interested in the Net's broader potential for
scholarly communication in all the disciplines think?
-- 

Stevan Harnad		 harnad@mind.princeton.edu	 (609)-921-7771