A pretty big double journal issue from the American Review of Public Administration (ARPA) showed up in the mailbox this week. It contains 808 pages of journal articles about Covid-19 from a public administration perspective. I’m going to spend the weekend reading this double issue and thinking about why each of these articles was written. I’m going to deconstruct them from the perspective of why they were put together and why each specific article was assembled. I’m really curious about why the author structured it and published it in the way it ended up on the page for readers.

On a Monday of all days, I started to dig in and focus my academic ambitions to a very specific line of inquiry related to really flushing out the trajectories in a myriad of machine learning literature reviews. I’m walking down the path to understanding a review of reviews of sorts. That inquiry is not very targeted and the content I’m going to encounter will be more of a breath based search of machine learning knowledge. After working through that tower of academic contribution I plan to spend some type really digging into the depth of a couple of key items to form a new academic trajectory toward some survey work or coding efforts that would yield additional academic contributions on my part. 

At this point in time, I need to refocus my efforts and spend time really digging into the current stream of academic contributions. That will help me rebalance my efforts to be a mix of both productive research projects and steady inquiry into how the broader academic of academic thought is changing. Given the sheer volume of publications that are occurring right now that becomes even more challenging. That is why I elected to focus on only reading literature reviews to start. I felt that a review of reviews would help me target the core articles being referenced commonly within the reviews and help me look at what outliers the various academics found to be important. 

Today I’m going to spend more time reading those papers that were identified yesterday. It was very overly ambitious to think that I could read and digest 2-3 literature reviews per day. That is an expectation from back when all I had to do in a given day was academic efforts. Within the limited windows of a full day of adulting the ability to consume 30 pages of a journal article simply takes more time. That is the nature of things I guess as we move forward into this study of machine learning. I’m going to move along at the best speed possible and focus on making quality contributions to the academy of academic thoughts. At this point in time, trying to just spew out content is a fool’s errand to deliver errata destined for a historically dusty shelf at the academy.

Yesterday I spent a few minutes writing about an internet outage that occurred on Sunday. Apparently, that outage was caused by some type of internet protocol issue downstream with a base provider of backbone services. What I thought was interesting is that none of the websites impacted really seemed to send any notice to consumers at all. They just posted a few notes on social media and moved along. My email inbox contained nothing about the outage at all. That should probably not surprise me at all, but it does for some reason. I thought maybe some of these companies would provide notice of downtime, but maybe they have learned that regular and swift communication does nothing to help them at the time of incident. Based on that they simply handle the inbound inquiries and move along. I ended up posting via the WordPress application on my Google Pixel 4 XL Android based smartphone. It was pretty easy to pull up the Google Doc and cut and paste the content from yesterday over and post it. At the time, I thought it was interesting that my desktop network was failing and the cellular one was successful. None of that was as interesting as the donut that ended up getting purchased, but that is an entirely different category of adventure. 

My notes contain an entry about creating forward looking journal articles trying to capture the trajectory of the field. Instead of writing literature reviews that are retrospective this would be an attempt to take the last 90 days or maybe 180 days of journal articles in a specific field and capture and catalog all of the next steps and future research notes. All of those compiled direction based signals about the future of research could help provide a look at the trajectory of research within the field. That type of effort could be pretty interesting to complete. It might be interesting to do a retrospective study on all the promised future research that did not make publication. It is entirely possible that the author finished it and it might not have been accepted for publication or they submitted it to a different journal. Sometimes trying to track down the trail of publications from a specific author is challenging. We don’t really have a seamless system to search all journal articles at one time. They are like little silos of intellectual capital hiding in different ivory towers. A lot of journals are starting up now that have public facing access to all of their content. Those open journals are for me the future of academic publications. Selfishly for those researchers who do not have university/college powered credentials for logins to the various journals it makes it much easier to keep up. 

As an independent researcher I have access to the premier journals in the field of public administration from my paid dues to the American Society for Public Administration. I even pay to have them send me the journals in the mail to make it easier for me to remember to read them based on the physical reminder sitting on my desk. Outside of my public administration based research interests the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning are easier to understand. Most of the researchers in those fields are very eager to share publications and preprints and you can very easily go out and start searching arXiv for electric preprints of articles. It is very easy to start reading and digging through the content. With arXiv you have to carefully watch the references of the papers you are reading to get a sense of where the literature review is being built from and what work the researchers are building upon. Those breadcrumbs provide the intellectual legacy within the academy and you are going to have to do some work to get to the foundational articles. They might not be freely available to read. Sometimes I end up going to the authors websites and reading the content that was instead of trying to get a subscription to read it. 

Maybe all this weblog content should be taken offline. This functional journal represented like 20 years of writing. Some of it false starts and a lot of it incomplete in nature. People seem to be trimming down backlogs of Tweets and other online content. Sometimes I consider purging it all and just moving along. This work is archived. Pulling it down from here would not even make a ripple in the grand ocean of innovation and creativity.

Working on the next writing project is always on target. Editing and working with previous work is not even on my radar most of the time. Obviously, it is something that I probably should invest more energy and effort into, but it never becomes a priority. I’m always placing value on what’s next. All of my attention and focus is on what I’m going to do next. That attention is never on what I have been doing. That is how it works and how I evaluate things. Potential matters. As a writer you don’t generally value the potential of a previous pile of work. This makes me wonder about the future of content. Library shelves provided a curated look into the collective works of content deemed memorable. Somebody thought it was important enough to log it and keep it on the shelf. Beyond any reasonable expectation for storage on a library shelf the amount of content available has accelerated to the point where no library could reasonably physically hold it, have the time to evaluate it, or provide the curation function historically associated with a library. 

Online from internet browsers we have access to so much new content being created every day that a certain degree of displacement is bound to occur. Classic novels and literature will be thinned out to the vital few gaining popular references over and over again. Academic writing is great for sign posting where the ideas were built from during the literature review and other sections explaining the origins of ideas. Outside of academic work something has to be pretty impactful to be referenced. Sometimes it takes a movie franchise to make a book super popular. Other times a super popular book will drive the creation of a movie and sometimes a franchise will develop from that seed. 

These are the things that I am super curious about today. I’m wondering about the future of content and drinking some espresso. 

People are using services to clean out Tweets older than 90 days. First, the facts are clear that this is a common enough request to need services. Second, people seem to be using these services on an ongoing basis. My own personal library of Tweets is generally useless. It is a bunch of links and one line references to things that caught my attention. Twitter is so ephemeral in how it represents the now. As time elapses the usefulness of the content expires exponentially. The value of a sporting event being televised peaks during the broadcast and replays generally are less valuable by an order of magnitude. It makes me wonder if all that content being produced has a flashpoint of value that peaks and falls off into an abyss. Within that abyss all the abandoned content just gets ignored for the most part. The only people going back to read old Tweets are generally researchers. Search engines are smart enough to pretty much ignore that forest of one line zingers and stale links that is the aging Twitter stream.

The amount of academic writing being published has skyrocketed with the advent of online distribution and journals that exist solely online. The barrier to entry of having to print and distribute a journal evaporated. That is important as to continue physically printing a journal it had to have enough subscribers to support that ongoing and expensive endeavor. Online journals have a much lower sustainment cost. This also creates the possibility of increasing fragmentation within the academic community. Following the trail of references in papers is what binds the academic community together. It is that shared activity of running down references that removes fragmentation and focuses the academy itself on the key contributions. At the same time, just seeing a reference over and over again and not being able to get access to it or really find it can be exceedingly frustrating. That is the type of problem that creates reliance on the sources of information and publications that are stable and easy to access. Working within topics that require working in multiple languages or trying to access international journals can be increasingly difficult. 

I guess given enough time to reflect on the future of content my concern about academic literature is dissipating. People will reference and get access to the ideas that influence the academy. That is going to happen based on the near perpetual desire of the people participating in ongoing academic research. Everything else outside of that is where all my wondering about the future of content ended up focusing. Content owned within movie studies and the frameworks they use to distribute will probably continue to be fragmented based on the ever growing islands of online streaming. Independent projects are more ephemeral. A lot of that content gets shared on platforms like YouTube that are here today and gone tomorrow. Given that independent content shared that way would have to be rehoused to continue distribution that content is at risk for being inaccessible. A lot of creator based individual driven content streams fall into that category. One one hand it is great that people are able to share content and some of it gains a real audience that gets to enjoy it and participate with the creator. Alternatively, what happens to that content in the long run.