/The World of 100
Tony Ng
via: FlowingData
Actions:
- Canadian Health Libraries Association – 10 things you can do for CISTI
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Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) is
Canada’s national science library and leading scientific publisher, provides Canada’s research and innovation community with tools and services for accelerated discovery, innovation and commercialization.
CISTI delvers science data and information to Canadians online, in the Depository Service and as paper delivery service to researchers in Universities. But its days of doing that are numbered…
CISTI has just suffered very serious budget cuts – 70% cut – that affects scientific innovation, access to scientific data, the dissemination of Canadian Science and open access publishing.
The Government of Canada and the National Research Council of Canada have decided that the journals and services of NRC Research Press will be transferred to the private sector.
Privatization? In a sense they are a victim of their own success. The NRC frames it as follows in a letter to their clients (e.g. Depository Service Program):
this transformation is not the development of a “new business” but the movement of a successful program into a new legal and business environment. It is our belief that this new environment will afford us more flexibility to manage our publishing activities.
More flexibility to reduce services to Canadians more like it since the Depository Services Program (DSP) and the delivery of online access to journals to Canadians cannot be funded by an entity outside of the Federal government, and it is expected that the termination date to journals delivered in this way will be sometime in 2010.
This means less access to scientific journals to Canadians. Research Canadians have paid for! CISTI journals deposited in the DSP were important, since the DSP’s:
primary objective is to ensure that Canadians have ready and equal access to federal government information. The DSP achieves this objective by supplying these materials to a network of more than 790 libraries in Canada and to another 147 institutions around the world holding collections of Canadian government publications.
In addition, hundreds of government jobs – scientists, librarians and researchers are expected to be lost. The budget cut is $35 million in annual expenditures.
This plan includes a reduction in NRC’s a-base funding totalling $16.8 million per year by 2011-2012 (announced in Budget 2009) as well as reductions in revenue-generating activities.
Hmm! Wonder what our current Federal Minister of State for Science and Technology’s thoughts are about science?
Here are a couple of articles:
- NRC cuts could affect 300 positions, The Ottawa Citizen
- Access to CISTI Source to End
Here are a few articles:
Action:
- Canadian Health Libraries Association – 10 things you can do for CISTI
USA today produced this interesting interactive map Shifting Religious Identities which renders and makes visual data from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) conducted by Trinity College scholars. The data, report and methodology from/of this survey are available to the public. In addition, the project makes available previous surveys with their associated documentation in their archive.
In Canada, the Statistics Canada Census collects this information by
religious affiliation only, regardless of whether respondents actually practice their religion. Data on the frequency of attendance at religious services have been collected by Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey since 1986. The survey samples adults aged 15 and over living in private households in the 10 provinces (1).
The 2001 overview provides some interesting data, a bit dated, only at the provincial and community scale and not rendered in an interesting way. If you want more detail you must purchase it. A map like the USA Today one could be rendered with what is made available but alas Canadian newspapers are no way near as savvy as the ones in the US when it comes to data visualization, let alone talking about and using statistics!
Contradicting the StatCan quote above,
the census has been collecting data on religion since 1871. Since this question is asked in decennial censuses (every 10 years), it was last asked in 2001 and was not included on the 2006 Census questionnaire. (2)
That question is also only asked to 20% of the population that fills out the Census. Some general information is available for free in the Community Profiles on a location by location basis but not for small census geographies and not for many communities at the same time. Those data at those geographies are available to fee paying citizens.
Perhaps Canadian churches, mosques, synagoges, gudwaras, temples etc. can pass the data donation basket to purchase some of this information!
I always enjoy looking at data analysis experiments from people who just like to play with numbers and who want to figure odd stuff out. The former fun find today was this gem Books and Music That Make You Dumb where CalTeck student Virgil Griffith
used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence.
Griffith is also the creator of
WikiScanner, a database that tracks the IP addresses of anonymous Wikipedia editors, he revealed that the CIA, the Vatican, and staff of various members of Congress (among others) had made edits on the site to remove potentially sensitive information.
As for the latter, I came across a title called Spamdog Millionaire – The geography of social media spam, which I could not resist reading! In this case Philip Jacob on the StyleFeeder Tech Blog did the following
For each account that we have closed due to spammy activity, I ran their source IP addresses through a GeoIP lookup and graphed the data using DabbleDB (which I had been meaning to play with for some time – more on that later). The result: India, in a word. Pakistan, too.
The visualization was not earth shattering, however the conversation about what to do with that information was infrastructurally and geographically interesting. The discussion centrered on the ethic of firewalling entire countries for the bad behaviours of some, and what it means when bad netizens from certain regions of the world get their nations access to content cut off!
Via: Polymeme
I have been neglectful of this wonderful space and am now getting back to it! As a warmer upper, Hugh, suggested that I post the following that I sent to the CivicAccess.ca list. I have been doing lots of thinking in this area, and I have decided to pursue a PHD on the topic of data access in Canada and hope to share some of my readings & findings as I go along.
In addition, I have been reading lots of great data laden reports in public health, on the topic of quality of life, and collecting data from a multitude of sources that I will get to talking about at some point. Until then you can read some of the documents and reports that I have tagged here and here.
Thinking about data
So these days I have to write a proposal, and it involves data, infrastructures, and geographic imagination. And as I was reading an article about criminological data models, governmentality, and biopolitics I came across this fellow Ian Hacking.
Prof. Hacking wrote about how:
- statistical probability came to be in the 17th century;
- the science of prediction and probability shaped categorizations of people into this and into that,
- those categories that did not exist before the statistical analysis, came to become social realities and
- probability can allow you to predict occurrences within a population according to a set of probabilities but alas at the scale of the individual things are totally random!
Ian Hacking is a Canadian Philosopher and a fellow at the College de France – the only anglo accepted thus far – same schools as Michel Foucault.
Why do I care and why am I sharing this? Well, it has to do with access to data and who is creating the categories we come to live by and believe, what it means when government rationalization comes in the form of statistics discussing populations, and that only the government and wealthy organizations have access to the means to those rationalizations.
During the course of proposal writing I re-read the Chapter on the Census, Map and Museum in Benedict Anderson’s Book Imagined Communities. He discusses how these three institutions were instrumental at framing the colonial gaze in Asia. He also explained that these institutions told us more about the colonial mentalité and less about those they being counting, mapping and whose artifacts got collected. Finally, he demonstrated how these institutions and the categories, territories and anthropoligies eventually got believed by the local, re-puporsed, acted and performed in reality, eventually, becoming ancestors. Bref – manufacturing an odd imagination of who one is. Those who counted, mapped and assembled got to tell the stories. And it is these stories that left traces.
After reading about Ian Hacking’s work, I listened to a CBC ideas interview with him. Brilliant! He discusses taming chance, statistical thinking, normativity, wanting to be normal and adapting to categories which make up people and shape a type of social reality. Access to data I think is about enabling more than a few to question, assess and shape reality. It is also about questioning who has the monopoly on the data that allow us to interpolate the terrain of our geographic imagination – who we are, our identity, issues, how we see ourselves.
Andrew Pickering, who studies the sociology of science, was also interviewed by Paul Kennedy in the same Ideas program, and he brought up Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomad science vs royal science. The latter a science that continues to support the known and accepted ways of doing things the former a more distributed form of science out of the academe. I think web 2.0, open access, open source, open data are about nomad science – which i will explore a little more.
I then listened to Brian Wynne, a Prof. of Science Studies in the same ideas series but a different show who discussed how science and technology somehow are beyond the realm of politics. He discusses in his work on The Public Value of Science how some sciences are imagined, how these are delusions, and are provocations and how these are constructed in the public mind.
I am trying, in my own work, to get at the idea that data help us form a picture of reality, and the more of us that get the opportunity to play with them, learn about them, value them, the more pictures we may create that may invert, contest and change something, question what we are currently being told in an educated way, wonder about what we are not told, what is silenced or worse just plain ignored, how our imagination is shaped, ways we may want to shape it and some new social realities we may want to aim for.
Or to use a term from a lecture given by Darin Barney, I think data are part of the means by which we can do citizenship, doing citizenship involves judging and acting on that judgement, and I believe that data are an integral part of making good judgement upon which to act.
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as an FYI The entire CBC lecture series on How to Think about Science is just plain great.
This paper includes an awesome table (p.003) which outlines attributes related to research data sharing in academic health centres. The table includes determinants of data access from the perspective of data storage, controls on access to data, and who determines access permissions.
The paper also includes 7 recommendations for Academic Health Centres (AHC) to encourage data sharing which I think can be modified to suit other contexts:
- Commit to sharing data as openly as possible, given privacy constraints. Streamline institutional review boards, technology transfer, and information technology policies and procedures accordingly.
- Recognize data sharing contributions in hiring and promotion decisions, perhaps as a bonus to a publication’s impact factor. Use concrete metrics when available. [I like that they understand the incentive structures of this group]
- Educate trainees and current investigators on responsible data sharing and reuse practices through class work, mentorship, and professional development. Promote a framework for deciding upon appropriate data sharing mechanisms.
- Encourage data sharing practices as part of publication policies. Lobby for explicit and enforceable policies in journal and conference instructions, to both authors and peer reviewers.
- Encourage data sharing plans as part of funding policies. Lobby for appropriate data sharing requirements by funders, and recommend that they assess a proposal’s data sharing plans as part of its scientific contributions.
- Fund the cost of data sharing, support for repositories, adoption of sharing infrastructure and metrics, and research into best practices through federal grants and AHC funds.
- Publish experiences in data sharing to facilitate the exchange of best practices.
I have not looked at this literature in a while, but my sense is the discourse is moving away from problems to providing solutions. Most importantly in the case of this paper, they are culture shifting since, in a sense they a pushing toward an open access ideology by creating an environment conducive to sharing by hiring the right people, providing the appropriate incentives, marketing successes, changing publication practices, educating and promoting open access within. This is most interesting as this is the medical profession, a bastion of commerce and privacy concerns that is moving to open access faster than our Statistical Agency in Canada!
The full paper is available for free in myriad formats!
Piwowar HA, Becich MJ, Bilofsky H, Crowley RS, on behalf of the caBIG Data Sharing and Intellectual Capital Workspace (2008), Towards a Data Sharing Culture: Recommendations for Leadership from Academic Health Centers. PLoS Med 5(9): e183
The publisher, PLoS Medicine:
PLoS Medicine believes that medical research is an international public resource. The journal provides an open-access venue for important, peer-reviewed advances in all disciplines. With the ultimate aim of improving human health, we encourage research and comment that address the global burden of disease.
PLoS Medicine (eISSN 1549-1676; ISSN-1549-1277) is an open-access, peer-reviewed medical journal published monthly online by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit organization. The inaugural issue was published on 19 October 2004.
November issue of Genome Technology focuses entirely on Open Access openly available under a CC license. The articles discussed both data and publications. Wonderful! See page 40 of the journal to read Ready or Not, Here Comes Open Access.
Via: SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
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I was looking for maps all night on the Tele! None appeared so I came home and found a few. I wonder if the cost and license restrictions of the actual electoral boundary file was an issue for television networks and the media. The only institution that provided a map with ridings was CBC. The rest were visualizations or shell maps of provinces and territories.
The CBC maps were interactive, with roll overs pop ups and some zooming capabilities! As I predicted before seeing the maps, multicoloured areas are urban, west is blue with some patches of orange, centre is orange, east is baby blue, with some patches of red and blue, and all those country ridings are tory blue! And Ottawa, which I did not predict, is surrounded by blue, with one orange and 2 reds! Ontario, well, it is awfully blue! Kinda fun to look around to see what is up!
CyberPresse has a pretty interesting visualization! One cannot see the real geographic distribution of the results but it remains a creative and interactive way to see the votes! As you scroll over the little squares a pop up window shows the results! At a glance a user can see the number of seats per province and then look at the littles squares and their colours, this was perhaps a little less effective but I guess they were struggling with screen real estate and access to a base map.
CTV had a pretty rudimentary map of the provinces and territories. If you click on the province you get a window of the ridings and a rather garish obtrusive list of ridings that blocks the map. You select the riding and then you get the results of the province in a table but not a geographic distribution of results by riding. The map is then left at the bottom of the page all lonely with not much information associated with it.
The Globe and Mail also had an interactive map but again just a shell with the provinces and territories like CTV example above, with a small bit of scroll over action that yields a pop up window and the left pane changing on the right. Informative but not the big picture of the country like a map with all the ridings.
Finally there is our national institution, Elections Canada! A few minutes ago it had no results! Oh My! No maps, and not the most intersting way to access the info. I wonder if they will ever produce a map? Will it be more than a static PDF? Since they own the base file you’d think they could do a little something with that monopoly access? Or perhaps because Statistics Canada sells that for them they also have some sort of dissemination restrictions.
Approved by Executive Council ~ May 21, 2008
Whereas connecting users with the information they need is one of the library’s most essential functions, and access to information is one of librarianship’s most cherished values, therefore CLA recommends that Canadian libraries of all types strongly support and encourage open access.
CLA encourages Canadian libraries of all types to:
Via CultureLibre.ca!
I was reading some of the web accessible INDU submissions by Canadian groups and individuals posted on Michael Geist’s Blog, and a common theme is open & free access to data and scientific research! Very Niiiiice!
You can access them and M. Geist’s here: Industry Committee on Canada’s Science and Technology Strategy
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