Dec
20
Yet Another Turning Point….
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
As some readers at this place already know , the boring fact is that I started work in the publishing and information industry in October 1967 , and am thus over fifty years as an observer of change in these parts . And , in what some regard as a fifty year dotage , , I am prone to remark that change is the new normal etc etc and pour scorn on the wealthy publisher who I approached for work in 1993 and who replied “ tell me when your digital revolution thing is over and then help me to cope with the next five hundred years of the post-printing world “ . And I quite see the point . Revolutions are not for everyone . And there were comfortable years in my twenties when it seemed possible to believe that Longman ad OUP, Nelson and Macmillan , could go on ruling the post colonial world of school textbook publishing with nothing more exciting than a revised Latin syllabus to stir the waters of their creativity . Yet in truth the world of print , from the rise of Gutenberg to the fall of the house of Murdoch , has been full of change . It just happens faster and more completely now .
In the old world ( my personal calendar divides at 1993 , Year 1 ,when I did my first internet strategy consultancy job : Appearances to the contrary my age is only 25! ) we bought and sold companies on valuations that reflected something of their ownership of unique , proprietory content . In the deals that I did for Thomson in the early 1980s , and particularly in the building of the then large law database Eurolex , ownership and exclusivity were critical . Journeying to Luxembourg last week , I reflected on my first visit there in 1980 to negotiate the rights to put the judgements of the European Court of Justice online . Reporting triumphantly to my chairman , I recall him saying – “ but surely they are worthless if everyone can get them ? “ Since that day the following earthquakes have taken place : cross-file searching that gave real utility to collections of documents held online ; the Internet and the Web , which permitted exposed content to be treated and searched as if it were all in the same place ; and then the ability to scrape , copy , transmit and , in the age of SciHub , mass-pirate that allegedly precious content , proprietory or not .
And so we emerge into the Age of data . It took a decade for the content world to understand that the Web was not just a place where you took the formats of yesterday , reloaded them digitally and pursued the same business models . By 2005 much of this had been done , and over the next ten years we had some really interesting Web formats , many new variant business models , and the first tremors of the new ‘shake . We call this round of shifting and grinding tectonic plates the Data revolution , and you need to look closely at micro movements to see it happening . In an area like science research , always a useful bellwether , the last quarter showed real progress in terms of the reaction of major players . In landmark announcements in the past three months Springer Nature have indicated that their SciGraph now contains over a billion metadata items ( https://www.springernature.com/go/group/media/press-releases/one-billion-metadata-facts-now-on-springer-nature-scigraph/15313528?utm_medium=spredfast&utm_content=SpringerNature_Press%20Release&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=SpringerNature_&sf176646201=1. ) while Elsevier have cleverly released their Unified Data Model (UDM) to a club of Pharma companies (https://www.dataiq.co.uk/article/elsevier-opens-data-model-life-sciences-innovation) . In short this means that the largest traditional content players in the sector are awakening to two critical factors in the post-content world – the content-about – thee-content will be more important than the content itself , and that your data model will be the most important means you have of communicating with your customers .
This column has many times rehearsed the market moves away from research and towards workflow . We have dwelt here at almost embarrassing length on the device as a solution rather than a primary access point . In the research world we can clearly see the emergence of a tools and services economy , in a market that has moved away from budget restricted purchasing points like the library and towards a total concentration on researcher support . Many publishers would love to go on living in a traditional publishing world – especially in scholarly societies dependent on journal income – but as Roger Schonfeld has indicated in two recent Scholarly Kitchen articles , it is simply no longer possible . If even Titans like Elsevier and Springer Nature are moving off the floodplain and seeking higher ground , everyone else needs a lifeboat . This is a consolidating market too – acquisition and failure are increasing , though who would want to buy traditional journals at present ? Consolidation here means outlets decreasing , more preprints and an increase in informal availability and transmission ( ResearchGate ) .
But the move to a data driven market where metadata searching is routine and text and data mining is a fluent part of most research processes implies that everything is available to be swept . Academic publishing is a paywall world where use of advanced mining techniques has to be negotiated with data holders . And publishers building analytics will find that you need a centrality of deployment to make them meaningful . As Roger Schonfeld indicates , this implies a partnering spirit that is alien to the capitalist spirit. And Danny Kingsley , director of Scholarly Communications at Cambridge said in an LII speech at the beginning of this month , the risk is that while the public purse can pay for some initial innovation , these funds cannot be reliably sustained – with the result that companies she named like Elsevier were buying their way into the academic service economy . This obviously worried her more than it does me – people fleeing for the hills cannot be too picky – but it does raise the interesting question of where the value now lies that underpins these players . It is not surely in the copyrights . It may be in the software . Increasingly it will be in the analytics , but this will be a fast moving game of winner -takes-all. – for a moment . And how many big service companies do you need – I suggest a market leader and a competitor to keep him honest is enough . This is the trouble with earthquakes , you end up sitting somewhere unfamiliar waiting for the aftershocks .
To those who have reached this point , thanks and seasonal greetings . More funeral rites next year , for which I wish you every happiness and success- especially if you are tackling the enigma which is the networked digital society .
Oct
20
ZKM – the cure for Frankfurt
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, STM | Leave a Comment
So, my fiftieth Frankfurt came and went. Three days of intense and interesting discussion with people who are building very successful businesses from the technologies and the social change in a networked society which I have been studying and monitoring since the 1980s. Much of this is hugely encouraging, some is faintly irritating (I still get questions about what happens when print re-asserts itself, or when will innovation be over!). But all of it, nine meetings a day, the receptions, and chairing the Innovation Day opening session, is, frankly – tiring! By Friday I needed a break.
And that duly came, though in the most surprizing manner. On Saturday I journied out of Frankfurt and down the Rhine valley to the comparatively (in German terms) “new town” of Karlsuhe. I wanted to revisit FIZ Karlsruhe, a part of the Leibniz Institute of Information Infrastructure, which is based some 12 km north of the site on the campus of KIT, the great technical university. That visit, on the following Monday, was all I had hoped it to be, and a testimony to the powerful work of these part (25%) state funded institutions in Germany. But more of that in its own context, having travelled through Boston the previous week, and experienced a grand party to celebrate the 50 years stuff with some 100 friends (enough of that now that we are in year 51!) I was pooped. My only interest was a delightful book on the history of sixteenth century Albania and I was quite prepared to embrace that for the weekend had not Karlsruhe itself intervened.
As I said, it is a new town. Started in 1715 as the Margrave of Baden sought to distance himself from the unruly citizens of Durlach. He built a monumental castle, and from his front door planned city streets running out from that central point in a great fan shape – its nickname is the fan shaped city. Thomas Jefferson, visiting at the other end of the same century, was impressed and its structure finds echoes in L’Enfant’s Washington. I was impressed too, and despite the disruption of installing a metro system, this remains a civilized and relaxed place. Go to Grundrechte square and you can see the civil liberties enjoyed by Germans emblazoned on street signs – this is the home of the German Federal Supreme and Constitutional Courts. The fact that this is a university town gives a pleasant diversity. By the time I reached the doors of the ZKM I was beginning to revive, but I had no idea of what I was to encounter next.
Imagine a huge munitions factory, stripped and turned vast three story galleries that reminded me of the central space at Tate Modern – only much longer. Then fill that with a wholly mixed population of all ages and abilities united in one pursuit – finding art and enjoyment in immersion in digital media. Walk into a room where cameras pick you up and show you on a screen. I paused before the slightly alarming image before me, when all of a sudden I was joined on screen by the people who had passed through earlier, all crowding and laughing and strolling around my similarly moving image. Then turn to a scanner which wants to look at objects in your pockets, and then similarly mixes them on screen with the images from other pockets. Very simple stuff, this, but it drove the laughter and delight of the visitors as they went to other galleries, brought their own devices into play and felt the power of the most perfectly designed and produced art gallery for digital as art that I have yet seen. ZKM is Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, and is an example to us all of the artistic and educational value of digital art. Gloomy reporters who ask what can be done to prevent children from spending too much time on their devices should be sent here for retraining. The networks provide digital opportunity for multimedia and individual media expression and social art of a high order. This has to be better acknowledged than it is in conventional media exchanges, and here is a wonderful example of how to do it.
And learn from it. As I wandered through the elements of a major show called Hydrid Layers I was struck, involved and then compelled to watch a deck called Basilisk, a video performance by an American artist called Daniel Keller. Using two ideas – the Streisand Effect, which occurred when the actor’s lawyers forced the removal from the Web of an image only previously seen by ten people, thus exciting the curiosity of millions, and the Basilisk concept, from the ancient world via Harry Potter, where the threat can only be extinguished by holding up a mirror, he explores the 2016 US election. With Google Maps shots of Streisand’s former Malibu home being undermined by coastal erosion as a backdrop, Keller uses flat and unemotional language to explain the US Alt-right memes around Pepe the frog, the frog pharaoh, and the Cult of Kek, and how this symbolism and its cartoon imagery became important in the attack on Clinton and the election of Trump. And, if we are ever to hold the Mirror up to the Basilisk, these are things about a networked society that we must learn and understand. Indeed, unless we have museums and galleries like this it is very hard to see how we can, at any age, learn and understand.
I left ZKM with the same sore feet that I had brought down from Frankfurt. Perhaps slightly worse. But I was elated and refreshed by what I had seen. If the Hydrid Layers or Art of Immersion shows come to a place near you please rush to see them. The only way to stop our kids falling for the Kek Effect is to immerse them so thoroughly in digital art and society that they have the ability to fashion their own mirrors to expose to the face of ever-present Basilisks.
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