Joining in the “Science 2.0″ discussion
My RSS reader spit out an article from Science with the interesting title “COMPUTER SCIENCE: Science 2.0″, written by Dr. Schneiderman from the University of Maryland. Before I could even switch Firefox tabs to check it out, however, I came across two good writeups of the article in Nobel Intent and Wired Science. This wouldn’t be the blogosphere if I didn’t chime in with my own opinion…
Let me just start out by saying that attempting to lump the entire process of science prior to this as “Science 1.0″ and the “new” form of science he is advocating as the ever-so tired “Science 2.0″ is immediately off-putting. It’s true that it’s difficult to come up with a pithy term for leveraging web/network technologies for scientific research, but “Science 2.0″ is neither original, accurate, or descriptive. It doesn’t help that, in the end, Dr. Schneiderman is more or less talking about applying the fields of psychology and sociology to web communities, rather than introducing a new and innovative research methodology.
Both of the commentaries by Nobel Intent and Wired pick up on this lack of clarity in the Science perspective. In particular the comment thread at Wired is… lively. I think that commenter Ania summed up my thoughts well:
What would have been nice (especially in Nature [sic]) would be an article on how the power of the web is being used to change research… such as changing the way we design and begin our experiments (usually with a bioinformatic study of whatever gene we are going to look at, a literature search through pubmed or another database). There are an incredible number of things we can do over the internet which help science each and every day, not withstanding being able to look up the genomes of sequenced animals, being able to do a blast search ( a search which compared nucleotides of sequences… ) of two genes or sequences in about 20 seconds (depending on if the americans are awake yet).
Schneiderman B, Science 7 March 2008: Vol. 319. no. 5868, pp. 1349 - 1350 DOI: 10.1126/science.1153539
