Imaginary magnitude

Elin Oxenhielm will publish a book:

I have received lots of comments on my paper, and I will publish answers to those in my upcoming popular book. This book will be about the second part of Hilbert’s 16th problem and my attempt to solve it. I will publish more information about this book at this web page soon, so bookmark this page if you are interested!

Oxenhielm’s homepage has recently been updated (thanks, Peter!) with information of the upcoming book.

Elin Oxenhielm has not been afraid to go out in the open on her homepage with criticism of Yishao Zhou - what tone will the book have? What possible effects will a book have on her future at the university? She is, after all, working as teaching assistant at a university department.

And what will happen with the homepage? Oxenhielm has published her rationale for setting up oxenhielm.com and publishing her (former?) teacher’s e-mail messages there: “Now I have realized that I must use this information channel to take action against these rumours.” One could imagine the homepage becoming a kind of “weapon” used by Oxenhielm in the publicity campaigning. But what form will her homepage take; it has, this far, not been very active; will she set up a blog-like regularly updated site?

We have, methinks, only seen the beginning of a trend where scientists increasingly will use the web to further their careers. We have had the ordinary homepage for quite some time - about as long as the web itself - where a scientist publish his or her cv, perhaps some preprints and a fuzzy photo of the cats or kids at home. This will change.

In contested areas we are beginning to see a new use for the webb; scientists/scholars using the homepage as a repository of arguments in a controversy. Two obvious examples are lomborg.com and anti-lomborg.com.

And in non-contested fields there will also be an extended use of the web. Just about any major scientific site - a lab, an observatory - is on the web, with material for journalists, outreach materials. Every university nowadays has a major webpresence, with press releases professionally produced. These are in turn aggregated and disseminated by boundary organizations such as EurekAlert. The press releases are boundary objects, useful for both journalists, scientists, and policy makers. Media exposure is a policy instrument.

But we also have the individuals. Some scientists will excel in the personalization of their webpresence. Media alliances has for a long time been of use to scientific entrepreneurs and they will use the web/bloggosphere in similar ways as they have in earlier times used popular science. (I’m doing it as I write …)

The use of the web by scholars will be the subject of The Boundary Works, a new blog - coming soon to a browser near you! - by that eminent scholar Alf Rehn and the undersigned. We plan to survey the use of websites by scientists. More information as it goes live.