One of the things I always found interesting about Bourdieu’s theories has to do with the ways in which fields, as social action spheres, tend to establish the limits of what’s thinkable. That is, to define what things is it reasonable to think about at determined moments and spaces.

In the case of the tourism field, these restrictions operate in a very particular way: they tend to sanction as useless any thougth about travel and tourism that doesn’t have as its objective any kind of sustainable commercial enterprise. Since I rather come from journalism and an academic context, fields where the analysis of any other kind of portion of reality shouldn’t necesarily be based on its commercial use, I always found quite problematic the reduction of “everything important should give money”.

In a way, this scheme establishes a clear limit of what’s thinkable: no critic reflection about the field itself is stimulated, since such reflections are understood as completely useless. According to this point of view, we should generate myths of place as business opportunities; but the evaluation of such imaginaries -that is, to take account of its production conditions from politics and economics- are not important.

This blog is part of a different bet: to analyze the different representations associated to the touristic field not as business opportunities but as social and political constructions. It’s a bet with no place in the touristic field, and for this reason its anchored in the academic, journalistic and literature side. In the same way the best travel stories are not written by travel journalists but those who come from sections more linked to politics -that’s the case of Ryszard Kapuscinski or Robert Kaplan- the best analysis of the tourism market will not come from the field itself, because this one refuses, systematically, to analyze any idea that is not comercially profitable.

Every now and then we find out that the academic field produces some interesting tools for classification and organisation of information. A case that really interested me H20 Playlists, a site that allows us to organise, by using tags, academic papers, journalistic notes and alls kinds of texts to build our own selections from a thematic classification the we define ourselves. One of the most interesting functionalities is that it lets us search by word or keyword among lists generated by other users, and add them in a simple way to our own. Then we can publish it under a Creative Commons license and share it with the rest of the site’s visitors.

Since this tool is still in beta phase, it still lacks a few things, such as the possibility to edit massively certain lists. But it has some interesting points, like the possibility of separating by using subtitles the different fields within the list.

In my case, I’ve been developing a list of studies about Mobilities, a category that sums all sorts of physical and virtual mobility given in our society -and, hence, comprehends tourism, interaction on the Internet, for instance. Since I built my list starting from others already existing in the site, it’s still a little messy. But you can see it in this link. The RSS feed of the list is here. Each item on the list is a different thing in the feed, which is really something positive.

I got to H20 Playlists thanks to two notes published at CultureCat; more exactly at this and this entry.

The discussion about what will be the role of the Internet within the academic context is getting interesting. Up to now, most of the working papers of certain relevance are being published in journals, which are divided into disciplines. The problem with these publications is that its cost can get a little bit too high, even for american universities -imagine, then, the cost for latinamerican faculties…

At Academia’s information sharing future, Grant Buckler wonders how to overcome the problem that the constant raise of subscription fees implies to the academic community. For this matter, he analyzes the case of Public Library of Science (PloS), an organisation that proposes an open access to the contents of publications. In strictly academic terms, his proposal makes sense. The authors of the papers published in academic revues usually get no monetary payment, they publish for other reasons: to improve resumé and to show the results of their researchs to colleagues. A broader difussion of these works would allow for more quotes and cites, which is one of the most usual indicators to stablish the relevance of an article.

For now, PloS has only one publication, PloS Biology. Despite there are no printing and distribution costs, they have to keep paying journal’s editors, who have to read the contents, shape it, suggest changes and finally descide the contents of the publication. For this, PloS Biology gets financial support through payments made by some authors of the articles -approximately, $1500, although some don’t pay- plus contributions made by some foundations.

The article can be found at e-content institute (originally seen at Open Access News).

For the last seven years, I’ve been working as a teacher at the Communication Sciences Faculty of the University of Buenos Aires. Along this time, we’ve always worked under bad conditions, crowded classrooms, poorly ventilated, extremely hot during summer season, and with minimum support -sometimes it’s hard to get a television to show a video to the class; forget about haven a slides projector.

But I would like to focus this entry on a specific problem: undergraduates working papers. Basically, it’s an academic work that students have to make in order to obtain their Social Communications Graduate title. Unfortunately, the career doesn’t give many elements to fulfill this paper. The methodological subjects are poor and most of the students finish without being able to build a work project that contains key elements, such as a theoric frame, hypothesis, etc. This way, it’s usually in hands of thesis directors the ability to help them cover these methodological bumps. I was a student once, and I also arrived to this instance in similar conditions, so I know the topic.

Besides, the Communications major has a large number of students, and the potential number of thesists grows while the number of students remains constant. The result is obvious: it becomes every time more difficult to find teachers willing to direct these working papers and more and more students find themselves cruelly dissappointed and discouraged when facing their final work. The situation is complex and it’s getting more serious with time. Despite the fact that the authorities are aware of the problem, it’s very complicated to actually fix it.
In my case, I have a Communication and Travel seminary, and most of the thesis I direct focus on this matter. I have somewhere between 20 to 30 students every year and, ususally, my thesists come from this seminary. But it’s obvious that I can’t direct them all. Even less when I’m working on my own Master Program thesis, which I’ve delayed considerably. How many thesist can a teacher direct every year? Two? Four? Six? The truth is, usually most of the teachers I know in this career, and take the thesis matter seriously, hold no more than four or five thesist simultaneously.

In the Communication field, titular teachers, adjunct teachers, associate teachers, and teaching assistants can direct students thesis. Facing the growth of the number of potential thesists, the subject leaks even more to the basis of the academic structure and those who are in charge of the practices, grade tests, etc.

It would be ridiculous to believe that the problem with thesis and working papers limits to the Communications field at the UBA. Long ago, Alejandro Piscitelly wrote an excellent entry on this subject (in spanish). The comments show that the problem has widely spread. Rather than discussing Piscitelli’s theoric and epistemologic positions, the comments are a desperate cry for help:

“I want to write a thesis about cosmiatrics, would someone tell me, more or less, where should I start?
Published by: mºjose on April 20, 2004 06:34 AM”

We can know a lot about methodology, but thesis only progress, as Piscitelly puts it, in one way: by making them. But it’s hard to jump start it if we don’t find a director to guide our work. No one is going to tell you online how to start. At most, you could find in the net thesis on similar subjects, or advices on methodology, but very unlikely you’ll find the answer to ‘how to begin’ to build your work. The Internet can help you find people who are working in the same topic, so you can contact them through e-mails, and also find new bibliography. But it will not give you a solution on how to put together a work that results, mostly, from the interaction of students and teachers, and a long exchange of ideas.

Of course, the methodological and theoric discussion on thesis and working papers could go further. But at least in the environment I work at, what’s urgent always beats what’s important, as Quino used to say through his Mafalda character. On one hand, we can never end the discussion on a reform for the Communications studies program. On the other hand, it’s hard to put into practice a proposal to fix the problem with thesists when there are not enough teachers to direct them. Which, in the long term, will turn into a questioning of the validity of the thesis or paper, at least within a career that cannot guarantee enough resources for its production.

One thing, do not turn the comments on this entry into a “frankenstein” where a bunch of people beg for help on their papers, instead of truly discussing the real topic. If you want to know what I mean by “Frankenstein”, take a look into this great entry at Denker Uber (in spanish).

One of the strongest tendencies in the Internet is tagging. It consists of a method of classification that allows the users to identify files trough key words and then share this knowledge with the rest of net users. In no long, a huge base of knowledge is built, classified not by machines but by the intelligence of thousands of people. The first application to use this method intensively was Del.Icio.Us, but today there are many excellent examples of tagging that go beyond social bookmarks, such as Flickr.

Within the academic world, two sites are intensively using tagging as a method to build databases related to different disciplines. The first one is CiteULike, in which users can store the url of academic papers and documents found in the Internet for later easy finding. There’s a huge number of registers and the search by key word gives an interesting number of results. There’s also an interesting functionality: the possibility to export registers to Bibtex or Endnote format, used to generate bibliography databases and relatively common among the academics.

One of the inconvenients is that many of stored papers belong to pay-to-access magazines. Of course, if you’re logging in from an american college that pays for the service this is not an inconvenience, but from this side of the world it is an important access barrier. The restricted access of this academic publications is seriously affecting the impact and circulation of ideas within the academic circle. They’re making money, of course, but -I ask myself- at what future cost?

An example of the functioning of CiteULike can be seen at this site, which reunites contributions to the tag tourism. You can find more here: turismo; travel.

Another site is Connotea. Visually less attractive, it has the same functioning method of CiteULike: users classify contents trough key words, that help to reunite the contents on specific pages. At least for now, it has a lot less in content than its competitor, as you can see in the tags tourism and travel. Also, it has less academic articles and it lacks the export to Bibtex or EndNote function.

In both cases, they give us RSS feeds for every one of the tags generated. If you’re interested in adding them to your RSS clients, such as Bloglines or Feedreader, here go the URLs:

Connotea Travel Tag
Connotea Tourism Tag
CiteULike Travel Tag
CiteULike Viajes Tag
CiteULike Tourism Tag

By the way, both services provide bookmarklets that can be placed at the personal bar of Firefox, Opera or at Internet Explorer links. This way, we can save an address into a paper with just a click.

Through Google.Dirson.com I just found out about Google Scholar, a new service of Google destined only to the search of academic and scientific material. In my first tests, I have to admit that it found a large number of very interesting material, but it’s not too clear the differences between free and pay-for-access material -for instance, the ones in Ingenta.

One of the most interesting things of Scholar Google is the possibility to access quickly to working papers that refer to an article that interests us. This way, maybe we cannot download the text we’re looking for -when they’re not free, it can get a little expensive for some of us- but at least we can read other authors that cite the text. Sounds a little third-world, but it can be a solution for our poor-in-dollars wallets.

We have to recognize, Google is taking lots of initiatives around the search theme. Of course, we can’t help to ask ourselves if it’s ok for a single company to have such power on the search field in the Internet.

The other day we talked about Google Scholar, the Google search engine especificallly destined to scientific and academic fields. One of the most interesting things is that not only can we access to texts that match our thematic search, but also to a number of references from other papers and texts published on the Internet. As stated in Lago at Errant, this implies a new component when checking for the relevance of an article. Instead of checking the endless citation index, we have in Google Scholar a free source to stablish the importance of determined articles.

Under the light of this innovation by Google, it’s likely that some things will change substantially, concerning blogs and journals. One of the problems of charging for articles is that its relevance seems seriously limited, since fewer people can access to it. It also becomes good news for those whoy publish their working papers directly on the web, in their blogs or personal sites. It can be a good alternative to start building an academic background without depending exclusively on formal academic channels of publication. Anyways, for now, we only have speculations on the impact of Google Scholar, which time will determine if they’re true or not.

With these changes, the strategy of companies, like Sage, of opening every now and then the complete file of their journals so that more people can read the papers stored can have interesting consequences in the future, since their articles and reviews will be used as references much more often than the competition’s -for instance, Routledge.

More on the subject at the blog of Alex Halavais, Academic-Gamers; Creativity/Machine and Ponderance. By the way, if you have an academic blog, you can complete this survey on academic blogging held by the people of Crooked Timber.

Update: a very interesting article about Google Scholar and the agreements with the editors for permission to search the abstracts (through El Tintero) can be found in Search Engine Watch.

A note published by Guardian Unlimited analyzes the topic of academic blogs, one that interests me for a long time now. It is known that every time more college teachers have blogs, but some are still reticent to this phenomenom. One of the main reasons is fear to be copied. That is, that someone will steal from us some very relevant idea which we planned on using in our works. This excuse is lame; the truth is that relevant ideas do not abound in academic contexts and, usually, its publication in a blog is enough to establish our author status. If someone steals an idea, a post, some text we publish in our site, there’ll always be a reader or someone who will tell us about it. It only takes an e-mail to have the blogger delete the stolen or copied post.

The note in Guardian Unlimited cites the case of Break of day in the Trenches, a blog by Esther MacCallum-Stewart, who follows the development of her thesis. I’ve once had a similar idea, mounting a blog that followed the development of my own Master program thesis on blogs and journalism. But the truth is, I have very little time and two jobs, and keeping two blogs is more than enough.

The note cites the excellent Purse Lips Square Jam by Anne Galloway and the famous Crooked Timber. It’s worth to read it, mainly because it’s not common for a media to cover this kind of issues.