The Long Tail is a vital concept for understanding attention dynamics in the digital age; it will be as vital for scholarship as it is already becoming for online business. The specialty knowledge of scholarship is ideally suited to the power curve distribution of the Long Tail, as I will explain, but unfortunately, academia's entrenched communication system isolates and slows the ready circulation of information so fundamental to Long Tail dynamics. This must change; scholarship must be retooled for the Long Tail of knowledge.
This is my ninth post in a series on how scholarly communications must transform. In my prior post, on why scholarly communications must be scalable, I stated that scholarship, like all information systems today, should be dynamically scalable, ready to answer both high and low demand. The Long Tail provides a context for understanding why playing to this dynamic is so critical.
Continue reading "Scholarly Communications in the Long Tail of Knowledge" »
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This is my eighth post in a series on how scholarly communications must transform. In this post, I explain that scholarship in the digital age must be scalable. As in my earlier post urging the integration of scholarship into the cyberinfrastructure, I am again pressing for scholars to recognize that the way their work is digitally mediated makes all the difference to its significance.
Scalability has become an absolutely necessary attribute for technological information systems today. I'm claiming that this trait is of equal importance for the information system that is scholarship. Here is the bottom line: As digital modes of communicating knowledge edge out the print-based publishing, any learned communication that is not made to scale will shrink in its audiences and
relevance, whereas scholarship that embraces scalability will be far more dynamic, flexible, and responsive -- a manifestly superior mode of knowledge.
Continue reading "Scholarly Communications must be Scalable" »
