Tuesday News: Twitter in Trouble?, why cover art matters, sexism in science, and Chipotle’s essay contest
Publishing Newsbook banning / censorship / cover-art / gender / institutional sexism / science / social media / teens / Twitter / writing contests7 Comments
Twitter at the Crossroads – According to David Auerbach’s article at Slate, Twitter is in big trouble. Not only is it failing to acquire enough users, but earnings are apparently bleak. In the meantime Twitter has acquired TellApart, which is described as “a leading marketing technology company providing retailers and e-commerce advertisers with unique cross-device retargeting capabilities.” How will TellApart work with Twitter? It’s not yet clear, except for the implication that Twitter is now trying to turn non-users into customers, which is, uh, an interesting strategy. How will all this affect users? It’s interesting, because I don’t really think there’s another social media platform that relies on such a strong sense of immediacy and extemporaneous conversation, despite all the promo and advertising.
Twitter’s strength is being the pulse of the Internet, the place where news gets broken in 140-character messages, where important topics start trending the second they enter the collective hivemind, and where politicians and celebrities and thinkers of all stripes can make announcements without the bother of a press release or the filter of the media. Yet this has always made Twitter Janus-faced: Is it a real-time news aggregator or a social network? More importantly, how will it make money? The conventional wisdom was once that Twitter would monetize its users by showing them ads that are extremely relevant to them. It is now obvious that Twitter’s future does not lie in a Facebook-like model, but in something else entirely. Twitter sees its user base, whose growth is flattening, not as customers but as content producers. In which case, who are its customers? –Slate
Graphic Novel About Holocaust ‘Maus’ Banned In Russia For Its Cover – A very interesting interview with Art Spiegelman, whose 1980 graphic novel, Maus, has a very powerful cover, which has made it unsellable in Russia. It’s indicative of the problems with prohibitions against certain types of speech and symbols, because sometimes there’s nothing more effective in challenging intolerance than a subversive or critical use of certain ideas, images, and elements of speech. And Spiegelman talks about how artists become afraid of doing anything that might draw negative attention to their work, which means they end up self-censoring.
Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus, has some very memorable cover art. It pictures a pair of mice — representing Jews — huddling beneath a cat-like caricature of Adolf Hitler. Behind the feline Hitler is a large swastika.
That last element has become a problem for Maus this spring. For Russian observances of Victory Day, the holiday commemorating the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany, Moscow has purged itself of swastikas. In an effort to comply, Russian bookstores cleared copies of Maus from their shelves. –NPR
PLOS ONE ousts reviewer, editor after sexist peer-review storm – You may have heard about this incident involving two female researchers (a biologist and a geneticist) who submitted a paper to a peer reviewed journal and received feedback suggesting they add a male biologist as an author, because apparently the scientific credentials of two Ph.D.s who also happen to be women are insufficient for the purposes of professional publication. Yeah, but there’s no such thing as institutional sexism, right?
On 29 April, Ingleby, a postdoc at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, posted two excerpts of the anonymous review. “It would probably … be beneficial to find one or two male biologists to work with (or at least obtain internal peer review from, but better yet as active co-authors)” to prevent the manuscript from “drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically biased assumptions,” the reviewer wrote in one portion.
“Perhaps it is not so surprising that on average male doctoral students co-author one more paper than female doctoral students, just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile a bit faster than female doctoral students,” added the reviewer (whose gender is not known). –Science
Chipotle launches essay contest for cups and $20K college scholarships – So you may know that for a while now Chipotle has had this Cultivating Thought campaign that features the content of writers on Chipotle bags and cups. I’m not a huge fan of Chipotle, so I haven’t really been paying much attention to the whole thing. But their current idea seems pretty cool. In short, they’re sponsoring an essay contest for teens between 13 and 18, with the opportunity to earn some money and get their work published as part of the Cultivating Thought campaign:
From now through May 31, middle- and high-school students ages 13 to 18 are invited to submit their original short essays “about a time when food created a memory” to Cultivating Thought. Stories can be up to 1,700 words.
Ten grand prize winners will be selected. Their essays will be showcased on Chiptole cups and bags, and each student will recieve $20,000, deposited in a 529 college fund. –LA Times
It’s going to be tough for Twitter to convert non-users into customers when the service as a whole has a crap reputation regarding harassment. I’m guessing their recent “We’re gonna be better about not letting people threaten your life all the time!” schtick is related to their low earnings.
@Chicklet: Yes, and the publicity they’ve gotten for it has been bad. Also, the bar to entry on Twitter being non-existent, it seems like a focus on non-customers is premised on the idea that people are inhibited, somehow, from participation. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but maybe Twitter should just sell to Facebook, and the evil empire can be complete.
“We are reviewing our processes to ensure that future authors are given a fair and unprejudiced review. As part of this, we are working on new features to make the review process more open and transparent, since evidence suggests that review is more constructive and civil when the reviewers’ identities are known to the authors…”
This is actually the opposite of what I think should happen. I think reviewers should be blinded to the identity of the authors and their institutions, and only if it’s deemed eligible for publication should that be opened up to look at conflicts of interest (which is what I’ve been told is the readon reviewers need to know why the author and their associated institutions are). If blinded is the gold standard for research, why shouldn’t it be the same for the review process.
“We are reviewing our processes to ensure that future authors are given a fair and unprejudiced review. As part of this, we are working on new features to make the review process more open and transparent, since evidence suggests that review is more constructive and civil when the reviewers’ identities are known to the authors…”
This is actually the opposite of what I think should happen. I think reviewers should be blinded to the identity of the authors and their institutions, and only if it’s deemed eligible for publication should that be opened up to look at conflicts of interest (which is what I’ve been told is the readon reviewers need to know why the author and their associated institutions are). If blinded is the gold standard for research, why shouldn’t it be the same for the review process?
@Erin Burns:
“If blinded is the gold standard for research, why shouldn’t it be the same for the review process?”
Research is different. Very often papers are sent for review to peers of the authors, familiar with their reputation, methods and publications. They are the best people to discover inconsistencies, ommissions, and so on. The author’s name and research history are absolutely relevant to a paper’s publication – unlike with most fiction.
The other side of that is that you get grudgewank between rivals and tedious nitpicking from competing researchers. Which is why a good editor will filter for that, and allowing a reviewer to comment as they did on that PLOS submission, let alone rejecting the paper for that sexist comment, is an absolute failure of the editing role. They deserved to be booted, and they were.
@Ann Somerville:
I’m not saying every part of the process should remain blinded (at the least you’ve got to look at conflicts of interest). But much of what you express as a normal and even beneficial part of the review process, seems to introduce unnecessary biases. Whether these are the negative ones where the grudgewank happens or the positive ones where people perceive something more positively based on the previous body of work and institutional reputation. I know as a consumer of research I’ve caught myself being biased one way or the other based on these factors, rather than critically analyzing the actual research. And while I don’t know a ton of academic reviewers, the few I’ve talked to have expressed concerns about those types of biases in their own work.
@Erin Burns:
The scientific review process is flawed from the get go since researchers are very often asked to suggest referees for their papers (necessary because editors can’t be fully read up in every field or on every potential expert), and in many cases, the pool of potential reviewers will be small (both because of the speciality and lack of willingness to review in first place.) Even if the review process was blind, the number of people working in a very specific area will be very small, so the chances of someone new (and unknown to a reviewer) coming in and working on that exact same area will also be small. And in that case, the reviewer should be alert to the possibility of plagiarism. (Eg, Author X is a known expert on the breeding habits of bandersnatches. Author Y submits a paper on this subject, and the reviewer gets the paper anonymised. Yet to the reviewer, the new paper reads awfully like another paper by Author X. Does he assume the author is X, or that Y has stolen the work?)
No, your proposal won’t work in practice, sorry. It really is up to the editors to make sense of reviews sent back, look for biases, and to listen to the authors’ comments on the review when they flag concerns. The PLOS situation was an editor failure. Bad/lazy/incompetent reviewers are common. That’s editors exist. And in this case, they failed.