Happy Birthday Computing Now Supporting tagline
While cruising at a comfortable cruising altitude of 32,768 feet en route to DH 2011, I found myself reading through The Well-Trained Mind, Susan Wise Bauer’s and Jesse Wise’s excellent book on home schooling and classical education. I was reading and writing on my iPad, which was the first time I have attempted a writing a lengthy article like this one. Technically, however, I cheated as I am now doing the actual editing on my 11” MacBook Air. Bauer’s and Wise’s book is a rather interesting and ironic book for me, considering that my children attend public schools in Chicago. Nevertheless, it’s a must-read book and provides the “structure” for many ideas I have long held to be true but didn’t always know how to express in words.
What actually got me to reading this book were my thoughts on Computing Now’s third birthday. As we celebrate this milestone, I tend to think of CN as a precocious toddler who is able to repeat ideas from our existing publications by putting together theme issues. We’re also readily able to learn and apply emerging technologies with relative ease, e.g. in mobile and social areas, again to deliver existing content. In the aforementioned book, Susan speaks of the three phases of learning (collectively known as the trivium) in the classical style of education. The first stage is characterized by acquiring facts and (hopefully) memorizing them. The second is about logic and abstract thinking. And the third, rhetoric, is about the art of incorporating facts and the art of logic into more refined arguments.
In the time I have been with CN, since it was a cuddly little infant, I’ve gotten a chance to see what we do well and where we need to improve as we continue to mature and become part of the “mainstream” in the Computer Society. Our current methodology reminds me of first phase of the trivium. We are good at taking existing content and helping readers to access it—the first word of our tagline. Like the young child, this is tantamount to being a parroting phase of sorts. It also shares some qualities with the third phase, especially when it comes to guest-editor introductions. Where we need to go next is toward establishing greater context (discovery and engagement) and creating original, in-depth content that complements the CS’s offerings. How will we achieve this? How will what we do be “unique” from the other offerings? I believe we must draw on the classical model of education, which calls on us to understand the following ideas:
Continued emphasis on repeating good ideas but not forgetting old ones. In my work with the humanities, most good ideas continue to be good long after they’ve been formulated. In many cases, there is just a new argument being made. I believe that is where CN can play an important role. Even if ideas in our field—computing sciences and information technology—come in waves, I believe part of our job is to make it clear how ideas today connect to old ideas. This is akin to the rhetoric stage as articulated by Bauer and Wise. As an example, multicore and GPU are important, but the connections to classical works, semaphores (dijkstra) and vector CPUs (cray) are critical to helping newcomers to our field to understand that these ideas didn’t just happen overnight. I’d like to see more thought given to classic papers—ours’ or others’—in the preparation, say, of theme issues, etc.
Emphasis on other disciplinary connections. I truly believe CN can differentiate itself by establishing interdisciplinary context, which is of growing importance to academia and the profession as a whole. (What brought me to CN in the first place was the multidisciplinary Computing in Science and Engineering publication that we and the American Institute of Physics co-publish.) In some ways, my comments are not limited to CN but the growing interest in broadening participation in computing, which will require the field in general to take a close look at what its doing and why its important to the rest of the world. Emerging areas, such as computational science, bioinformatics, and digital humanities would seemingly provide a lot of context and opportunities. Judging by the heightened interest we observed on my special issue about novel architectures and accelerators, I like to see us do more of this sort of thing.
Emphasis on connections to the world and being truly social. We have made great strides in social and new media thanks mostly to Christian Timmerer. For us to reach the next level, however, we must understand that the best ideas probably dont come from us but rather from our members. We absolutely and positively must embrace the best practices in social, including commenting (using web 2.0 friendly technologies like Disqus and Echo). It is mostly conjecture on my part, but I think members do want to “write for us” but perhaps aren’t interested in highly formal contributions. If we make it easier for members to post or tweet ideas, we can find out what is hot and adjust our editorial calendar accordingly. I continue to worry that we are more about push than pull, and we need to be about both to live up to “engage” (the third word in our tagline).
The time I have spent as part of the great team at CN has been truly special and allowed me to explore all of the above, even if there is much work to do. I hope this birthday message helps to inform the framework for what we’re going to do when we “grow up”. I am looking forward to celebrating our fifth and tenth anniversaries and beyond. To reach there, we will need to advance to the rhetoric stage, which I believe will require us either to become a quasi-publication and/or a regular contributor to an existing one. Original content from ourselves and readers will be the likely basis for this stage.
As the old jazz standard goes, the best is yet to come. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
