How to visually portray the ebb and flow of ideas

As my article on academic librarian competency gets edited by various people I note the really neat or humorous stuff gets removed. Serious articles may be well written but they aren’t allowed to be fun. They also aren’t supposed to talk about the neat ideas and questions that arise for which no answer is provided in the immediate text. That means my neat idea about how we might visually portray ebbs and flows in ideas through time and the literature will undoubtedly get dumped. So I dump it here for your interest.

Back in library school I came up with this idea and wanted to do it as a PhD. The Library School didn’t think I was a desirable PhD candidate and I was more interested in paying back my exhorbitant (for the time) students loans, so I left with this kernel of an idea safely tucked away in my brain. Also unfortunately, I am not mathematically inclined. One might safely say I am reduced to an ameoba-like state when faced with math and statistics. Fight or flight kicks in and I wriggle out of the place post-haste. So stop jabbering and share? OK.

“[M]ost scientific disciplines undergo major revision as new information and experiences become incorporated into an understanding of phenomena” states Eldredge [quoting Kuhn (1970) (2002: 74)]. This implies a growth process integral to disciplines and raises many questions such as: What is the state of growth or maturity shown in research articles with respect to a specific topic? Is it possible to portray growth or maturity? How would we do it and what would it look like?

My suspicion is that there are ebbs and flows in information and research literature as ideas get picked up, incorporated and even wane. This process of growth might visually parallel the battleship curves used in archaeology to portray stylistic evolution (Deetz and Dethlefsen, 1967; Bentley and Shennan, 2003). This would be an extensive line of inquiry and dependent on math and statistics (ick!).

One might use bibliometrics as applied to the top 5 or 10 impact factor journals to track citations and/or keywords representing the ideas being studied. Tracking more than one idea is better because you may then track whether as one idea wanes the other starts to wax, reflecting the ebbs and flows already mentioned (I’m mixing metaphors in a good cause!). The more congruence between the shapes representing the movement of each idea through time, the more likely we are to have hit upon a meaningful visual portrayal. Using the number of citations or keywords over x number of years, one might then graph these hits on both sides of a central line, thus creating curves resembling, one hopes, the shapes of battleships or at least congruent shapes, whatever they may look like.

It must be admitted that not all discussions about neat ideas take place in research or peer-reviewed literature (note this blog entry, but I'm biased). Some topics may barely encroach into the peer-reviewed journal literature arena. These topics, for example academic librarian competency, might be more discussed in the non-journal literature such as the Canadian 8Rs study and other reports, standards or guidelines regarding competency such as Competencies for Information Professionals of the 21st Century (cited in previous blogs), listservs, blogs, etc.

Regardless of the proviso, I think this is an interesting idea worth pursuing and would complement the work being done by Crumley and Koufogiannakis (2002) and Koufogiannakis et al (2004) with respect to organizing and understanding our library literature better.

J Eldredge. (2002). Evidence-based librarianship: what might we expect in the years ahead? Health Information and Libraries Journal 19, 74.

J Deetz and E Dethlefsen. (1967). Death's head, cherub, urn and willow. Natural History 76(3), 29-37.

RA Bentley and SJ Shennan. (2003). Cultural transmission and stochastic network growth. American Antiquity 68(3), 459-485.