------------------------------------------------------------------------ The World Wide Web's Role in Research Keynote speech for the 1996 Asia-Pacific World Wide Web Conference 23 August 1996 Tsinghua University, Beijing, China by John December (john@december.com) ======================================================================== Abstract The World Wide Web and the Internet offer new opportunities to perform research online. Researchers can make connections with colleagues around the world as well as tap into large storehouses of information and conversation about many topics. The Web's technologies provide a spectrum of functionality to meet these communication needs. By using these functions, researchers can employ the Web and the Internet in a variety of ways. **** The Context of the Internet and Web The World Wide Web is an amazing invention. Originally developed by researchers in the high-energy physics community, the Web has quickly spread worldwide to be used by people in many different fields. The reason for this rapid growth lies in how the Web meets a variety of research needs for communication, information, and interaction. The nature of the Web itself has fostered a rich, global community of researchers. Since the Web's technical organization is distributed, non-hierarchical, and interactive, scholars with the necessary equipment have been able to participate with relative ease. And since people on the Web can be both producers and consumers of information, the voices of each researcher have been able to merge with each other to achieve a rapid expansion of collaborative scholarship. The Web's unique media characteristics have also fostered the Web's growth. Because of the Web's basis in hypertext, the work of scholars can easily be referenced in other works. The result is that a globally-distributed, associatively linked body of work emerges. Collaboratively developed, this work gives rise to new kinds of communities and new kinds of relationships among people. As the culmination of more than thirty thousand years of human expression, the World Wide Web and global computer networks today have the potential to change how we think about our world and how we express ourselves. The invention of vowels in the fourth century BC changed the western world from one in which information was primarily transmitted orally to a world in which writing dominated. The Roman empire, founded upon writing, no doubt set the stage for our modern political bureaucracy. Today, global computer networks offer us a new way to collaborate with other people and to communicate ideas. Network-based communities of researchers have already emerged on the Internet that demonstrate a dramatic shift from geographical reliance upon information to a global perspective. The Spectrum of the Web's Functionality The Web supports a range of uses which can all be broadly classified as "communication." These uses range from largely one-way communication contexts of one-to-many information dissemination to more interactive contexts of one-to-one and many-to-one exchanges. Each of the Web's technologies play a role in this spectrum of functionality. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) supports a range of communication: from hypermedia display to a high degree of user selectivity. Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programming supports computation as well as a higher degree of responsiveness in user interactivity. Java, the computer programming language developed by Sun Microsystems, provides a still richer level of interactivity in Web communication. Advances such as Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) and the mixture of Java with VRML, provide even richer ways for information to be displayed to users and for users to interact with that information. The Value of the Internet for Research Through all the functionality they offer, the Internet and Web support a variety of valuable ways to support research. The kinds of research the Internet can support includes finding information, gathering information from and about people, presenting information, and providing interactivity. The ability to find a wide range of information is perhaps one of the most compelling reasons to use the Internet. Researchers need to develop their skills in navigating, retrieving, evaluating, and using information in order to benefit from the Internet. The vast amount of Internet information available can be accessed through subject trees, keyword searching engines, as well as geographically organized lists of servers. The value of this information is vast--a researcher using these means can locate information directly from laboratories, research centers, and colleagues instantaneously and on a global scale. The Internet can also provide a way for researchers to gather information directly from people. For example, a researcher can prepare an HTML form which asks users to respond to a series of questions. The users can respond, and the results can be automatically sent to the researcher for analysis. While there are many methodological considerations that a researcher should take into account when gathering these kinds of responses from people, this kind of online research is unique. The Internet can also be a powerful way to find out about people. There are many Web sites that offer directories and lists of contact information about people as well as their home pages. The tradition of creating personal home pages makes it possible to virtually "meet" many of the leading researchers in a variety of fields and directly connect to many of their research results and publications online. The Web is a compelling information presentation tool. Using a process of developing information, researchers can communicate their results to colleagues worldwide. I've outlined my methodology for Web Development in my writings and on at my Web site (http://www.december.com). My methodology includes six phases: planning, analysis, design, implementation, promotion, and innovation. In brief, you can approach web development as a continuous interplay of the processes of planning, analysis, design, implementation, promotion, and innovation. Most significantly, the Internet and Web can be used to provide interactivity. The Java programming language opens the way to give immediate and continuous feedback to a user. The potential of Java to enrich the role of a researcher on the Web is very great. Simulations, virtual scientific instruments, and collaborative forums can be created using Java. But in using Java, researchers need to rethink the term "interactivity" itself. Instead of focusing just on the technical give and take of data across a network or the filling out of information in a form and its processing with a database, we need to look at how people work within a community of practice. People don't work online in a vacuum--they have colleagues, bosses, customers or suppliers, and others who they work with or communicate with. They are constrained by certain rules, and their work is defined by certain roles. That community of use defines both those rules and roles. I've suggested a methodology which approaches rethinking interactivity in these terms for Java developers. My hope is that the Java industry can play a role in creating compelling content to bring interactivity to the Web by approaching the social context in which people work. Pros and Cons The Internet as a forum for research has definite drawbacks as well as benefits. Certainly, the benefits include the easy access to global participants, the contextualization of online activity through hypertext, and the enormous stores of information and communication forums that exist on the Internet today. But the Internet is a very dynamic information space. The participants with whom a researcher communicates can hide or falsify their identity. The participants in networked communication are not always serious researchers. Because of the Internet's wide popularity, mass audiences now routinely use the Internet. Their attention span and behavior online can be unpredicatable and chaotic. These drawbacks should definitely be considered in using the Internet for research. Conclusion The Internet enables researchers to connect to a great global "conversation." This conversation includes the rich repositories of knowledge, data, and scientific results from laboratories as well as many of the formally published works of a variety of fields. Combined with the rich, interactive forms of communication that researchers are participating in and helping to create, the Internet promises to be a major part of any serious researcher's means of communication. Question and Answer **** See http://www.december.com/present/apwww96.html for online information about this talk. John December (john@december.com, http://www.december.com) is president of December Communications, Inc. and the publisher of Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine and several widely used and frequently accessed World Wide Web-based reference publications about the Internet and the Web. An experienced Internet writer, teacher, software developer, and author, he holds an M.S. in Computer Science and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and is a PhD Candidate in Communication and Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is co-author of the books, "The World Wide Web Unleashed" and "HTML & CGI Unleashed," and author of "Presenting Java" all published in 1995 by Sams.net, an imprint of Macmillan Computer Publishing. ========================================================================