
Wednesday, September 16, 2015 – 5.30-7.30pm
Feliciano School of Business Auditorium, Room 101
For directions, select School of Business from聽
厂别别听
What’s the best way for researchers to collaborate across disciplines in the 21st century? A new free tool called Authorea is the occasion to address this question as part of a conversation about Digital Humanities with Italian entrepreneur, scientist, and Authorea co-founder聽Alberto Pepe聽who will provide a comparative look at past and present tools designed to produce and circulate scholarship.
奥补迟肠丑听聽about Authorea
In the early 1600s, Galileo Galilei turned a telescope toward Jupiter. In his log book each night, he drew to-scale, labeled, and dated schematic diagrams of Jupiter and some oddly-moving points of light near it. Through artistic and scientific renditions of his observations, he concluded that the Earth orbits the Sun, just as the four Galilean moons orbit Jupiter. Galileo’s clear and careful record keeping and publication style, which contributed significantly to the shaping of the modern “Scientific Method,” constitutes a point of departure for a reflection on research and dissemination of results today. Galileo鈥檚 notes directly integrated his data (drawings of Jupiter and its moons), key metadata (timing of each observation, weather, telescope properties), and text (descriptions of methods, analysis, and conclusions). From observation to publication, it took him three months to share his work. In our globalized and digital world, research and sharing are much more complicated operations, in large part because most tools that scientists use for the preparation of scholarly manuscripts, such as Microsoft Word and LaTeX, function offline and do not easily account for the born-digital nature of research objects. Also, most authoring tools in use today are not designed for collaboration, and, as scientific collaborations grow in size, research transparency and the attribution of scholarly credit are at stake. Authorea addresses precisely these challenges and offers a radically innovative way of addressing them.
In the course of the Sept. 16 meeting on our campus, Alberto Pepe will illustrate the platform of the startup Authorea that he co-founded in 2014. A group of interested scholars, both from the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities, will have the chance to see how, using the html technology instead of the usual pdf files, Authorea allows to collaboratively write rich data-driven manuscripts on the web. The results are articles that natively offer readers a dynamic, interactive experience with an article鈥檚 full text, images, data, and code. Thanks to this new concept, Authorea will help scholars of all disciplines pave the road to increased data sharing, data reuse, research reproducibility, and Open Science, just the way Galileo had intended it.
Program
- Introductory remarks:聽听(CHSS Dean)
- 惭辞诲别谤补迟辞谤蝉:听听(Inserra Chair) and聽听(Feliciano Center, Director)
- 笔谤别蝉别苍迟补迟颈辞苍:听听(Authorea, co-founder)

鈥屸赌Alberto Pepe,聽co-founder of Authorea, was born and raised in the wine-making town of Manduria, in Puglia, Southern Italy. Pepe holds an MSci in Computer Science and a B.Sci. in Astrophysics, both from University College London, U.K., as well as a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of California, Los Angeles with a dissertation on scientific collaboration networks.聽聽Pepe has also worked in the Information Technology Department of CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, and as Associate Research Scientist at Harvard University. He lives in New York City where he works on the development of his startup Authorea in one of the biggest 鈥渃o-working spaces鈥 in town, on 23rd St. and Park Avenue. Authorea was created thanks to the synergetic work of their two co-founders Pepe and Nathan Jenkins, and to the generous help of some 鈥渁ngel investors鈥 who gathered substantial funds to launch the project. Born in 2014, Authorea has already reached over 25,000 users and aims at expanding that number in collaboration with academic institutions.
- Presented in collaboration with the聽 at 精品成人福利在线 University
- Spearheaded and organized by聽听() at 精品成人福利在线 University
Resources
Authorea:
贵别补迟耻谤别诲听interview聽with Alberto Pepe in聽
贵别补迟耻谤别诲听interview聽with Alberto Pepe in聽
贵别补迟耻谤别诲听interview聽with Alberto Pepe in聽
贵别补迟耻谤别诲听聽by Maria Teresa Cometto (in English)
Select articles from聽Authorea.com
Resources for the Sept. 16 meeting
础谤迟颈肠濒别听辞苍
听(Modern Language Association) Core website
Fedora聽at Columbia University
: Multi-institutional collaboration
: Digital Humanities in New York City
听(Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) website
聽website: A platform for scholarly documents sharing
Article by Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg
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