Asynchronous Collaboration in Scientific Research

Most research today is collaborative. Collaboration is often constrained in disciplines such as geography, because university economics seldom allow more than one resident specialist in most subdisciplines. The consequent spatial fragmentation of the "invisible colleges" means that specialized scholarship can seldom be pursued in a face-to-face mode or often even in a synchronous mode. The combination of large-scale, long-term, and distributed collaborations point to the increasing use of asynchronous collaboration on the Internet, especially the World Wide Web.

My research has been directed to the design, development, and study of an interactive Internet-based environment designed to host the entire body of research in a WWW site called a Research Web (RW). The RW is an environment designed to share ideas, develop hypotheses, and incubate scholarly products. The key characteristics of the RW are: permanence of dialog, the centrality of documents, the facilitation of reflection, and incremental progress through criticism of specialized documents called RW essays.

The RW essays are hyperdocuments that integrate topical information into a single annotatable expression of knowledge. Essays have a suite of tools they depend on: DocReview, the critical apparatus; the Annotated HyperBibliography, an interactive annotatable bibliography; the Annotated HyperGlossary, an interactive dictionary/glossary used to discuss the vocabulary of the enterprise; and the EssayAssistant, authorware which ties the essays and tools together.

The RW is made universally accessible by making all the software web-based. The web browser is the user's window on the RW. Software can be selected to suit the needs and abilities of the research team. All documents are automatically searchable in the browser, and the entire site may be searchable with indexes. A private listserver with Web-based searchable archives is obligatory. The RW may itself be distributed to take advantage of institutional site licenses.