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Do you ever wonder if it’s possible to feel like you are sinking in some sort of sea with a lot of good ideas floating just out of reach? You are scrolling, clicking, marking sites for further study, and trying to find web papers that have the potential to be transformative, but those innovative and experimental research papers (or pre-prints) are not included on your list because they have yet to be published formally. The traditional approach to looking for new knowledge on the web is very active and can be tiring, so it’s not uncommon for many people to ask the question: How do I allow my existence on the Internet to allow all of these breaking news articles to come to me? Sound like something a website editor, writer or just an inquiring mind would want; it’s definitely possible. The process of transitioning from a hunter-gatherer in the information wilderness to an accomplished gardener who develops a cultivated environment where the most appropriate and progressive online research will grow and be brought to your attention in a high-quality manner – not good fortune, but the establishment of intelligent self-sustaining systems for discovering what you find online – changing continuously and providing you with curious and unique discoveries of online research through individually filtered information streams.
Cultivating Your Digital Garden: Beyond Basic Feeds
Rather than following just a small number of select blogs or utilizing social media algorithms that prefer drama over quality information, the first action you should take when you want to grow your digital garden is to intentionally sow the right seeds from reliable sources of information that produce cutting-edge digital research. The next step is to identify preprint servers and open access repositories in your subject area—such as technology, design, sociology, or an obscure mix thereof—that are commonly used to publish these types of publications. There are many well-known examples of such places, including arXiv, SSRN, and bioRxiv; these are generally accepted as standard preprint servers. However, you must also seek out independent research repositories, university labs, and individual researchers’ personal websites as potential sources of original preprint research. An important aspect of all this is utilizing an RSS feed service—an old, excellent piece of technology—to subscribe to each of these sources directly. An RSS reader then becomes the trellis for your garden to receive all of the new foliage that will be produced when different vines are combined into one location. When you subscribe to a server for your chosen web papers, every time a new web paper is published on that server, it will appear instantly. There’s no algorithm that judges just how “interesting” the web paper may be. Instead, you receive the full raw feed from the server, and therefore you will able to see many patterns as well as trailblazers (those who create the first web paper). This is a strong foundation to ensure that you have a direct connection to the original web papers as they are published.
A garden requires multiple types of plants in order to thrive. Plant diversity plays an important role in the resilience and unpredictability of the garden. As part of this search for diverse plants what you should do is to go beyond the institution and utilize your human network for collaboration. Look for researchers, data scientists, and industry innovators that are publishing web papers and interacting with their readers. There are a number of web forums such as Twitter (and newer sites in its niche) and LinkedIn where authors post their work directly. More importantly, authors often share the works of other authors they find interesting or useful. By creating a list of these individuals (not just well-known figures but also active practitioners), you will create a tremendous source of human-based filtering for your social media feed. In addition, the amount of interaction around individual web publications will allow you to see the range of conversations that will occur, such as discussions on methodology, praise for clarity, etc. Adding to the above is the social layer, which places additional context around web documents that would be otherwise a raw feed, thereby helping you decide which of the documents that you are searching for are causing real ripples in the web. The difference of this layer is similar to looking through a seed catalog, versus walking through your friend’s garden and receiving direct recommendations from them.
The Alchemy of Passive Aggregation: Letting Tools Do the Work
Having multiple sources of information is one thing; managing the flow of those sources is another. As you move into the world of strategies, you will use tools to do “magic” with the stream of information you have collected as well as those from your other sources. For example, use a “feed reader,” an online app that allows you to filter for smart filtering of information and based upon your own filtering rules. For example, you can set up an alert if you see specific keywords, author names, or even specific phrases in abstract titles. An example of a rule you might want to implement is to highlight any web article that has both “algorithmic bias” and “design ethics” as part of the title. This passive aggregation means that the tool you are using is continuously filtering through your incoming stream of articles and moving any potentially relevant articles into an easy-to-see bucket for your immediate review. Imagine if you had an extremely hard-working research assistant that never sleeps, who would identify the best research from the web using the criteria you set. Instead of passively receiving information, you are now actively discovering good information that fits your needs without having to spend time looking for it. The web page(s) that match what you are interested in are automatically found and published for you without any effort on your part.
With tools such as Google Scholar alerts or notifications from a specialized academic search engine, you can take this even further. In addition to tracking publications, preprints and web-based papers of quality are also being indexed. By creating an alert based on a keyword, you will receive an email daily containing new resources related to that keyword. The trick is using these together – your RSS feed delivers breadth from established sources, your social media connections provide human connection or chance engagements, while automated notifications offer you in-depth results concerning particular subjects. These three types of data serve as nodes in a web (yep, pun intended) of breakthrough knowledge from various viewpoints. Let’s say there’s a revolutionary web paper about UX design and neuroscience that’s going to be published soon. This article will show up on preprint servers (batch loaded into your RSS reader), shared by a cognitive scientist you follow (in your social layer), and it will create a new alert for ‘neuroscience of UX’ in the research tools you use. It found you through 3 unique channels to confirm its importance; therefore, having this way of discovering something with multiple points will greatly increase the signal-to-noise ratio for you.
Embracing Serendipity and the Adjacent Possible
Many of the most innovative concepts arise at the juncture of different domains or what’s sometimes called ‘the adjacent possible’; but a rigidly structured and hyper-focused filtering process may prevent that from happening. Thus; in order to have an effective strategy for innovation, there needs to be consideration given to intentionally creating a space for chance or serendipity within your overall plan. Adding a little bit of ‘exploratory feeds’ into your information consumption may be one way to include chance/serendipity into your patterns of work. For example, subscribe via RSS feed from a preprint server that has information in an area that is only tangentially related to yours – if you are a technology web editor, then subscribe to a sociology or urban planning preprint server feed so that you will get a broader variety of information but still have the potential to use it as a way to explore new ideas, develop concepts, or learn different methods for visualizing data in your own domain. Many times, breaks-outs in one area are simply insights that are waiting for an application in another area. When exposed to different disciplines that are related to the one you work in, you create an opportunity for unexpected connections. Finding an academic paper about network theory in an ecology journal could inspire you to create your website navigation in a new way. This purposeful serendipity has proven to be a strong driver of innovation.
Plus, refer to discussions about web papers as you take advantage of all formats for information-gathering about it. This means that as you read through a web paper in its PDF form, you should also read blog posts critiquing the web paper, use forum threads to deconstruct the content of the web paper, and listen to podcast episodes that interview the authors of the web papers. Forums such as PubPeer or specific subreddits can be excellent sources for determining the ramifications and limitations of a web paper. This additional layer of conversation about web papers will help you understand the full significance of a breakthrough. When you listen to conversations that develop around a web paper, you are not simply allowing one single web paper to guide you to its author; you are becoming part of the entire thought community developing around a breakthrough. You will clearly understand where the breakthrough fits into the greater conversation regarding your research topic and, thus, will have a much better understanding of researching with depth and authority.
From Consumer to Contributor: Closing the Loop
The single best thing you can do to enable the best materials available via the web to locate you is to join in the discussion yourself. As you read each of the compelling web papers, write a short summary or reflective note on your professional site/blog and use tags on the author(s) in addition to the relevant keywords. Connect with the author(s) in a thoughtful way through social media by asking a clarifying question or sharing how their thoughts impact your work. By doing this action you accomplish two things: First, it helps clarify your own thinking. Second, and more importantly for discovery, it helps signal the rest of the network what your interests are. Other thinkers/authors will then begin to know you as an active community member and will begin to provide you with materials that are relevant to your area of interest. You go from being an unnoticed consumer within the network, to being an actual visible node within the network. Your curated digital presence acts as a beacon, attracting similar minds and the web papers they create or champion. You create a gravitational pull for the very breakthroughs you seek.
The ultimate goal of this approach to discovering breakthroughs in web papers is the empowerment of curiosity. You will not be exhausted by continuously searching for new ways to do things; instead, you will create your own unique, intelligent, and somewhat accidental way of creating an environment full of relevant and useful information. You will grow different types of seeds in the ground and develop intelligent irrigation systems around those seeds using filters and alert systems, while also exploring the area around your seeds to grow. As you contribute to the overall ecosystem, it will grow to include you in that ecosystem as well. For any website editor this is more than simply a hack to make your life easier; this is a true professional superpower. It allows you access to the leading edge of innovative thinking prior to these ideas becoming commonplace. So, instead of continuing to chase after the end of the horizon, start growing and nurturing your own garden of resources. Establish your signals to help guide you and then wait for the truly innovative and influential web papers to find you, and be prepared to use them for inspiration for your next truly unique piece of work. You won’t need to seek out future uses for your ideas; instead, you will develop a plan for cultivating them to bring them to you.
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