MY FRIENDS in the bibliometry business (the folk who count citations) are
always checking out new ways of assessing the published output of their
colleagues.
Noble and virtuous though this is, I think they may have missed a major
trick. Why not pay far more attention to what people read rather than relying
solely on what they write? After all, the saying “you are what you eat” doesn’t
mention what you excrete.
The citation index points vaguely in the right direction, but the references
you quote at the end of your research paper only record the reading you thought
was the most significant—or perhaps what would look good to supervisors or
worse. It says very little about your real motivation and understanding of the
subject.
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Online raw material for this research is trivially easy to get: any
self-respecting webmaster can produce an awesomely detailed inventory of the
websites you’ve visited, how long you lurked there and where you clicked off to
afterwards. But the offline world offers some interesting problems. Apart from
photocopies and inter-library loan requests, what record is there that you have
ever seen a particular book let alone read it? Probably the best place to start
is your office bookshelf. An idle hour with a bar-code reader is bound to turn
up an interesting inventory of titles, while adding parameters for Legitimate
Reading Wear and the Consolidated Dust Index would give you a fair estimate of
your Textual Referral and Retention Factor.
All horribly exposing—for bookcase read psyche. Intriguingly, even the
biggest control freak will often reveal their darkest secrets through the
juxtaposition of book titles. (What would anyone would make of my shelf:
Machiavelli’s The Prince leaning jauntily against the austere
Admiralty Manual of Navigation, Volume I, which in turn supports a
colourful stack of Novell manuals, a battered copy of Hamlet, a dusty
Unix tome and the illustrated version of The Mousehole Cat?)
With a bit of care, you could even trawl historical data using these
techniques. Remember all those science documentaries in the 1970s, 80s and even
early 90s, the ones where the expert was always interviewed in front of his/her
office bookshelf? Well, grab a few frames from each set of talking heads, chew
them over with some image analysis software and compare them with library
images. Even if some of the titles couldn’t be read completely, you could
probably assign them to bucket categories like “TV Series Tie-in”, “Obsolete
Undergraduate”, “Terse Technical” or “Unread Review Copies”.
Of course, you will have spotted the gigantic flaw in this whole
project—it does rather rely on the subject not knowing that they are being
researched. Which prompts a truly awful thought—what if someone is doing
this already?