New “research” web-pages at BiRC
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008Yesterday I updated the “Research” page at the BiRC website. We have been wanting to update the description of our research for a while. It is after all an important part of the website of a research institution, and ours was hopelessly outdated and a mess of small and large projects, some we were actively working on and some that were little more than areas we were interested in.
A year ago, we had a big meeting and discussed, all of BiRC, for an entire afternoon how to update the pages. It really goes without saying that nothing could be decided in such a large group. Instead, around Christmas, Storm, our director, called a meeting inviting those interested in updating our web-pages and willing to put in the work to implement the changes. Requiring that people should back up their ideas with actual work reduced the group significantly. We were only three, myself, Enette and Storm.
I got the task of coming up with a draft of the research pages and present it to the rest of BiRC.
What is a research project and what goes on a research center’s homepage?
The first thing I had to decide was what I wanted on the page. The form of the content is usually easier to figure out once you know what the content is.
On a webpage describing the research going on at BiRC, I wanted it to be the actual research going on at BiRC. This sounds obvious, but I have seen many research institutions listing their research interests with lists I find completely unbelievable. You might be interested in a lot of different problems, but there is a limit to how many fields you can make an active contribution to. I find it dishonest if you claim to be doing research in field where, really, all you have done is publish a paper related to the field five years ago, and you occasionally read a paper about the topic. Too often, that is what I have noticed.
There is nothing wrong with focusing on a few research areas at a research institution. Sure, it is fun to do a few projects outside your main research area from time to time, but if people read the web pages to find out what you are doing at the institution, then they should find the area where you are spending the majority of your time, not something you think about every second year. If a post doc wants to come and work at BiRC, he should know what kind of work we actually do, not what kind of work we like to read about.
Anyway, this is turning into a bit of a rant, but that is the kind of thoughts I was having at the time.
So, I wanted the page to contain our active research areas, and I wanted to back up the “we are actively working on this stuff” claim we are implicitly making when describing research on our web pages.
How do you prove that you are active? You put up the money or the work! Ideally, you want to prove that you are doing research in an area, by showing that you are actively publishing in it. If you do not publish, are you really doing research there? If you are, is it any good? I wanted each project to be able to show at least two-three papers a year to be considered active. I made an exception if there was funding for a project, but it hadn’t really produced any results yet… I am still not sure this is a good idea, but my arm was twisted a bit to allow for this…
Designing the web pages
After these considerations, I started to design the pages. I made an overview page, where people can scan through all the research areas at BiRC very quickly, and with links to sub-pages — one for each research area — that can contain more information.
On the main page I wanted a short description of each research area and a list of the most recent papers published in it (at least three, is my initial choice, but more if there are more papers published within the last year). This works as a sort of sanity check for whether we are describing an active research area or not, and also tells the world what kind of papers we publish in each area.
Putting it together
This design I presented to BiRC and no one objected. Good. Then I asked people to send me the projects (description and publication lists) they wanted on the page. Deadline March 15, which would give me time to set up the sub-pages and such, and then the new page could be put on the on May 1.
Naturally, but March 16 I hadn’t received anything and by May 1 I had a few half-baked descriptions. Deadlines are rarely taken that serious when they are internal deadlines like this. I am pretty bad at meeting them myself, so I cannot really complain.
With a lot of threats I got the material I needed over the weekend — well, enough to make descriptions of the main research areas at BiRC — and I put the pages together. I’m personally maintaining more of them than I had planned. I really only wanted to be responsible for the Association Mapping page. This is my own main area, and the one where I consider myself the local expert. I ended up maintaining virtually all the pages where I am contributing anything. I plan to push the responsibility to someone else when I get the chance, but for now this is how it is.