The same should go for everybody. From commenting, blogging, to writing books. Repeating somebody’s work in its entirety is pretty unnecessary when a citation would do. What you build off others, how you do intellectual parkour and create something new out of many things old, is what’s valuable. You advance everybody that much further and faster by doing so.

And a gap in the literature doesn’t always need to be filled. There might be a very good reason for such a gap.

It’s finally time for me to make an original contribution because I have something original to say. There’s a gap that needs to be filled. And I can fill it. I should fill it.

The question is how.

I know I have to fill the gap with a story. A story is stickiest and understanding more complete when I tell a story.

I know it has to be accessible.

I know it has to be sound bytey and meatey.

I’d love to be able to say that I’ve spent 8 months putting Original Content together and can share it now. I can’t. There’s loads of OC to be sure. It’s just not in any sort of coherent format. The hiccup is because I’m less skilled at inserting conflict or drama into a story.

My good friend Romy Klaus, head of Unlike.net, insists that I must triumph over myself and do so. This notion of a protagonist and an antagonist is absolutely vital to produce drama. And she’s right.

I’ve had four false starts in eight months. Each time I’ve tried I’ve fallen into traps.

The degeneration of unpacking the onion until even I’m in tears.

The degeneration into scapegoating.

The purposeful avoidance of saying anything people don’t want to hear.

It’s a trap.

I’ve come back around to my original position. I’m going to tell a story. I’m going to do it my way. And even if it’s in a buzz killington style, dammit, I’m going to try.

Here’s to a DRY Original Contribution.

While I don’t have that much to say about the essence of the Fourth Paradigm yet, I have to admit that I feel immediately at home with this group within eScience. One of the best quotes in the book is:

“Need driven versus curiosity driven. Basic science is question driven; in contrast, the new applications science is guided more by societal needs than scientific curiosity. Rather than seeking answers to questions, it focuses on creating the ability to seek courses of action and determine their consequences.”

Substitute ‘societal needs’ with ‘business needs’, and I have myself a nice bridge between eScience and commercial eScience. I suppose that’s been one of the fundamental misunderstandings about the Scientist-Practitioner: that they were only poking about out of curiosity. Science for the sake of science.

What if we were transparent about the intent to use science for purely commercial gain? Sounds Edisonian I suppose?

Much of the literature seems to be about very huge computing problems, like analyzing the data from the LHC. I’m not necessarily as concerned with problems of that order of magnitude. In fact, most business problems are fairly modest by comparison. What will, however, hold back commercial eScience, are the same forces that will hold back eScience. That is to say, the lack of unification among the fundamental tools.

At any rate – this field looks attractive.