JSTOR (short for Journal Storage) is an online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides its member institutions full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Membership in JSTOR is held by 7,000 institutions in 159 countries.

JSTOR was originally funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, but is now an independent, self-sustaining not-for-profit organization with offices in New York City and Ann Arbor, Michigan. In January 2009 JSTOR merged with ITHAKA becoming part of that organization.^[2] The latter is a non-profit organization founded in 2003 "dedicated to helping the academic community take full advantage of rapidly advancing information and networking technologies."^[1]

History[link]

JSTOR was originally conceived as a solution to one of the problems faced by libraries, especially research and university libraries, due to the increasing number of academic journals in existence. The founder, William G. Bowen, was the president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988.^[3] Most libraries found it prohibitively expensive in terms of cost and space to maintain a comprehensive collection of journals. By digitizing many journal titles, JSTOR allowed libraries to outsource the storage of these journals with the confidence that they would remain available for the long term. Online access and full-text search ability improved access dramatically. JSTOR originally encompassed ten economics and history journals and was initiated in 1995 at seven different library sites. As of November 2010^[update], there were 6,425 participating libraries.^[4] JSTOR access was improved based on feedback from these sites and it became a fully searchable index accessible from any ordinary Web browser. Special software was put in place to make pictures and graphs clear and readable.^[5]

With the success of this limited project, Bowen and Kevin Guthrie, then-president of JSTOR, were interested in expanding the number of participating journals. They met with representatives of the Royal Society of London, and an agreement was made to digitize the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society back to its beginning in 1665. The work of adding these volumes to JSTOR was completed by December 2000.^[5] As of November 2, 2010 (2010 -11-02)^[update], the database contained 1,289 journal titles in 20 collections representing 53 disciplines, and 303,294 individual journal issues, totaling over 38 million pages of text.^[4]

Usage and contents[link]

JSTOR is licensed mainly to libraries, universities, and publishers. Individual subscriptions are also available to certain journal titles through the journal publisher.

As of November 2010^[update], JSTOR material is provided by 692 publishers. More than 90 million searches of the archives were performed between January 1 and July 12, 2010.^[4] In addition to its use as an archive for individual journals, JSTOR has also been used as a resource for linguistics research to investigate trends in language use over time.^[6]

The availability of nearly all journals on JSTOR is controlled by a "moving wall", which is an agreed-upon delay between the current volume of the journal and the latest volume available on JSTOR. This time period is specified by agreement between JSTOR and the publisher and is usually 3–5 years. Publishers can request that the period of a "moving wall" be changed or request discontinuation of coverage. Formerly publishers could also request that the "moving wall" be changed to a "fixed wall" – a specified date after which JSTOR would not add new volumes to its database. As of November 2010^[update], "fixed wall" agreements were still in effect with three publishers of 29 journals made available online through sites controlled by the publishers.^[7]

In addition to the main site, JSTOR's labs group operates an open service that allows access to the contents of the archives for the purposes of corpus analysis at its Data for Research service.^[8] This site offers a search facility with graphical indication of the article coverage and loose integration into the main JSTOR site. Users can create focused sets of articles and then request a dataset containing word and n-gram frequencies and basic metadata. They are notified when the dataset is ready and can download it in either XML or CSV formats. The service does not offer full-text, though academics can request that from JSTOR subject to a non-disclosure agreement.

JSTOR Plant Science^[9] is available in addition to the main site. JSTOR Plant Science provides access to content such as plant type specimens, taxonomic structures, scientific literature, and related materials and aimed at those researching, teaching or studying botany, biology, ecology, environmental and conservation studies. The materials on JSTOR Plant Science are contributed through the Global Plants Initiative (GPI)^[10] and are accessible only to JSTOR and GPI members. Two partner networks are contributing to this: the African Plants Initiative which focuses on plants from Africa and the Latin American Plants Initiative which contributes plants from Latin America.

Register and Read: Limited free access in 2012[link]

In January 2012 JSTOR announced "Register and Read," a beta experiment. It will give at no charge limited access to all the articles in 70 journals that account for 18% of user demand. Registered guests will be able to read (but not download) three articles every two weeks.^[11]

Books[link]

In 2011 JSTOR announced the Books at JSTOR initiative, to be launched in the northern spring of 2012, of putting current and backlist books on line. Nine university presses are cooperating. The plan is to enable links to reviews and cited journal articles.^[12]

Controversy[link]

On July 19, 2011, internet activist Aaron Swartz was charged with data theft in relation to an alleged theft of academic journal articles from JSTOR.^[13] According to the indictment against him, Swartz surreptitiously attached a laptop to MIT's computer network, which allowed him to "rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR".^[14] Prosecutors in the case say Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.^[15] Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleaded not guilty to all counts and was released on $100,000 bail. Prosecution of the case is ongoing.^[16]

Two days later, on July 21, Greg Maxwell published a torrent file of a 32GB archive of 18,592 academic papers from JSTOR's Royal Society collection, via The Pirate Bay, in protest against Swartz' prosecution.^[17][18]

On September 7, JSTOR announced that they are releasing the public domain content of their archives (about 6% of the total) to the public.^[19] According to JSTOR, they have been working on making those archives public for some time, and the recent controversy made them "press ahead" with this initiative.^[19]

See also[link]

• List of academic databases and search engines
• Aluka
• ARTstor
• ArXiv
• Digital preservation
• Project MUSE

References[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Participating Institutions
• List of journals available on JSTOR

Edward Rolf Tufte
Tufte during his one-day course in San Diego, 7 February 2011
Born	(c. 1942) Kansas City, Missouri
Occupation	Professor, statistician
Nationality	American

Edward Rolf Tufte ( /ˈtʌfti/; born 1942) is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University.^[1] He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization.^[2]

Biography[link]

Edward Rolf Tufte was born in 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri, to Virginia Tufte and Edward E. Tufte. He grew up in Beverly Hills, California, and graduated from Beverly Hills High School.^[3] He received a BA and MS in statistics from Stanford University and a PhD in political science from Yale. His dissertation, completed in 1968, was entitled The Civil Rights Movement and Its Opposition. He was then hired by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, where he taught courses in political economy and data analysis while publishing three quantitatively inclined political science books.

In 1975, while at Princeton, Tufte was asked to teach a statistics course to a group of journalists who were visiting the school to study economics. He developed a set of readings and lectures on statistical graphics, which he further developed in joint seminars he subsequently taught with renowned statistician John Tukey, a pioneer in the field of information design. These course materials became the foundation for his first book on information design, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.^[4]

Tufte self-published his Visual Display in 1982, working closely with graphic designer Howard Gralla. He financed the work by taking out a second mortgage on his home. The book quickly became a commercial success and secured his transition from political scientist to information expert.^[4]

On March 5, 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Tufte to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's Recovery Independent Advisory Panel "to provide transparency in the use of Recovery-related funds."^[5]

Work[link]

Tufte is an expert in the presentation of informational graphics such as charts and diagrams, and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. Tufte has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Information design[link]

Tufte's writing is important in such fields as information design and visual literacy, which deal with the visual communication of information. He coined the term "chartjunk" to refer to useless, non-informative, or information-obscuring elements of quantitative information displays. Other key concepts of Tufte are the lie factor, the data-ink ratio, and the data density of a graphic.^[6]

He uses the term "data-ink ratio" to argue against using excessive decoration in visual displays of quantitative information.^[7] In Visual Display, Tufte states:

Sometimes decorations can help editorialize about the substance of the graphic. But it's wrong to distort the data measures—the ink locating values of numbers—in order to make an editorial comment or fit a decorative scheme.

Tufte also encourages the use of data-rich illustrations with all the available data presented. When examined closely, every data point has value; when seen overall, trends and patterns can be observed. Tufte suggests these macro/micro readings be presented in the space of an eyespan, in the high resolution format of the printed page, and at the unhurried pace of the viewer's leisure. Tufte uses several historical examples to make his case including John Snow's cholera outbreak map, Charles Joseph Minard's Carte Figurative, early space debris plots, and Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. For instance, the listing of the names of deceased soldiers on the black granite of Lin's sculptural memorial is shown to be more powerful as a chronological rather than as an alphabetical list. The sacrifice each individual made is thus highlighted within the overall scope of the war.^[8]

Criticism of PowerPoint[link]

Tufte has criticized the way Microsoft PowerPoint is typically used. In his essay "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint", Tufte criticizes many properties and uses of the software:

• It is used to guide and to reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience;
• It has unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of early computer displays;
• The outliner causes ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy, itself subverted by the need to restate the hierarchy on each slide;
• Enforcement of the audience's linear progression through that hierarchy (whereas with handouts, readers could browse and relate items at their leisure);
• Poor typography and chart layout, from presenters who are poor designers and who use poorly designed templates and default settings (in particular, difficulty in using scientific notation);
• Simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely disguised points. This may present an image of objectivity and neutrality that people associate with science, technology, and "bullet points".

Tufte's criticism of PowerPoint has extended to its use by NASA engineers in the events leading to the Columbia disaster. Tufte's analysis of a representative (link to actual analysis on Edward Tufte forum) NASA PowerPoint slide is included in a full-page sidebar entitled "Engineering by Viewgraphs"^[9] in Volume 1 (page 191) of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report.

Tufte argues that the most effective way of presenting information in a technical setting, such as an academic seminar or a meeting of industry experts, is by distributing a brief written report that can be read by all participants in the first 5 to 10 minutes of the meeting. Tufte believes that this is the most efficient method of transferring knowledge from the presenter to the audience. The rest of the meeting is then devoted to discussion and debate.^[10]

Small multiple[link]

One method Tufte encourages to allow quick visual comparison of multiple series is the small multiple. A chart with many series shown on a single pair of axes can often be easier to read when displayed as several separate pairs of axes placed next to each other. This is particularly helpful when the series are measured on quite different scales, but over the same range on the x-axis (usually time).

Sparkline[link]

Sparklines U.S. stock market activity
Index	Open	February 7, 2006	Close	Low	High
Dow Jones	10796.42		10749.76	10691.97	10874.79
S&P 500	47.40		47.10	47.07	47.55
Nasdaq	43.00		40.81	40.70	43.26

Tufte also invented^[11][12][13] sparklines—a simple, condensed way to present trends and variation, associated with a measurement such as average temperature or stock market activity. These are often used as elements of a small multiple with several lines used together. Tufte explains the sparkline as a kind of "word" that conveys rich information without breaking the flow of a sentence or paragraph made of other "words" both visual and conventional.

Sculpture[link]

Outside his academic endeavors over the years, Tufte has created sculptures, often large outdoor metal ones^[3] which were first primarily exhibited on his own rural Connecticut property. In 2010, "the man known as 'ET' ... opened a gallery, ET Modern, in New York City's Chelsea Art District"^[14] at 11th Avenue and 20th Street.^[15]

Bibliography[link]

Tufte has written several books about using statistics to analyze political issues. A selection:

• 1968. The Civil Rights Movement and Its Opposition. PhD thesis.
• 1973. Size & Democracy. with Robert Dahl. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-0834-7.
• 1974. Data Analysis for Politics and Policy. Prentice Hall College Div. ISBN 0-13-197525-0.
• 1978. Political Control of the Economy. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-07594-8.

Among his works on the theory and practice of designing graphs, charts and maps are:

• 1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. (2001, 2nd edition, ISBN 0-9613921-4-2).
• 1990. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0-9613921-1-8.
• 1997. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0-9613921-2-6.
• 2003. "PowerPoint is evil". In: Wired 11 (9). ISSN 1059-1028. .
• 2003. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0-9613921-6-9.
• 2006. Beautiful Evidence. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0-9613921-7-7.

Additional citations

References[link]

External links[link]

• Edward Tufte's website
• The Data Artist
• Intelligent Designs Article in Stanford University's alumni magazine
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art Pen and Parchment - The Beautiful Evidence of Medieval Drawings video 47 min
• The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint Presented in the Form of a PowerPoint Presentation
• Robison, Wade, Roger Boisjoly, David Hoeker and Stefan Young, "Representation and Misrepresentation: Tufte and the Morton Thiokol Engineers on the Challenger" (Science and Engineering Ethics (2002) 8, 59-81) sharply criticizes Tufte's analysis of pre-disaster non-employment of graphics in Visual Explanations. Robison was a Rochester Institute of Technology professor; Boisjoly a directly involved Thiokol engineer; Hoeker and Young freshman RIP students. Alternative link.
• Ivy League Rock and Roll - A day with Edward Tufte Review of a Tufte seminar, including discussion of his work
• Art Directors Club biography, portrait and images of work
• A review of Edward Tufte's 'Beautiful Evidence'
• BBC portrait of the artist
• Interview for Washington Post
• ET Modern museum/gallery

Aaron Swartz
Born	(1986-11-08) November 8, 1986 (age 25) Chicago, Illinois, United States
Occupation	Software developer, writer, Internet activist
Website
aaronsw.com

Aaron Swartz (born November 8, 1986) is an American programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist. He is best known in programming circles for co-authoring the RSS 1.0 specification. He received mainstream media attention after his federal indictment and arrest on 19 July 2011, for allegedly harvesting academic journal articles from JSTOR.^[1]

Swartz is the co-founder of Demand Progress and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Early life and work[link]

Swartz was active in discussions of Internet standards from an early age, and co-authored the specification for RSS by the time he was 14.^{[citation needed]} Since then he has been a member of the W3C's RDF Core Working Group, co-designed the formatting language Markdown with John Gruber, and worked on many other projects.

Swartz attended Stanford University for a year, leaving to start the software company Infogami, a startup that was funded by Y Combinator's first Summer Founders Program. Infogami was built around a wiki backend, a subject of interest for Swartz since his early effort to develop theinfo, a wiki-based encyclopedia, in 2000.

Reddit and Open Library[link]

Within a year, Infogami merged with Reddit to form not a bug, though the latter group failed to take off. In late 2006, Reddit was sold to CondéNet (the online arm of Condé Nast Publications and the owners of Wired) and Swartz moved with his company to San Francisco. In January 2007, Swartz was asked to resign from his position at Wired Digital.^[2]

In September 2007, Swartz, together with Simon Carstensen, launched Jottit, a website service quite similar to Infogami. Jottit was launched from bitbots.net, a project by Swartz and Carstensen. Swartz is also the creator of the web.py web application framework, based on the Python programming language, which is used by Jottit (and previously reddit).

Swartz then went to work for the Internet Archive, serving as the software architect for the new Open Library project, building on work from infogami.

Politics and sociology[link]

Swartz is an active blogger and has written a number of essays on his blog. Two were "Who Writes Wikipedia",^[3] an article examining the contributions to Wikipedia articles written during his candidacy for the Wikimedia Foundation board election in 2006, and "HOWTO: Be More Productive",^[4] an article on personal productivity.

In recent years, Swartz has worked primarily on social analysis and political activism. He worked on watchdog.net, and serves on the board of Change Congress. In 2010 he became a fellow at Harvard University's Safra Center for Ethics.

Swartz co-founded Demand Progress, a progressive advocacy group that organizes people via email and other media for "contacting Congress and other leaders, funding pressure tactics, and spreading the word" about targeted issues.

Controversies[link]

PACER[link]

In 2009, Swartz downloaded and publicly released approximately 20% of the PACER database of United States federal court documents managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.^[5][6] He had accessed the system as part of a free trial of PACER at 17 libraries around the country, which was suspended "pending an evaluation" as a result of Swartz's actions. Those actions also brought him under investigation by the FBI, but the case was closed two months later with no charges being filed. ^[6]

JSTOR[link]

On Tuesday, 19 July 2011, Swartz was charged by U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer, in relation to downloading roughly 4 million academic journal articles from JSTOR.^[7] According to the indictment against him, Swartz surreptitiously attached a laptop to MIT's computer network, which allowed him to "rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR."^[8] Prosecutors in the case claim Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.^[9]

Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleading not guilty on all accounts, and was released on $100,000 bail.^[1] Prosecution of the case continues, with charges of wire fraud and computer fraud, resulting in a potential prison term of up to 35 years and a fine of up to $1 million USD.^[10] JSTOR put out a statement saying it would not pursue civil litigation against Swartz.^[1]

Jerry Cohen of Burns & Levinson said the government's choice to pursue criminal charges when JSTOR and MIT had resolved their civil concerns with Swartz reflected a trend of increasingly-zealous prosecution in federal courts.^[11]

On September 7, 2011, JSTOR announced it had released the public-domain content of its archives for public viewing and limited use. According to JSTOR, it had been working on making those archives public for some time, and the controversy, which involved, according to a press release, "an individual who was indicted for downloading a substantial portion of content from JSTOR, allegedly for the purpose of posting it to file sharing sites", impelled JSTOR to "press ahead" with the initiative.^[12]

Publications[link]

• Swartz, Aaron (Jan–Feb 2002.). "MusicBrainz: A Semantic Web Service". IEEE Intelligent Systems 17 (1): 76–77. DOI:10.1109/5254.988466. ISSN 1541-1672. 
• Swartz, Aaron and Hendler, James “The Semantic Web: A Network of Content for the Digital City”, Proceedings of the Second Annual Digital Cities Workshop, Kyoto, Japan, October 2001.
• Gruber, John and Swartz, Aaron. Markdown definintion, December 2004.

References[link]

External links[link]

Find more about Aaron Swartz on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Images and media from Commons
	News stories from Wikinews

• Official website