CAISOR Research Agenda

CAISOR Hypernotes, Memos and Reports

For reference, we state here the categories that are used, in the present website, for regular documents that have the general appearance of an article, merely excluding the webnotes that are just a short text in HTML.

The main distinction is between articles on one hand and reports or memos on the other. As 'articles' we include both those articles that have been published in quality journals or conferences, and other documents that have the same structure and character, provided that we feel their contents or their historical interest merits their inclusion here. In particular, we include a few departmental reports from the period before or around 1970, and a few articles that have recently been accepted after peer review to workshops where the proceedings have "limited circulation".

On the other side of the fence, there are 'reports' or 'memos'; these terms are used as synonyms here. (The term 'report' is more commonly used, but we wish to also include some kinds of documents that are actually e.g. proposals or surveys, rather than reports of something, and then 'memo' or 'memorandum' is more appropriate). The following are the specific kinds of documents in this main category:

  1. Proposals, policy documents, and reports for research activities
  2. Articles about policies and trends in the academic environment
  3. Position articles about e.g. research methodology in our field
  4. Historical notes about the projects represented here
  5. Survey notes for surveys of the state of the art in a topic of research
  6. Lecture notes for courses in the area of the present site
  7. Memos containing intermediary results from research projects, that is, results that are not in themselves a complete article, but which serve as illustrations for an article or as evidence for the results that it proposes.
The first three kinds of documents in this list are referred to here as academic memoranda; those kinds in items 4, 5, and 6 are referred to as hypernotes. The rationale is that academic memoranda have usually already been issued to some community, which may be small or large, so they have an existence of their own anterior to being included in the present website. Our hypernotes, on the other hand, are written specifically for inclusion in the CAISOR website, including its "open areas" or subsites, in line with the spirit of the hyperbook.

The project memos, finally, represent information that has traditionally been kept within the respective research project and not been made available at all to the outside. I believe that some such material should be made publicly available, now that the Internet makes that possible. They should not be intended as primary reading, but instead as reference material so that the reader of a regular article has the possibility to go back to the underlying project memos in order to obtain validation for, or improved understanding of a particular result. The separate CAISOR open space for research methodology, MORADOR (accessible from the Hallway) contains a longer discussion of this methodological topic. In line with that methodological stance, the category of project memo is included in our publication structure.

Posted on 2006-03-28 as part of the CAISOR website. [Version history.]