After getting my degrees in Philosophy and Computer Science, I asked myself, “what should I do with all of the essays, research papers, and source code I authored in the last four years?” My answer: feed it to Google!

To have a nice place to publish my papers, I began working on Project Alexandria at Idealab, a social network where student authors can publish their work, gather peer reviews and statistics about their writing style and content, and create a nice, online portfolio of their work complete with human-readable URLs for each of their papers. From Project Alexandria’s About page:

Project Alexandria is a collection of undergraduate and graduate level research papers, and other student-generated written works, that seeks to preserve, publish, and “mashup” the enormous amount of high-quality information produced and tragically discarded by students every academic year.

As far as an individual student is concerned, a paper loses nearly all of its value after it is graded. This perception may be reasonably accurate on a unit basis, but what if, for example, we could collect not just one undergraduate Sociology paper, but 10,000 undergraduate Sociology papers written this year? What if, through crowd intelligence and computer science, we could summarize, sort, and recombine these papers in interesting ways? If we were to collect some of these documents, and discover and promote the most interesting papers from each year, or the best excerpts from individual papers, we could quickly build a high-quality, extremely specialized, unique corpus of knowledge, opinion, and other information that would rival any other source.

…By publishing my work, I’ve made it possible for others to cite me in their papers, to use my work for learning and teaching, and to encounter esoteric pieces of knowledge and new perspectives…

Student authors can upload their papers, which are automatically categorized, linked to similar papers, analyzed for writing level, published to RSS feeds, and opened for discussion with comments. I also wanted to generate word clouds a la Wordle, but I didn’t get around to that feature. Take a look at my author profile and an example paper. I’m no longer working on Project Alexandria, but I’ve only shown it to friends and I wanted to share the concept.

As far as publishing source code goes, I’ve created a Launchpad project, Code University, where I published a branch containing source code for various projects and homework assignments.

By publishing my work instead of keeping it to myself or throwing it away, someone might benefit from it who otherwise would not have. I encourage you to do the same!

Am I worried about someone plaigarising my work? No, and publishing it is a safeguard against that. Am I worried about students using my work to cheat? No, that’s not my problem and universities need to evolve rather than intimidating students into not discussing their work or hoping that solutions will not appear online.