A late post from the week before. Also, I missed this last week’s conversation – apologies.
Deborah Finkle shared about the cyber security research program in the DOE here in Washington – how it is to run a research lab funded by the government and directed by their security concerns. (more…)
We brainstormed future topics. Some include:
We spent half an hour discussing “What is an Information Science dissertation?”
Paul Wouters
Program Leader and Founding Member, The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
The talk took the form of an autobiographical case study, discussed in three parts:
1. A biographical encounter about personal introduction to information science and how the field developed
From a degree in biochemistry, Wouters became involved in science journalism, interviewing prominent sociologists of science (e.g., Bruno Latour and social scientists in the Netherlands) and being exposed to the Science Citation Index. As a PhD student, he researched the history and development of the SCI (with the assistance of Eugene Garfield). The study of the history of information systems, work on the interplay between semiotics and IS, and conferences on cyberscience (1996) led to his current work in e-Research and knowledge production. The questions of how we increase (or not), standardize (or not), diversify (or not), stabilize (or not) the creation and sharing of scholarship in the social science and humanities.
The basic premises of the Virtual Knowledge Studio include: (1) changes in information and communication create new possibilities; (2) how can these resources be used by researchers in the humanities and social sciences; (3) how do we engage with and reflect upon e-Research (to ask new questions, reformulate old questions, find new ways to combine data, to generate new types of data, to establish new ways of communicating, and to collaborate in new ways). Other institutes (e.g., NCeSS) were mentioned. The VKS focuses on design, conceptualization, experiment/play, interdisciplinary work, and the dynamics of knowledge creation. Virtual ethnography, web archiving, and simulation are the three methods that VKS develops, through analytical centers and construction platforms (based at institutions).
2. How the Virtual Knowledge Studio scholars engage with methods, topics, and ideals
Information Science techniques and approaches abound at VKS: Webometrics and link analysis, network analysis, scholarly information behavior (e.g., how Women Studies scholars use ICTs in their research and teaching), differences in behavior and practice across fields, embodied data and semiotics, data sharing (e.g., creating a safe spaces, common spaces, and private spaces for data), Semantic Web and classification, Web archiving.
The boundaries of information science are often blurred–adopting a focus on contexts, users, information, and labor (e.g., illustrating “invisible work”) to build and configure tools–and building theory that is (productively) explanatory and/or experiential. (Information science should avoid trying to define itself; rather, it should worry about boundary crossing to contribute to society.)
3. Looking from localized practices that illuminate the future roles for information science
Wouters calls for information science/studies to support theory building about information infrastructure, embodied data, and construction of research objects as well as assessing new information sources (e.g., new media like blogs, wikis, Facebook, Flickr; large scale analysis and collection beyond a single discipline), creating data and analytical tools, and monitoring Web use.
Questions and discussion
Q: How are you making this claim about blogs as a undifferentiated information source?
A: The investigation should be the first question to address, but it would be helpful, perhaps, if you could make use of pre-formatted sources as a source of data.
Q: Why would you look at technology as how it can enhance science rather than the other way around: looking at scholarly work and how technology could support this work?
A: VKS moves between these two perspectives and takes the position that there are untapped possibilities for scholarship based in new technologies.
Q: The research object: are there new objects that are examples of what may be possible? How do we measure scholarly output or productivity?
A: That’s not what I meant by research objects. For examples, games are the object of research now, and we see these communities of scholars and scholarship emerge around this area.
Q: If Whitley’s framework is descriptive, how would we use it as a prescriptive framework for problem selection in information science?
A: It is probably not stable enough to predict, but it is useful as a lens through which conversations could start; you would need to see if what you observe and if it fits.
Q: What is virtual ethnography?
A: You live with people, take notes, see the world from their perspective in ethnography. It is an open question how you use a method like this is cyberspace: log file analysis, lurking, avatars, etc.
This post serves as a holder for continuing conversation based on the 11/20/06 Research Conversation moderated by Batya Friedman, titled Privacy By Design, rather than an accurate transcript of the conversation. Using Value Sensitive Design projects, Batya wants to ask, “what does it mean to do interdisciplinary work?” Post your follow-on comments related to the content of the talk or the Q&A time.
