Eric T. Meyer – Knowledge Machines
16 October, 2021 -
examPrep
- 1 – This book is about how the Internet has transformed knowledge. More specifically, it is about how digital tools and data, used collaboratively and in distributed mode — our definition of e-research, which we elaborate later in this chapter — have changed the way researchers and scholars in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities do their work. We argue that there has been a transformation in how knowledge is produced, creating online “ knowledge machines ”that now underpin how research is advancing. In changing the world of knowledge, these knowledge machines are also changing the wider world of how research is accessed and used by a wider public and reshaping the physical and social world we live in.
- 2 – In this book, we try to understand not just how networked technologies have changed the ways we consume knowledge but also how new technologies have reconfigured the ways that knowledge is generated.
- 3 – Because the instruments are, moreover, part of a single online system that is growing ever more powerful and integral to the research process, we argue that even if it may be too early to say that these machines are responsible for a “ revolution, ”we can say that they are responsible for the most important transformations of the sciences and humanities in our time and for the foreseeable future. This conclusion makes it worthwhile to examine the nature and implications of these transformations.
- In this book, our main focus is the production of new knowledge, primarily as it is undertaken by university researchers. But it is useful to put this topic in a broader perspective of what “ research ”can mean in the context of the Internet — if only to set the stage for defining e-research, which, we argue, is a subset of research. Indeed, as we shall see, one issue raised by the digital transformations of research is whether these broader and narrower topics have become more difficult to disentangle.
- The first form of Internet research is about the Internet as a social phenomenon.
- The second form of Internet research is about how the general public, students, and researchers use the Internet as an information source.
- 4 – The third form of Internet research is about the Internet as research tool and research method. In this case, the Internet can be seen as a means for measuring and discovering patterns of human behavior, online or offline.
- A fourth form of Internet research is about engineering and computer science: the research into advancing the underlying technologies that allow the Internet to function. Much of this work is happening in industry and in industrial/academic partnerships and involves the design of both the hardware (including routers, switches, and cables) and the software to keep the Internet running, growing, and improving.
- Our focus in this book is the fifth form of Internet research, which is somewhat less well known than the first four and involves understanding the Internet as an underlying research technology or infrastructure that is enabling advances in research practices across multiple disciplines and domains. The label sometimes attached to this perspective is e-research (Borgman 2007; Dutton and Jeffreys 2010b), which we define as the use of digital tools and data for the distributed and collaborative production of knowledge (Meyer and Schroeder 2009b) and which can be seen as a subset of digital research that takes place primarily at various research frontiers.
- 5 – It is important to note that throughout this book we take a broad view of the Internet, which according to this view encompasses not only the network but also the devices and tools connected to it. A purist might argue that “ the Internet ”refers only to the network of networks that uses the various layers in the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) model to transport data. Our broader view may be less technically accurate, but it is more accurate in terms of how to think about the Internet ’ s sociotechnical network. This idea of the Internet includes not only the underlying network devices and connections but also all the devices, sensors, applications, databases, networked tools, data, and content residing on these technologies, for without them the network itself is uninteresting and not powerful at all.
- 6 – And again, we also use the term research (or knowledge) to encompass science, social science, and humanities, but we separate science from nonscience in accordance with Schroeder (2007b). The demarcation of science from nonscience and labeling the study of the social as scientific are of course fraught with difficulties, and we return to this topic on a number of occasions.
- The main questions we want to address are, What difference have digital technologies made to research, and how have they changed the direction and the practice of research? There is a difficulty with these questions, and it is just as well to flag this problem at the outset: it is increasingly difficult to identify a single overall transformation brought about by e-research or networked digital technologies separately from the general effects of the Internet. Nevertheless, we argue that it is possible to pinpoint some consequences of a more specific set of research technologies (e-research) on knowledge production, with wider implications for the role of science and knowledge in society.
