• Epistemic Cultures

ESU Leipzig, 2016Dr Jennifer Edmond

Trinity College Dublin

Research as Culture(s) 1- CP Snow, 1959 Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures”

- Scientists versus ‘literary intellectuals’- Questionable criteria, such as ‘optimism,’ and ethical engagement

- European Commission- ‘Science’ = ‘Wissenschaft’

- Boyer, “Scholarship Rediscovered”- Scholarship of Discovery, but also of Integration, Application and Teaching

- Unsworth, “Scholarly Primitives”- Proposes a (very popular) model of the process of scholarship- Discovering, Annotating, Comparing, Referring, Sampling, Illustrating and

Representing- Focusses however on the interaction of the scholar with the world (information

retrieval) rather than the interaction of information in and through a scholar’s apparatus

Research as Culture(s) 2

- Knowledge creation is a community process- Durability of peer review- Difficulties of interdisciplinary work- General agreement among experts as to what is or

isn’t a contribution- Epistemic processes as discipline specific, but not ad

hoc or subjective- Knowledge Creation in the Humanities differs from the

Sciences

What does and Epistemic Culture Look Like?

“….our educational systems focus on teaching science and business students to control, predict, verify, guarantee, and test data. It doesn’t teach how to navigate “what if” questions or unknown futures. As Amos Shapira, the CEO of Cellcom, the leading cell phone provider in Israel, put it: “The knowledge I use as CEO can be acquired in two weeks…The main thing a student needs to be taught is how to study and analyze things (including) history and philosophy.”

Epistemic Cultures, Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999)

- Subtitle: “How the Sciences Make Knowledge”- In depth ethnographic study of High Energy Physics and Microbiology- Numerous relevant questions investigated

- How is work described?- Organic (HEP) versus inorganic (MB) metaphors

- How are identities formed and maintained?- Multiple versus team authorship norms

- How does a laboratory function?- Laboratory roles (social versus object)- Laboratory ‘capital’ (access to skills, techniques, instruments)

SPARKLE Project

Scholarly Primitives and Renewed Knowledge-Led Exchanges

- Premise: We cannot deepen interdisciplinary collaboration until we understand each other better

- Problem: There is no Knorr-Cetina for the humanities, primitives approach not fundamental enough

- Method: 9 in-depth interviews with historians about how they create knowledge

- Team: Developed collaboratively by a humanist, computer scientist and a professor of design

SPARKLE Project

Scholarly Primitives and Renewed Knowledge-Led Exchanges

- Findings- Historians are physically mobile (‘pre-agrarian’ knowledge

creation)- Historians develop complex strategies to overcome time

limitations (c.f. John Guillory, ‘the clock time of scholarship’)- ‘Seeing’ is a key metaphor, including peripheral forms of

professional vision- Serendipity is also key, in the sense of having a ‘prepared mind’- Humanists DO create knowledge outside of the writing process- Humanists DO Collaborate (but not the way you think)

- Theoretical perspectives

- Methodological

Approaches

- Secondary Sources

- Primary Sources

- Lived ExperienceHumanities?

Biology/PhysiologyHigh Energy Physics

NO ‘RAW’ DATA!

GAP!

Instrumentation

This image: CERN-AC-0910152 by CERN is licensed under CC-BY-SA (no mods)

The SPARKLE Protocol

The purpose of this interview is to describe, in detail, your research/epistemic process, through the lens of a particular ‘act of scholarship’ – in most cases, a published scholarly article. The questions below are intended to be answered in reference to a single piece of written work: that said, if you can’t remember specific parts of the process, or if you feel a particular work was atypical in certain aspects of its development, feel free to add general information about how you perceive your research process.

The SPARKLE Protocol1. What is your field of study, and research interests? 2. What is the singular idea/insight/argument of the paper?3. Where did the idea come from (personal experiences, gaps in research, outgrowth from another project, source

material stumbled upon)? 4. How did you start working on it? What was the form of the first idea? A doodle? A textual outline? An image? A

scribbled note? 5. How did you develop the argument? What were the inputs to the thinking and the argument? How did you identify

what literature to search? How did you identify or what were your methods to identify the search terms to get to the literature? What other inputs did you call upon?

6. Describe the spaces (physical and virtual) where you work? How do you record your data as you go along (eg Did you print things out and noted on the margins? Comment on the digital document? Doodle / note in a notebook?)

7. How did you know when you were done with the research? Did this point come before, during or after the writing up process?

8. How did you start to write the first draft of the paper – what sections did you write first and what followed after that? How long did you work on this manuscript? How many revisions did you produce? Did it move as a largely steady flow, or were there interruptions (from other work or projects, or because of something inherent in this research)?

9. Where did you publish it? Why and how did you end up publishing at this venue? 10. How was it received? What kinds of feedback and comments (eg from reviewers, colleagues, students) did you get?

Did you make efforts to share the work with others before finishing or publishing it?11. Were there ‘breakdown’ moments that made you change/modify the argument? How did you overcome them?

The Humanist and the Computer Scientist

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Owen Conlan, Adaptive HypermediaJennifer Edmond, German Literature

The Works Described

“The Semiotics of Schizophrenia: The Artistry and Illness Unica Zürn”

Sole authorshipModern Language Studies, 2002

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“Multi-model, metadata driven approach to adaptive hypermedia services for personalized eLearning”

With V. Wade, C. Bruen, M. Gargan

Proceedings of Second International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems

Where did the Works Come From?

- Audited graduate seminar (novel)- Thin secondary material- Body of theoretical work on

women, creativity and mental states

- Serendipitous personal encounter- Medical literature, DSM and PDR

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- Extension of PhD work

- Availability of cohort of test subjects

- Clear context for development

- Technical work of two particular centres of excellence

Work Spaces

- Office- Home (Sofa)- Library- Coffee Shop- Bus

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- Focus on the availability of the virtual space (dev environment)

- Focus on spaces that supported the collaboration (white board)

Starting and Ending Work

• Scribbled marginalia gradually coalesce into chunks that can then be drafted

• Clear end point due to lack of secondary material, no need to wait for recursion

• Some feedback from conference• Write up a part of the epistemic process• Published in the journal of the conference

where it was presented• Won a prize, cited in a later biography

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• Reference to iterative cycles of user engagement

• Tipping point when system works for users

• Collaborative, so input of others (including other disciplines ‘baked in’)

• Write up largely after epistemic process is completed

• Presented at a major CS conference

• Good citation track record

Conclusions

• Computer science is a social science, grounded on the expectation that users know and will gravitate toward what they want

• Humanities methods are integrative, multimodal and peripatetic.• Need for

• Different kinds of dialogues (we may be asking each other the wrong questions)• Different kinds of research spaces (‘augmented research environments’), more

work with engineering and design• More nuanced forms of engagement, for example where a ‘tooling’ approach

may be to advanced

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A Word on Epistemicide Budd Hall, “Beyond Epistemicide: Knowledge Democracy and Higher Education,”

“Just as colonial political practices carved up the globe in the 18th and 19th centuries, knowledge, the intellectual energy by which humans operate became colonized as well. The process of dispossession of other knowledge is a process that Boaventura de Sosa Santos, a Portuguese sociologist, has called epistemicide, or the killing of knowledge systems.”

Documents the ‘four epistemicides of the Long 16th Century,’ perpetrated against the Muslims and Jews expelled from Europe, the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, the Africans taken and sold as slaves and the women persecuted as witches.

After this: "...modern science …[was granted] the monopoly of the universal distinction between true and false to the detriment of … alternative bodies of knowledge”

• Question Time…www.parthenos-project.eu

Jennifer EdmondTrinity College Dublin

edmondj@tcd.ie

www.tcd.ie