Eric T. Meyer - Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities

Knowledge Machines

Infrastructures Series

edited by Geoffrey Bowker and Paul N. Edwards

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Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities

Knowledge Machines

Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities

Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-0-262-02874-5

Epub 3.0

d_r0

Acknowledgments

It is a great pleasure to thank the many people who contributed to this bookabove all Bill Dutton, who led the two phases of the Oxford eSocial Science project and was invariably helpful and generous with his expertise. On the same project, we also enjoyed working with Jenny Fry, Matthijs den Besten, Marina Jirotka, Paul David, Annamaria Carusi, Rob Ackland, Arthur Thomas, and Grace Eden, among others. Sally Wyatt, Kathryn Eccles, Monica Bulger, and many others whom we cannot list here provided comment and criticism that helped shape the book. Christine Borgmans visits to the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) were the source of many insightful discussions, and Ann-Sofie Axelsson was a great help with Swedish e-research. At the OII, Emily Shipway, Tim Davies, Duncan Passey, Pauline Smith, and the rest of the staff provided a superb infrastructure. Our involvement with the doctoral students at the OII, including Christine Madsen and Lucy Power, provided us with perspectives on additional corners of e-research. The project was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, JISC (United Kingdom), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (United States), the European Commission, the Research Information Network (United Kingdom), and Indiana University, among other institutions. Many interviewees have given time and provided expertise: these e-researchers have been excellent informants. We also thank the reviewers of the draft manuscript, whose suggestions were invariably constructive.

Many of the studies that went into this book were carried out collaboratively as part of various projects, and we have referenced them and acknowledged our many coauthors. This acknowledgment cannot do them justice, nor can it do justice to the greater detail of those studies, but readers interested in these more in-depth studies can find them via the reference list.

We also received useful feedback at many talks, particularly at the University of California, Los Angeles, Harvard University, and Kings College London; in Amsterdam, Goettingen, and Canterbury New Zealand; and, of course, in presentations to our colleagues at the University of Oxford.

Finally, Ralph thanks his family, Jen, Sven, and Anja, who, among other things, were also great informants as e-researchers, and Eric thanks his wife, Michelle Osborne, for her unflagging support.

List of Abbreviations

List of Illustrations

Figures

Tables

1 A Digital Research Revolution?

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 modeour definition of e-research, which we elaborate later in this chapterhave 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.