cutting the trees of knowledge: social software, information architecture and their epistemic...

Cutting the trees of knowledge: Social

software, Information architecture and Their

epistemic consequences

Digitalization vs. Traditional Media

Internet– Provide an

interactive component

– Involve all interested people

– World Wide Web allows information to flow and forth

Radio, TV, Phone Radio, TV, Phone – information

flowing in one – direction only

– Support one –to – one communications

Print Press

Its inherent tendency to phrase the nature of information and knowledge in economic terms

Disadvantages – high economic cost – Printing press– Printing material– Disseminating

Problems of electronic media Author: the owner of information

Copyright: the ownership which had to be

judicially protected

Electronic publishing

Commercial publishers of scientific books and journals

Demands of scientific careers

Open Access Movement It is a social movement in academia,

dedicated to the principle of open access — — to information-sharing for the common good (Wikipedia).

Tracing its history at least to the 1960s, but became much more prominent in the 1990s with the advent of the Digital

Age (Wikipedia).

Open Access Movement

Debate of freedom of (scientific) information

All proponents agree:1. Removing price barriers (‘free as in

free beer’)2. Removing permission barriers

(‘free as in free speech’)

1. Social software integrates various aspects of group interaction

2. It is simple to use3. It enables, through its architecture,

groups to self-organize rather than have structure or organization

Social Software

Core: “Social”

arXiv: is an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics which can be accessed via the internet.

Social Software

Concrete or first-order beliefs are supplanted by metabeliefs

There is a shift from the knowledge of facts and direct acquaintance towards knowledge about beliefs

Downloadable beliefs

Downloadable beliefs

Wikipedia:1. It was a bottom-up challenge to

traditional encyclopedias

2. Not only offer and abstract and schematic overview of a topic but immediately give access to an incredibly fine-mazed, highly specialized

The social organization of knowledge production, storage, distribution boils down to a biological fundamental

Advantage: - time saving Idle human intelligence

Knowledge economy

Dewey Decimal Classification Universal Decimal Classification Library of Congress Subject

Classification

Cutting the trees of knowledge

Tagging (labeling):one creates an extra sphere of meta-data (the so-called ‘semantic web’), with the specific function of identifying, discovering, assessing, and managing the described entities.

e.g. blog posting

Classification

Folksonomies: help expand our understanding

by showing the overlap between many related concepts and how they merge into the wealth of social practices that give them meaning.

Classification

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