Social Software, Information Architecture, & Their Epistemic ConsequencesSchiltz; Truyen; Coppens.

Wikipedia Yahoo! Google

Social software has distorted the semantics of the conventional scientific system – But at the same time, we get more suspicious of what we find on the Web.

PRINT Passive 1-to-1; 1-to-Many Info flows in one

direction Author Copyright Exclusivity Expensive Info + Knowledge =

Economics

DIGITAL Interactive Many-to-Many Back-and-

Forth Communication

Ubiquity Community Marginal Cost “FREE”

Scholarly communication crisis Conflict between commercial publishers &

demand of scientific careers Information moving online Removing price barriers Removing permission barriers

Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature on the internet. Making it available free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Removing the barrier to serious research.

PRINT Coupling of Science & Economics

DIGITAL DE-coupling, enabling fresh interest in thinking about information and its possession.

“OPEN ACCESS’ is...to the advantage of scientific production if it is generous and ubiquitous – an idea which even scientific publishers must eventually concede .”

Social software enables group interaction Most visited websites are ‘social’ at their

core Despite authorship issues, copyright

concerns, this has been to the advantage of progress

Social Software + Acceptance of Open Source Methods = Growth of Knowledge & Information Sharing

But INFORMATION ≠ KNOWLEDGE

Superior type of knowledge: Understanding where to access knowledge components when needed.

New internet usage: outsourcing the knowledge process to others.

“Knowing means being embedded in a social knowledge network that guarantees just-in-time delivery of the knowledge components you need”

Traditional beliefs have become downloadable beliefs The fact that they are ready for download

in trusted environments warrants their truth

Acceptance Principle The act of knowing takes place in the

social network, not the individual mind A lot of what we know is about cognitive

artifacts, not about the directly empirical

Projects Galaxy Zoo Open Science Wiki USGSted

Tools GPS OpenID

Saves us TIME. Dangers of inaccuracy or

misunderstanding? No proponent of OPEN ACCESS has ever

proclaimed the main advantage of free accessibility resides in accessibility to lay people

Helps experts Allows lay people to help experts help them

Nature of what is known itself seems to be changing

Ontological, epistemological consequences

How has the shift in knowledge production, distribution, and vindication semantically affect our dealing with information, our arrangement of meaning?

Limits of traditional classification: budgetary, spatial, complexity constraints

We have added a degree of ABSTRACTION to make sense of things

We take into account relational qualities of the classified items – items that can be ordered in such a way as they are RE-ENCOUNTERED at different places in a structure

SLIP BOX = TAGGING Highlights relations between items in

a structure Creation of order through meaningful

redundancy semantic web.

Quality of labelling is not to be judged on an individual basis.

All tags don’t have to be validated.

The value of tagging is in its collaborative aspect, its accurate result as defined by the community, that bridges social gaps.

The limitations of the conventional taxonomy system and knowledge growth

The value of folksonomies – what may be the current best practice

The need for circularity and polycontextuality

The world is not static and eternal, but dynamic and evolving.

IN CONCLUSION, we realize...

If the production of knowledge is always a social process, what are the implications of social media?

If innovations such as GPS and OpenID technology can help social software promote the production of knowledge, what else can be incorporated to make for more seamless or fruitful collaboration?

Does anonymity on the Web help or prevent social software from achieving its potential as a knowledge generator?

Can social software do for journalism what it has

done for science?

Schiltz, M., Truyen, F., & Coppens, H. (2007). 'Cutting the trees of knowledge: social software, information architecture & their epistemic consequences'. Thesis Eleven, 89 (1), 94.

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Slide 2: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2009/01/crowdsourcing-09.html Slide 3: http://www.pcworld.com/article/170874/the_15_biggest_wikipedia_blunders.html Slide 4:

http://www.techmynd.com/how-do-i-turn-off-caps-lock-yahoo-answers-best-answer-hilarious/ Slide 5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Google_Bomb_Miserable_Failure.png Slide 6: http://www.codypetruk.com/large/analog.jpg Slide 7: http://librarywall.maastrichtuniversity.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/openaccess.jpg Slide 8: http://www.pyroenergen.com/articles09/images/dna.jpg Slide 9: http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs45/i/2009/097/5/9/Social_media_icons_by_plechi.jpg Slide 10 & 11: http://blog.comscore.com/2010/09/social_networking_asia_pacific.html Slide 12: http://ceoworld.biz/ceo/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/social-media-profiles.png Slide 13: http://gisellert1987.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/social_media_sites1.jpg Slide 14: http://www.clker.com/clipart-9618.html Slide 15 & 17: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/twitter-earthquake-alerts/ Slide 16: http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ Slide 18: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/iphones-with-gp/ Slide 19: http://malefis.u-strasbg.fr/site/images/homer-brain.jpg Slide 20: http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/jhe/lowres/jhen13l.jpg Slide 21: http://www.alonnissos.org/page9/files/taxonomy%20tree.jpg Slide 22: http://www.fuelinteractive.com/blog/2008/04/my-social-medianetworking-talk.cfm Slide 23:

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