Tag: science2

HypER 2009: Hypotheses, Evidence & Relationships

You know that feeling that you’ve come home? I recently joined a 2-day workshop at Elsevier’s Disruptive Technology Labs, Amsterdam, where an exciting group of people shared what is clearly a harmonic convergence that’s been waiting to happen for a long time. HypER: Hypotheses, Evidence & Relationships is the name we gave ourselves. From the nascent wiki homepage:

The next step in the evolution of the digital research infrastructure is the detection, navigation and analysis of  Hypotheses, Evidence & Relationships in the literature: the building blocks of knowledge-level claims.

This community brings together researchers in argumentation, computational linguistics, sociology of science, hypermedia, semiotics, semantic and pragmatic web.

Check out the participants and presentations from Day 1, and the ensuing activity streams to take this forward… such as intersection with the W3C Scientific Discourse working group.

What makes this particularly exciting from the perspective of our Hypermedia Discourse group is that we’ve been working since 1998 on tools and theory for human-annotation of discourse relations, while meantime, the machines have been getting smarter at extracting certain forms of these from traditional scientific texts. Now, as I argued in my presentation, there’s potentially a marriage made in heaven for us to really move the knowledge infrastructure forward, out of the shadow of the printing press, into a network-native environment that takes seriously the power of the social/semantic web. Moreover, it takes seriously the pragmatic level of communication by recognising the rhetorical role that different statements play in scientific communications.

My specific argument on the human+machine annotation synergy is that no matter how smart the machines get, we will always need human annotation of hypotheses, evidence, and discourse relationships, and very high quality user interfaces (Slide 10):

Researchers read meanings into texts that are not there, and with which the author might disagree

  • so we will always require manual annotation tools
  • we need ways to make connections to connections
  • extremely complex connections may remain the province of human sensemaking (e.g. is analogous to)

Good user interfaces will be needed

  • to view, edit and navigate HypERnets, whether manually or automatically constructed

Scientific discourse is a social process

  • we take huge care in our writing about how we position ourselves in relation to our peers — will we trust unsupervised machines to extract and position our more complex claims?
KMi HypER 2009

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Digital Scholarly Discourse

I wrote this recently as a 1-pager to a foundation, which more or less sums up how I’m thinking right now…

Digital Scholarly Discourse

It is premature to applaud the Internet as the next Gutenberg revolution until it similarly transforms our core assumptions about how knowledge can be most effectively disseminated, analysed and debated.

In the shadow of the print journal

1665 was a milestone in the history of intellectual technology. Within months of each other, the French and British academies published Le Journal des S

Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social Not Working?

Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social Not Working? was the title of a fun and stimulating event, the second of the British Library’s TalkScience series, with Nature.com’s Timo Hannay kicking it off with some thoughts [podcast], and a Nature Network forum supporting it with pre- and post-discussion.

It brought together a good mix of Web 2.0 geeks, bloggers and researchers, plus serious scientists and scholars already immersed in, playing at the edges of, or just plain curious about the wonders of Web 2.0. As well as meeting some interesting people, the big messages for me were that:

  • we’re clearly in the early, transitional phase of escaping from the shadow of Gutenberg: research fields are largely ruled by print journal publications, with few formal career incentives to blog, or publish in lower tier, but more innovative, e-journals
  • there are some demonstrable “Web 2.0 approaches add value” application areas emerging, especially around collaborative annotation
  • social networks for disseminating and archiving blog commentary on the peer reviewed literature look like a promising niche, which makes sense to researchers

Practising what we preach, here’s the Dialogue Map showing the ideas and websites discussed, as mapped on the night, in Compendium, a tool that’s been funded by the e-Science/Scoail Science Programme.

Then I uploaded the map into our Web 2.0 Cohere app for mapping Ideas and Arguments, so you can add your own thoughts to the hypertext. We’re investigating this as one vision of semantic, Web 2.0, scholarly discourse (maybe that makes it Science 3.0 discourse?…)

You can see below the root “Idea” of my Dialogue Map, and once you click on this you’ll be taken into Cohere, showing how this expands on the Idea of “Science 2.0”:

In the discussion, I mentioned Cohere in the context of our need for sensemaking tools that allow us to ask questions such as Who disagrees with this paper?. Cohere came from the EPSRC Scholarly Ontologies project that laid the foundations for annotating and interrogating semantic annotations. I also mentioned a forthcoming internet experiment which aimed to bring together technologists working on structured online deliberation and argument mapping tools, with subject matter experts from climate science and policy. This experiment is going to be called ESSENCE: E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change