Sunday 8 June 2014


Humanexus: Envisioning Communication and Collaboration





Indiana University
Department of Information and Library Science

VIDEO




Overview: This presentation opens with a screening of Humanexus, an award-winning semi-documentary that visualizes human communication from the Stone Age to today and beyond. The film aims to make tangible the enormous changes in the quantity and quality of our collective knowledge and the impact of different media and distribution systems on knowledge exchange. It follows a presentation and discussion of recent collaborative work on scholarly communication and collaboration. Last but not least, everyone will be invited to explore the Information Visualization MOOC (for free or for IU credits) and to visit the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit on display at the summer school.


READINGS:
    Stipelman, Brooke A., Hall, Kara L., Zoss, Angela, Okamoto, Janet, Stokols, Dan, and Börner, Katy (submitted) Mapping the Impact of Transdisciplinary Research: A Visual Comparison of Investigator Initiated and Team Based Tobacco Use Research Publications. The Journal of Translational Medicine and Epidemiology.
    Bollen, Johan, David Crandall, Damion Junk, Ying Ding, and Katy Börner. 2014. From funding agencies to scientific agency: Collective allocation of science funding as an alternative to peer reviewEMBO Reports 15 (1): 1-121.
    Mazloumian, Amin, Dirk Helbing, Sergi Lozano, Robert Light, and Katy Börner. 2013. Global Multi-Level Analysis of the 'Scientific Food Web'Scientific Reports 3, 1167.
    Börner, Katy, Noshir S. Contractor, Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, Stephen M. Fiore, Kara L. Hall, Joann Keyton, Bonnie Spring, Daniel Stokols, William Trochim, and Brian Uzzi. 2010. A Multi-Level Systems Perspective for the Science of Team ScienceScience Translational Medicine 2 (49): 49(cm)24. 

Relevant books:
    Börner, Katy, and David E. Polley. 2014. Visual Insights: A Practical Guide to Making Sense of Data. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
    Scharnhorst, Andrea, Katy Börner, and Peter van den Besselaar, eds. 2012. Models of Science Dynamics: Encounters Between Complexity Theory and Information Science. Springer Verlag.
    Börner, Katy, Mike Conlon, Jon Corson-Rikert, and Ying Ding, eds. 2012. VIVO: A Semantic Approach to Scholarly Networking and Discovery. Morgan & Claypool Publishers LLC.
    Börner, Katy. 2010. Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know. The MIT Press.
        Humanexus
        Information Visualization MOOC
        Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit 

26 comments:

  1. How does the new collective allocation of science funding prevent nepotism or excessive interlinkage?

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    1. Today, "old boy's networks" exist and are very hard to identify. In the proposed system, standard network analysis techniques can be applied to identify and deal with them.
      Conflicts of interest need to be observed in today's and in the proposed system.

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  2. It seems to me that while the movie presents three scenarios, the is a clear message that 'we do not want' virtual world, information overload and fusing with informational infrastructure we have build since palaeolithic drawings on rocks (2 first scenarios). After last scenario there was no question 'What do we want?', and it seems that it proposes a kind of 'let's go back to nature' solution to the above problems. Is this correct? The deeper question is whether humanity can deal with challenges of 'digital age' without changing themselves, both psychologically and physically to adapt and evolve in these new circumstances. In short, I miss the question "what do we want?" at the end of last scenario..

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    1. It seemed to me that the video ended with people learning to moderate their digital usage, use it in healthy manners, and reintegrating with the non-digital world.

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    2. But what is the "healthy" vs "non-healthy" situation? I have the impression that people consider that the closer to the non-digital world we are, the more healthy it is, and I think it is only a fear of change. So unless we have experimental evidence that the actual use of digital technology is a threat to a healthy social lives, it is fallacious to claim that we are on a bad path.

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    3. I agree. I think that Humanexus is shoving people towards technophobia instead of towards reflexion. It tries to warn us against "losing our humanity" or "losing the old ways", but neglects the fact that thanks to the Internet and new technologies in general, things are actually getting better.
      We're making knowledge available to all, we're getting better at managing the information that is made available to us, we're surpassing the limits of our bodies.
      What do I want? I want to go back to the first scenario, and have the ability to manage all that information, integrate it, and become better, smarter, wiser.

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    4. Yes, things are 'getting better' for many objective easily measurable values. However, there are many elements of human and planetary life that are not easily measured or often acknowledged.

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    5. And it's a very "human" thing to interact with technology and explore where our relationship with technology can take us. I don't think we should shy away from this relationship, but more so just try to understand it and use it to help us.

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  3. We have discussed a lot about the increase in the amount of knowledge since the digital age. Dr. Borner stated that knowledge doubles every 1.5 year. What metrics are we using to measure knowledge? Is it based simply on quantity of documents, or are quality and redundancy also taken into account. Is there an agreed upon definition of knowledge in Web science or any other field?

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  4. Le système d’affectation proposé est une excellente alternative pour garder plus d’argent dans la recherche et de faire contribuer le maximum de chercheur à l’évaluation mutuelle. Cependant, est-il possible que ce système fonctionne correctement avec l’aspect compétitif des chercheurs !!

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  5. Very aesthetic short movie. I couldn't overlook the implicit political message encoded in it: something like "technology will ruin your soul and dehumanize us all".

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  6. I really like the video and I would have liked to speak more about communication today in everyday life, not only through scientific research. Maybe we could speak about it later today.

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  7. Si j’ai bien compris, le pire cas est qu’il n’y ait plus d’interactions entre les humains, car il y a trop d’informations qui entre pour l’individu. J’ai compris qu’il y avait deux situations en pire cas et une situation en cas moyen. Quelle est la deuxième situation en pire cas que je n’ai pas nommé?

    Si j’ai bien compris la situation en pire cas, même si on réussit à mieux structurer l’information, la situation en pire cas peut toujours se produire, car l’information n’arrête pas d’augmenter. Donc, il faudrait faire bien plus que simplement mieux structurer et centraliser l’information.

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    1. Ce que j'ai trouvé intéressant c'est qu'il n'y a pas seulement plus d'interaction entre les humains, mais aussi plus d'interaction avec soi-même. À travers un écran nous pouvons mentir, cacher notre vraie identité etc. Il me semble que cela entraîne la question de l'identité, qui sommes-nous et pas seulement qui sont les autres (on pourra en reparler tantôt si ça t'intéresse)

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  8. I find Professor Börner’s proposal to make every researcher a source of funding extremely interesting (and I am shocked at the amount of money wasted in the proposal application process). Besides the significant amount of savings, what do you think is the main advantage (out of the many) to funding research in this way? Another question I have for Professor Börner is: How do we keep this new method of funding from itself leading to clustered of funds in a small number of research groups?

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    1. More money to share would mean (hopefully) that more researchers would be given a grant. Also, everyone would have funding anyways, so even if there are bigger projects, everyone would still have funding for their own local or personnal projects.

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    2. Whenever you review a funding a proposal, you get to see the future. A future another scholar believes is possible--if his project is funded.
      It is very valuable to see so many possible futures (not all are truly possible).

      With a fraction of 0%, everybody gets/keeps the same amount of funding. With 10%, only 90% need to be given to others. A few might have large funding amounts. Today, many researchers have no funding.

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  9. The proposed funding system is a great alternative to keep more money in research and to contribute to push researchers to do mutual evaluation. However, is it possible that the system works properly with the competitive aspect between researchers!

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  10. One of the complaints I hear from profs in UQAM (where decision-making is very decentralized) is that the fear of displeasing their colleague and paying the price in opportunities in the department is making it hard for them to bond and collaborate. I'm enthusiastic with the funding allocation proposal, but I do feel it could make for awkward situations with colleagues—especially if you just lost all of your funding and you don't know who was funding you and why you lost it.

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  11. Something that occurred to me as a benefit of the "fund-ranking" model is that it would take full advantage of each researcher's expertise. Researchers would be able to leverage their knowledge of their particular field and specialization in order to fund individuals conducting compelling research in that area. However, it would also seem that this would restrict the degree of diffusion. We would likely see oncology researchers funding other oncology researchers, which may lead to an excess aggregation of funding for particularly famous individuals within a certain field. I appreciated some of the suggestions in the paper (Borner, 2014) for controlling for these effects, like parallel peer-review/application based granting and circular funding monitoring, and backlog donating, etc. It might be interesting to implement a recommendation system that suggests relevant researchers or research programs based on some of the scientometrics discussed by Kousha and Giles including number of citations, who are relatively underfunded compared to other researchers of the same caliber according to these metrics

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    1. As I mentioned in the discussion, I believe those researchers that are highly funded in the new system would use some of their funding to develop novel algorithms/systems to identify promising researchers/projects. Amazon-like recommender systems--if you like this researcher/project then you might also like those--are one of many different possible ways to help distribute funding responsibly.

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  12. Thank you Madam KATY BORNER because your video content is clear. What do we want? I liked it when you show us the scientist statistics.

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  13. Dr. Börner, I really like your emphasis on data visualization, art + computation, and appealing to people's emotions to create real change.
    I read a blog post last week regarding art, technology, and social justice (read here) and the author said that every tech company should have an Artist-in-Residence and a Chief Design Officer. I'm curious what you think about the author's ideas (I do not endorse all of them necessarily but I would like to know your opinions on these matters).

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  14. Dear Katy, Thank you very much for sharing your works. I’m very interested by the power of simplification and visual analytics, mainly in the context of ontologies. Do you think that one day, formal logic will be understandable by anyone not blind since visually presented? I ask this kind of question because visual artefacts are frequently described as the simplest way to communicate informations but in which limits is the supposition will be always true.

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