Introduction: The Dynamics of Epistemic Communities

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Communautés Créatives et Langage de Codification

International audienceLa communication propose une analyse typologique des identités des communautés créatives. Plus particulièrement, elle remet en cause l'apparente homogénéité des communautés épistémiques et des communautés de connaissance en procédant, d'une part, au moyen de comparaison entre différents programmes de recherche développés en sociologie des sciences et du politique, d'autre part, en conduisant une analyse sociolinguistique des énoncés lexicaux issus des auto-présentation des communautés. Cette analyse critique aboutit à segmenter l'ensemble des groupes créatifs en deux familles : les communautés au profil stable et régulier et à visée scientifique ou technique, et les collectifs au profil foisonnant et instable et à visée de transformation sociale

Temporal mobility: context and routine in museum documentation

Organisational information resources have temporal mobility if they are able to traverse temporal knowledge boundaries and remain usable over time. Information resources – digital and physical records and data – can be vital for on-going productivity and decision-making in an organisation, and some information resources are retained as organisational memory to inform the maintenance and development of performance in the long term. Organisational records are also managed and maintained for regulatory reasons of accountability and transparency, or to secure organisational legacy. In particular, within scientific communities, datasets need to be accessible in the long term to a globally dispersed network of researchers. For information resources to be useable, recipients need to understand the circumstances in which they were created: when, where, why and by whom; i.e. the provenance of the records. This contextual information helps users interpret information content and translate it for use, and lack of context hampers the temporal mobility of records. This research looks closely at the role of context in the use of information resources after the passage of time, to investigate what aspects of context are significant and how context affects interpretation and use. Through participant observation, I studied how information resources were used during the accessioning of archaeological artefacts at a museum. In this thesis, I examine the accessioning task in detail, using routines as an analytical perspective to draw out the intricacies of how different aspects of context were used when interpreting documentation records from the past. This autoethnographic study draws heavily on my personal experience of the performance of the task and the difficulties in completing it. The findings of my research highlight the significance of understanding how records were created, not just their provenance. Our understanding of aspects of the documentation routine greatly facilitated our interpretation and use of past records. The routine and our understanding of it was an important contextual element that contributed to the temporal mobility of the records. This has implications for the long-term management of information resources suggesting that there is value in augmenting descriptive metadata with contextual information on generative processes to facilitate long term use of information and data content

Changing preferences : conventional photography to digital imaging in communicating architecture

Architectural photography is merging into a new form of image capture and output which is a mix of conventional photography and digital imagery. As this transition takes place it is anticipated that the credibility of the image may also change. the aim of the project is to research the perception of the quality, content and authenticity of both conventional photography and digitally produced images used within the architectural profession

Whose Right is Right? Searching for a Common “Right” for Promoting Trust and Water-Related Data Exchange in Central Asia

According to a number of scholars in transboundary water management, mistrust is considered to be one of the main obstacles to cooperation, especially for the exchange of hydrological data and information between newly-independent riparian states. The research presented here is focused on identifying the ways in which trust and mistrust are created through epistemic communities and global values in four sequential steps. The first step is conceptualizing and identifying the origins of trust in relations between the states using most prominent International Relations (IR) theories and proposing a definition of trust as “belief that other state would do what is right with the “right” being socially constructed and common for both trustor and trustee” based on a constructivist worldview. As a second step, the important role of epistemic communities is identified in both promoting trust and facilitating data exchange between the states. Third, examples from a case study of the newly-independent Central Asian states concerning data exchange on the Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers are used to demonstrate how trust and mistrust are built through epistemic communities. Finally, the influence of international water virtues on trust are examined through the example of data exchange and its influence on trust in Central Asian states. As a result, the research shows that because of national interests, biased knowledge and competition for funding in newly-independent states, epistemic communities and global virtues fail to build common understanding of what is “right” and bring trust

COLLABORATIVE SCIENCE ACROSS THE GLOBE: THE INFLUENCE OF MOTIVATION AND CULTURE ON VOLUNTEERS IN THE UNITED STATES, INDIA, AND COSTA RICA.

Reliance on volunteer participation for collaborative scientific projects has become extremely popular in the past decade. Cutting across disciplines, locations, and participation practices, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world are now involved in these studies, and are advancing tasks that scientists cannot accomplish alone. Although existing projects have demonstrated the value of involving volunteers to collect data, few projects have been successful in maintaining volunteer involvement over long periods of time. Therefore, it is important to understand the unique motivations of volunteers and their effect on participation practices, so that effective partnerships between volunteers and scientists can be established. This study provides a first look into the relationship between motivation and culture in the context of ecology-focused collaborative scientific projects around the world. Projects in three distinct cultures - the United States, India, and Costa Rica - were examined by triangulating qualitative and quantitative methods followed by a cross-cultural comparison. The findings reveal a temporal process of participation that is highly dependent on motivation and culture. Initial participation stems in most cases from self-directed motivations. However, as time progresses, the motivational process becomes more complex and includes both self-directed motivations and collaborative motivations. In addition, motivation is strongly modulated by local cultural norms, expectations, and practices. Collaborative and scientific cultures also have an impact throughout the course of the volunteers' participation. This research provides theoretical and practical contributions: its findings extend current understanding of theories of motivation by showing the connection between culture and motivation, and demonstrate how cultural effects lie at the core of motivation and participation practices in volunteer-based collaborative scientific projects. These findings will also inform scientists, project leaders, educators, administrators, and designers on ways to entice and maintain long-term volunteer participation in collaborative scientific projects that are situated in different cultures

Trust and Trustworthiness: A Framework for Successful Design of Telemedicine

Trust and its antecedents have been demonstrated as a barrier to the successful adoption of numerous fields of technology, most notably e-commerce, and may be a key factor in the lack of adoption or adaptation in the field of telemedicine. In the medical arena, trust is often formed through the relationships cultivated over time via clinician and patient. Trust and interpersonal relationships may also play a significant role in the adoption of telemedicine. The idea of telemedicine has been explored for nearly 30 years in one form or another. Yet, despite grandiose promises of how it will someday significantly improve the healthcare system, the field continues to lag behind other areas of technology by 10 to 15 years. The reasons for the lack of adoption may be many given the barriers that have been observed by other researchers with regards to trust and trustworthiness. This study examined the role of trust from various aspects within telemedicine, with particular emphasis on the role that trust plays in the adoption and adaptation of a telemedicine system. Simulators examined the role of trust in the treatment and management of diabetes mellitus (common illness) in order to assess the impact and role of trust components. Surveys of the subjects were conducted to capture the trust dynamics, as well as the development of a framework for successful implementation of telemedicine using trust and trustworthiness as a foundation. Results indicated that certain attributes do influence the level of trust in the system. The framework developed demonstrated that medical content, disease state management, perceived patient outcomes, and design all had significant impact on trust of the system

Social impact retrieval: measuring author influence on information retrieval

The increased presence of technologies collectively referred to as Web 2.0 mean the entire process of new media production and dissemination has moved away from an authorcentric approach. Casual web users and browsers are increasingly able to play a more active role in the information creation process. This means that the traditional ways in which information sources may be validated and scored must adapt accordingly. In this thesis we propose a new way in which to look at a user's contributions to the network in which they are present, using these interactions to provide a measure of authority and centrality to the user. This measure is then used to attribute an query-independent interest score to each of the contributions the author makes, enabling us to provide other users with relevant information which has been of greatest interest to a community of like-minded users. This is done through the development of two algorithms; AuthorRank and MessageRank. We present two real-world user experiments which focussed around multimedia annotation and browsing systems that we built; these systems were novel in themselves, bringing together video and text browsing, as well as free-text annotation. Using these systems as examples of real-world applications for our approaches, we then look at a larger-scale experiment based on the author and citation networks of a ten year period of the ACM SIGIR conference on information retrieval between 1997-2007. We use the citation context of SIGIR publications as a proxy for annotations, constructing large social networks between authors. Against these networks we show the effectiveness of incorporating user generated content, or annotations, to improve information retrieval

The Role of the Epistemic Community in Influencing Privacy Legislation: The United States and the European Union

Threats to individual privacy from computer information, database, and surveillance technologies of the mid-20th century prompted the formation of a privacy epistemic community that informed and influenced privacy policy and legislation in the United States and the European Union. Because the United States was more advanced in computer technology than the European nations, awareness of privacy issues, and the privacy epistemic community, emerged first in the United States---and migrated to Europe a generation later. The United States legislated the Privacy Act of 1974, which became the benchmark for individual privacy protection in the United States. While several European nations passed privacy legislation in the 1970s, there was no common privacy policy and law among European nations. In the early 1970s, the Council of Europe (CoE) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) created privacy data-protection committees that became important networking organizations for privacy epistemic community experts from the United States, European nations, and other OECD member nations. The influence of the trans-Atlantic privacy data-protection epistemic community can be seen in the similarities among the Fair Information Principles/Practices (FIP) found in privacy studies, guidelines, conventions, and laws in the U.S., the CoE, the OECD, and the European nations. Two case studies describe the role and influence of the privacy data-protection epistemic community members in influencing privacy studies, policy, and legislation in the United States and Europe. The United States enacted narrow sectoral legislation to protect individual privacy from government computers and databases in the Privacy Act of 1974. More than two decades later, the European Union enacted broad omnibus data-protection legislation that effectively limits the collection and aggregation of personal data on EU citizens. Why two such dramatically different privacy data-protection laws could have been enacted when influenced by the same privacy data-protection epistemic community leads to analysis of economic, socio-cultural, and political influences on privacy data-protection legislation. Evidence suggests that privacy data-protection epistemic community influence, filtered through different socio-cultural visions of the relationship of the government and the citizen, lead to dramatically different privacy data-protection legislative results

Partially connected to science : the Luxembourg Museum of Natural History and its scientific collaborators.

This thesis explores the production of scientific knowledge at the Luxembourg Museum of Natural History. It focuses in particular upon the roles and interrelationships of amateurs and professionals in this process. In doing so it explores how the boundaries of science are made and unmade. As a contribution to the science studies literature, the production of science is examined in a rather unexplored space: a museum. Theoretically, this thesis draws on science studies in general and actor-network theory in particular. Based on empirical research - participant-observation fieldwork, semi-structured interviews and document analysis - it unpacks the 'cultural boundaries of science'. It provides an empirical and theoretical understanding of the multiplicities, heterogeneities and materialities of boundaries and boundary-work. On the one hand, this thesis shows how the co-production of scientific knowledge and the making of a 'museum without walls' is rendered difficult through resistive agency and different articulations of space and time; on the other, it examines how this co-production is eased through the managing of boundary encounters and boundary objects, and practices such as decentralisation, brokering, and heterogeneous gift exchange. This thesis thus provides an informed account on what it means to be 'partially connected' to science