glossaLAB: Co-Creating Interdisciplinary Knowledge

The paper describes the glossaLAB international project as a contribution to confront the urgent need of knowledge integration frameworks, as required to face global challenges that overwhelm disciplinary knowledge capacity. Under this scope, glossaLAB is devised to make contributions in three main aspects of such endeavor: (i) development of a sound theoretical framework for the unification of knowledge, (ii) establishment of broadly accepted methodologies and tools to facilitate the integration of knowledge, (iii) development of assessment criteria for the qualification of interdisciplinarity undertakings. The paper discusses the main components of the project and the solutions adopted to achieve the intended objectives at three different levels: at the technical level, glossaLAB aims at developing a platform for knowledge integration based on the elucidation of concepts, metaphors, theories and problems, including a semantically- operative recompilation of valuable scattered encyclopedic contents devoted to two entangled transdisciplinary fields: the sciences of systems and information. At the theoretical level, the goal is reducing the redundancy of the conceptual system (defined in terms of “intensional performance” of the contents recompiled), and the elucidation of new concepts. Finally, at the meta-theoretical level, the project aims at assessing the knowledge integration achieved through the co-creation process based on (a) the diversity of the disciplines involved and (b) the integration properties of the conceptual network stablished through the elucidation process.2019-2

Conversation about the city: Urban commons and connected citizenship

The analysis of conversations between Italian and Brazilian groups allows to understand meanings that inspire and motivate political demonstrations and different performances in favor of a desired city. The research takes a descriptive perspective, based on categories of analysis informed by theories, but made by the exploration of terms used in conversations caught by members of four Facebook groups. The expectation is to highlight concepts, revealed by the set of statements made by people interested in trends that city growth takes or just in the given uses of urban spaces. To provide clues for the interpretation of the talks, we use centrality indices of Social Network Analysis (SNA) in a semantic network of concepts. Thus, it is possible to establish similarities and differences between current forms of civic participation and politics on urban commons largely supported by online social networks