Niels-Oliver Walkowski

Grounding Networks

Niels-Oliver Walkowski — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 13:36:58 +0000

Great critique by +David Berry on the occasion of a review of three publications which tell the utopic story of networks. It emphasizes that the idea of networks remains a model (or I would argue an epistem) to approach to reality in showing its limitations, black boxes and hidden power structures. Coming more from Networks as a Culture Technique for the organization of social space, software development etc. from a Science Theory point of view on could continue to head to a direction Berry touches at the end of his review saying:

the network as an explanatory approach offers a particularly enticing view of society for those who want to argue for a break or discontinuity with what has gone before.

This point illustrates the strategic use of the network metaphor in discourse. Nevertheless within scientific discourse (actor network theory) for example the network can have repressive function withdrawing somebody the control over his discursive object. Implementing the network perspective for a special object complicates the use of this object as a whole. As there is no metaphysic answer to what is a whole and what is compound (Wittgenstein) but only a situative pragmatic the notion of strategy as argumentative strategy appears again. There is nothing out there which is more a network than it is monolithic. How we treat it only reflects our discursive and strategic goals.

The Poverty of Networks

The Poverty of Networks. The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 515, ISBN 0 300 12577 1, pbk £11.99 Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open …

Digital Humanities, e-Science, Research Objects, OAI-ORE

Niels-Oliver Walkowski — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 09:07:20 +0000

As pointed out in the short introduction to this blog some weeks ago the blog will be the core of a demonstrator to an evaluation and adaption of what I call the Aggregating Research Representation approach for the so called Arts and Humanities. Not invented by the OAI-ORE 1 model but increasingly promoted by it the idea to extend the entities of publication within science led to different realizations of what van de Sompel describes as Compound Information Objects 2. The goal is not only to publish an article in the end of a research process summarizing the results but additionally the whole package of material and information which supported this research process like Data, Algorithms, Stuff Information and so on. There are two main ideological patterns by which these ideas are driven: a) to guarantee transparency of research in the way that people can follow up and question the process behind a conclusion presented in a text. b) to offer the possibility of reuse in the way that other people can transfer parts of others work to their own research context without the need to start from the scratch. Therefor the concept of Aggregating Research Representations is strongly linked to the e-Sciene theme and an epistemological leitmotif introduced by Microsoft as the fourth paradigm 3 of research and generally denominated as data-driven-science.

Until today most implementations of Aggregating Research Representations represent research of the sciences. There is the myExperiment example 4 which curates Aggregating Research Representations mainly produced by scientists of Life Science, Bioinformatics and Chemistry, there is the Open Notebook or Open Laboratory Book 5 approach heavily linked to the chemistry community, there is the Compound Information Object example mentioned before introduced by van de Sompel with Embedded Networked Sensing research data and there is the Enhanced Publications model 6 of the EU funded project DRIVER applying its model to natural sciences from different areas and to other statistical oriented disciplines like quantitative social sciences and linguistics.

This list is only a short introduction but the main point why I enlisted it is obvious. It raises the question if and to which extent the idea of Aggregating Research Representations can be transferred and applied to arts and humanities research. This question by which my PhD project begins is situated in different playing fields. First it has a political dimension thinking of what Bruno Latour is eager to call the Science Wars 7. Speaking of constructivistic vs. positivistic epistemology this “battle” is often used in political conflicts between humanities and sciences research. Giving the point of Latour that this battle is grounded in an epistemical missunderstanding and that constructivism and positivism are only two different perspectives on the same research process we nevertheless must admit that these two perspectives play a different role in humanities and in sciences and that former has to justify its existence and viability in research and science policy on a different level. This has consequences on the one hand for the funding of humanities research which has no comparison to natural sciences funding and which becomes increasingly attached to unholy conditions 8. On the other hand and even more important for the question of my PhD is the consequence that humanities researchers are under continuous pressure by the e-Science community to be more collaborative, to finally adapt a culture of sharing, to leave their literally dark room of solipsism and to embrace the new digital possibilities. One could argue that this is the reason why there grew a loosely connected community called Digital Humanities: to support the adaption of digital environments to humanists needs and to create digital practices specific to humanities research. But one shouldn’t forget that the Science Wars mentioned before has its battle lines not only between disciplines but also within disciplines or in other words that there is not such thing called arts and humanities as referred to by the Digital Humanities. And in fact the strong players in the Digital Humanities are disciplines like Linguistics, Empirical Literacy and so on. On the other hand David Berry records that: In the digital humanities, cultural criticism-in both its interpretive and advocacy modes-has been noticeably absent by comparison with the mainstream humanities. The same applies to the Aggregating Research Representations discussion as the given list only show examples of empirical oriented humanities research.

Sally Wyatt once said that analyzing the so called Non-Adapters of a media or an invention is a good method to uncover the limitations of this invention by itself often forgotten in the euphoria of its appearance 9. In fact humanities researchers often have well developed reasons why they refuse to make use of digital tools and possibilities. It’s revealing that researchers of e-Science normally don’t ask what are existing practices of sharing and collaboration in the humanities or under which conditions it make sense for humanists to collaborate, where do they do so, under which conditions results of humanities research are sharable, what is the epistemic of Opennes and so on but just demand that humanists have to change their research culture. Doing this will reveal new ways of engaging into the digital for the humanities. Consequently Digital Humanities is not only about bringing the Humanities into the pre-existing digital world. There is no digital nativity as pointed out by a lately published study 10. One always has to arbitrate between the digital and the non-digital and within the digital itself to gain a digital identity. Hence Digital Humanities is also about relations and frontiers between the digital and the non-digital. To aim in this direction a reflection of e-Science and its paradigms has to include methods and epistemics used within humanities itself. An issue which is not self-evident when looking at Berrie’s observation. Therefor my research will involve a cultural-science-based reflection of networks as culture techniques and an epistemological critique to the extent and nature of use of data in what is called data-driven-science.

There are several reasons why an investigation of Aggregating Research Representations is a research object of preference. As underlined in this post such Representations have not only grown on the theoretical background of e-Science but modelers of Aggregating Research Representations formulate their implementations as a contribution to this discourse. Additionally they are progressively implemented in an Linked Open Data environment which seems to be the most convincing architecture so far representing the idea of Opennes, Sharing and Collaboration. Finally to connect these issues to Aggregating Research Representations – and not to remain standing in a pure e-Science perspective – offers the possibility to transfer some of the results into an operational level. Although following former argumentation it has to be pointed out that results won’t only effect the design of Aggregating Research Representations but its integration into (e-)research in general. By doing so I want to apply my idea of Digital Humanities as reflexive coding between media theory, cultural-science, epistemology etc. and informatics, information sciences etc. where reflexivity means to code not only to achieve an objective but also to make an object out of the code at the same time. This is how we get to a setting which is typical for humanities research and which enroll its activity between the object in its positive objectivity and the priority of the object as Adorno would describe it 11.

1 http://www.openarchives.org/ore/

2Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel, ‘Compound Information Objects: The OAIORE Perspective’, (Open Archive Initiative, 2007) <http://www.openarchives.org/ore/documents/CompoundObjects-200705.html> [accessed 23 July 2011].

3A.J.G. Hey, S. Tansley and K.M. Tolle, The Fourth Paradigm: Data-intensive Scientific Discovery (Microsoft Research Redmond, WA, 2009) <http://iw.fh-potsdam.de/fileadmin/FB5/Dokumente/forschung/tagungen/i-science/TonyHey_-__eScience_Potsdam__Mar2010____complete_.pdf> [accessed 23 May 2011].

4 http://www.myexperiment.org/

5Jean-Claude Bradley and Kevin Owens, ‘Chemistry Crowdsourcing and Open Notebook Science’, in Nature Precedings, 2008 .

6Barbara Sierman, Birgit Schmidt and Jens Ludwig, Enhanced Publications?: Linking Publications and Research Data in Digital Repositories (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), p. 212 <http://dare.uva.nl/document/150723>.

7Bruno Latour, Die Hoffnung Der Pandora: Untersuchungen Zur Wirklichkeit Der Wissenschaft (Suhrkamp Verlag; Auflage: 3, 2002).

8Daniel Boffey, ‘Academic Fury over Order to Study the Big Society’, The Observer, 27 March 2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/mar/27/academic-study-big-society> [accessed 4 November 2011].

9S Wyatt, ‘Challenging the Digital Imperative’, Development (Maastricht: Maastricht University, 2008) <http://www.narcis.nl/publication/RecordID/oai:dare:16649/Language/en> [accessed 8 July 2011].

10Nishant Shah, ‘In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives’, DMLcentral, 2011 <http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/search-other-decoding-digital-natives> [accessed 4 November 2011].

11Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 2nd edn (London, New York: Continuum, 1981).

Call for a new approach in Digital Humanities

Niels-Oliver Walkowski — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 09:51:54 +0000

In his interesting new Blog Post David M. Berry gives a nice new model of the development of Digital Humanities from Computing Humanites over Digital Humanities to somewhat he calls Digital Humanities 3.0. WhetherÂ it is an adequate term to describe what he is looking for, because of its marketing like speech and its notion of a linear progress, the concept behind it is a fascinating one. It’s a demand for a more reflexive approach in the Digital Humanities, the attempt to raise questions how the digital, the software, the computional change our methods, our way we interact with material, our concept of truth and last but not least our epistemology. Consequently he argues for a ‘Computational Turn’. In this perspective Digital Humanities began as a support for analog research and research methods stepping forward to a field where humanities core qualities were transformed into tools to interact with now born digital content in a ‘humanities way’ (reflexive, qualitative …) to point out now that this transformation process isn’t a one way movement. What Berry demand isn’t new in its media reflexive position and has a long tradition in Media Theory and a performative sidekick in netcritics and hacktivism as he mentioned himself. Identifying that this perspective is astonishing absent in Digital Humanities it would be an interesting discussion to clarify what a computational turn could mean contrasting to classical media theory and where the connections are. Moreover identifying the connections to other theories with same perspectives could produce a profile of what are the main questions for the Digital Humanities followed by such a perspective. For example Derrida’s concepts of trail and postponement are really interesting approaches to discuss what Berry calls the “Streaming Internet”. At least there is still a practical problem consisting in the heterogeneous backgrounds of people acting within the Digital Humanities and the still contingent discussion of what Digital Humanities should be. Grounding this issue there is still an opposition of humanities orientated computer specialists and humanities researchers with computional capacities within the field focusing on there backgorundperspecitves. This often leads to infertile discussions and a lot of misunderstanding. So a question for the computational turn would also be how it should be spelled out to make the communication about it possible.

Regarding automatic inferencing

Niels-Oliver Walkowski — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 08:16:58 +0000

As an reply to the OKF Blog entriy about machine reasoning I want to outline some personal concerns. The problem of automatic inference is not the lack of context which could be compensated as you have demonstrated. It is the fact that context from the perspective of the rdf statement or an inference machine is in many cases indescribable. Not because there is an ontology missing but because there are many possible contexts imaginable. A very simple phenomena of this problem is the ambiguity of many words. The more abstract the concept the more it could be integrated in different contexts. The next problem is that Ontologies like OpenSync represents a particular perspective about the world which may not fit for all people in their own situations. This problem my not be so dramatic with simple things like sheeps and lambs but it becomes a problem with more theoretical concepts. One dream of automatic interference apostles was always to bring it into science and to generate new knowledge with it. In my opinion this is impossible because of the problems mentioned. Interference is build up upon reasoning and reasoning is a deterministic thing: you can only get out what you put in. This is not the way scientific innovations work.

Atomizing the discourse

Niels-Oliver Walkowski — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:18:54 +0000

The Open Knowledge Foundation Blog is introducing the project Debategraph today. Debategraph describes itself like this:

Our goal is to make the best arguments on all sides of any public debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.

ItâEUR(TM)s a little bit sad and more over dangerous for political discourse and open debate to see âEURoecomplex, multi-dimensional problemsâEUR as you describe it broken down into a small set of prejudices (as in the case of âEURoeIllegalâEUR Migration to the USA). ThatâEUR(TM)s a problem which I found underestimated in general with Open Data. Data appear to be facts, because the contexts of them are blackboxed either in a machine like in Nature Sciences or in Methods like in Humanities and so on. In this sense Data always is somehow affirmative. They have a message which is alwas the message of its creator. There are many situations in which this is not problematically but when it comes to political discourse it is, as seen in the example above. The question why someone raises an argument, who raises it, in which situation, with which interests is a generic part of political debates which canâEUR(TM)t be represented in the approach of Debategraph.