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Scientifically-constructed knowledge can take many forms, especially in
the modern age of genomic data, hypertexts and multimedia. KNOWLEDGE
NETWORKS is a term used (e.g., by the National Science Foundation)
to refer to to an even wider range of interconnections, both among the
scientists who have created them and among the representations
themselves. In the new science occurring on the WWW, the speed with
which a manuscript can go from author to reader has been accelerated
dramatically.
Perhaps because the physical installations required to do
modern physics (high-energy accellerators, telescopes, etc.) required
them to come to the same geographical location (CERN, Livermore Los
Alamos!), physicists have long been aware of how useful informal
communication channels can be [REF588]
. This may be one reason why the server begun by P. Ginsparg at Los
Alamos National Labs has been a leader in exploring how scientific
publication can occur. This system, originally developed for only
physicists, has been so wildly successful that it now houses many
documents from many disciplines.
As might be expected, computer
scientists have a particularly wide range of resources for searching
their own literature, including \item The Computing Research
Repository (CoRR);
CORA a search engine
developed especially for Computer Science research paper;
NCSTRL (pronounced ``ancestral''), a
system for sharing archives of technical reports in computer science
One
ugly truth of Science is that the primary task is to disagree with one
another. The scientific process works because it effectively weeds out
flawed arguments. One scientist can gain fame by claiming something new
is true; a second scientist can gain fame by showing that it is not. If
the question is sufficiently important, a third, scholarly scientist can
do useful work by enumerating the many people who said all the things
that were neither new nor true, as well as the very few publications
that are both.
The printed record of science must contain all aspects of
this on-going debate. But the channel is not wide enough to contain all
debates among all scientists and so only some aspects of the debate can
be published. Reviewers play a critical role in deciding what is worthy
of publication. Searching for journal articles is only a part of what
scientists must do. They are planning experiments and executing them,
they may be teaching, they may be relating their basic findings to the
development of a product, etc.
The browsing behaviors of scientists
contributes to a philosophy of how science is actually prosecuted, but
only if it deals with the larger realm of scientists' activities. A
great deal has been said about what a small fraction of a typical
scientist's day in fact is reflected in their publication record [REF588] . But the new WWW and Email
suggest a characterization of scientists' activities including
traditional publication channels as well as informal artifacts similar
to the letters and correspondence which have traditionally been the
mainstay of historians of science [Rudwick85] .
Logical positivists aside,
most current philosophy of science acknowledges the tremendous burden
carried by the language used as scientists muddle towards a
common understaning. This point has been made especially clear in
biology by Fox Keller and Lloyd's {\it Keywords In Biology: } [Keller92] . For these philosophers, the
word ``keyword'' is not being used as it has in this text, as an element
of an automatically assigned indexing vocabulary. Rather, they are
interested in those {\em key words} that scientists use to talk to one
another. As parts of scientific theories expressed in natural language,
keywords ... serve as conduits for unacknowledged, unbidden, and often
unwelcome traffic between worlds. Words also have memories; they can
insinuate theoretical or cultural past into the present. Finally, they
have force. Upon examination, their multiple shadows and memories can be
seen to perform real conceptual work, in science as in ordinary
language. [p. 2]
Indeed, it is precisely because of the large overlap
between forms of scientific thought and forms of societal thought that
``keywords''---terms whose meanings chronically and insistently traverse
the boundaries between ordinary and technical discourse---can serve not
simply as indicators of either social meanings and social change {or}
scientific meaning and scientific change, but as indicators of the
ongoing traffic {\em between} social and scientific meaning and,
accordingly, between social and scientific change. [p. 4-5, emphasis in
original]
As suggested by Section §6.8 ,
the emergence of vast datasets like those surrounding the Human Genome
Project point to qualitatively different relationships between the
keywords used as part of natural language by scientists and the data and
theories to which they are meant to refer.
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