[Fis] THE FOURTH GREAT DOMAIN OF SCIENCE: INFORMATIONAL?

Fri May 15 14:19:54 CEST 2015

Dear colleagues,

I hope that the list allows for transmitting the above figure showing the
sciences empirically organized in four major domains using aggregated
citation relations among journals in (221) Web-of-Science Subject Categories
for the classification (based on factor analysis of the underlying matrix). 

See for more technical details at http://www.leydesdorff.net/overlaytoolkit 

The reference is: 

Ismael Rafols, Alan Porter & Loet Leydesdorff, Science overlay maps: a new
tool for research policy and library management
<http://www.leydesdorff.net/overlaytoolkit/overlaytoolkit.htm> , Journal of
the American Society for Information Science & Technology 61(9) (2010)
1871-1887; <pdf-version
<http://www.leydesdorff.net/overlaytoolkit/overlaytoolkit.pdf> > <software
and manual <http://www.leydesdorff.net/overlaytoolkit> >.

Best,

Loet

  _____  

Loet Leydesdorff 

Emeritus University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

 <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net> loet at leydesdorff.net ;
<http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 
Honorary Professor,  <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> SPRU, University of
Sussex; 

Guest Professor  <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/> Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou;
Visiting Professor,  <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html> ISTIC,
Beijing;

Visiting Professor,  <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/> Birkbeck, University of London;

 <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en>
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

From: Fis [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Pedro C.
Marijuan
Sent: Friday, May 15, 2015 1:33 PM
To: 'fis'
Subject: [Fis] THE FOURTH GREAT DOMAIN OF SCIENCE: INFORMATIONAL?

A Dialog on the Informational as the 4th Great Domain of Science
Moisés André Nisenbaum & Ken Herold

PART 1:  Informational as the 4th Great Domain of Science
(Moisés André Nisenbaum)

To classify is human (BOWKER & STAR 2000). The organization of scientific
knowledge is concern of scientists long ago. It started as a matter of
librarianship and has evolved over time using various tools like enumerative
classification, faceted classification, universal classification, controlled
vocabulary, thesaurus, ontologies, Semantic Web. But how Information Science
should organize scientific knowledge taking into account the dynamic
behavior of disciplines and multi, inter and trans-disciplinary science of
the twenty-first century (Information Society)?

Rosenbloom (2012) proposed a model in which four great Scientific Domains -
Physical (P) Life (L), social (S) and Computing (C) - can be
<http://moisesandre.com.br/FIS/debate/images/rosembloom-figure-2.1-domains-c
omposing-disciplines.jpg> combined to form any discipline.  The first three
(P, L and S) are "well known" domains and he proposes that the 4th is
Computing. The small number of domains (compared with 10 of DDC and UDC) is
offset by
<http://moisesandre.com.br/FIS/debate/images/Rosenbloom-figure-2.9-relations
hips.jpg> dynamic
<http://moisesandre.com.br/FIS/debate/images/Rosenbloom-figure-2.2-domains-s
imple-relations.jpg> relationships between domains that can be written by
<http://moisesandre.com.br/FIS/debate/images/Rosenbloom-table-2.1-ME-Languag
e.jpg> Metascience Expression Language. Although the prerequisites of a
Great Scientific Domain has been well developed, Rosenbloom does not explain
why they are in number of four or why these specific four domains.

NAVARRO, MORAL and Marijuan (2013) propose that the 4th Great Scientific
Domain is the Informational (I) instead of Computing. However, the biggest
proposal is that the Information Science needs to be rethought to support
theoretically and methodologically this 4th Great Scientific Domain. At the
end of the article, the authors
<http://moisesandre.com.br/FIS/debate/images/Map-Pedro.jpg> propose the
insertion of the four Great Scientific Domains in High-Resolution
<http://moisesandre.com.br/FIS/debate/images/Map-Bollen.jpg> Map of Sciences
(Bollen at all, 2009)

The problem is that all this is still in its "philosophical field" and miss
a more pragmatic approach. When I observed this map, I just thought about
how to measure these four domains and, even without even knowing exactly how
to do this, I asked Bollen the raw data of his research. My initial idea was
to identify every scientific discipline by a mathematical entity, for
example a digital 4x4 matrix representing quantitatively the four Great
Scientific Domain components and their relationships. The problem how to
establish the criteria (bibliometric) that would define the matrix elements.
Once created, we can check if the matrices really come together as expected.

Best,
Moisés

References:

<https://books.google.com.br/books?id=xHlP8WqzizYC&lpg=PR9&ots=Mz3xtCt2nE&dq
=Sorting%20things%20out%3A%20Classification%20and%20its%20consequences.%20&l
r&hl=pt-BR&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Sorting%20things%20out:%20Classification%20and
%20its%20consequences.&f=false> BOWKER, Geoffrey C.; STAR, Susan Leigh.
Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. MIT press, 2000.

<https://books.google.com.br/books?id=WGfxkn8OkwAC&lpg=PP1&dq=On%20computing
%3A%20the%20fourth%20great%20scientific%20domain.%20google%20books&hl=pt-BR&
pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=On%20computing:%20the%20fourth%20great%20scientific%20dom
ain.%20google%20books&f=false> ROSENBLOOM, Paul S. On computing: the fourth
great scientific domain. MIT Press, 2012.

NAVARRO, Jorge; MORAL, Raquel del; MARIJUÁN, Pedro C..
<http://moisesandre.com.br/FIS/debate/articles/pedro-article.pdf> The
uprising of informational: towards a new way of thinking Information
Science. Presented at 1st International Conference in China on the
Philosophy of Information, Xi’an, China, 18 October 2013.

 <http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0004803>
BOLLEN, Johan et al. Clickstream data yields high-resolution maps of
science. PLoS One, v. 4, n. 3, p. e4803, 2009.

PART 2: Comments from Ken Herold

I appear to be a fringe observer of the history of information science from
within my professional (since 1984) domain of librarianship and information
studies. [1] For a broader example, Chaim Zins conducted a multi-year study
of information science internationally from 2003-2005. [2]  My own edited
works [3] in 2004 and 2015 reprise various works going back to Machlup from
1962  [4].

I am somewhat skeptical of the suggestion that recombining knowledge is new
or previously critically not examined.  The international documentation
movement, predecessor to information science, has been shown by Buckland and
Rayward [5] among others to be exactly the rich response to the global
growth of knowledge 100 years ago.  Bioinformatics should and does clarify
and extend our perspectives, but I hesitate to accept its equivalence with
von Neumann architecture or cultural heritage.  Nevertheless, all the right
questions are being asked in my opinion.

Rosenbloom's interminable references to Wikipedia are off-putting, I am
afraid.  Also, he takes a rather narrow historical view of information
science in chapter 1.  Again, the trend seems correct to me as to the
importance of computing.  I just do not place as much value on an ad hoc
relational approach with few links to the massive peer-reviewed literature
available.     

I suppose I could best serve as the devil's advocate in this round?   

Sincerely,

Ken

References:

[1] https://www.asist.org/?s=history+of+information+science
<https://www.asist.org/?s=history+of+information+science> 

http://www.uff.br/ppgci/editais/historyofis.pdf

[2] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.20505/abstract
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.20505/abstract>  

[3] https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/1034
<https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/1034>  

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/library_trends/toc/lib.63.3.html

[4] https://archive.org/details/productiondistri00mach
<https://archive.org/details/productiondistri00mach> 

http://philpapers.org/rec/MACTSO-9

[5] http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/otlet.html
<http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/%7Ebuckland/otlet.html> 

http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~wrayward/otlet/otletpage.htm
<http://people.lis.illinois.edu/%7Ewrayward/otlet/otletpage.htm> 

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