[Fis] RV: THE FOURTH GREAT DOMAIN OFSCIENCE: INFORMATIONAL? (R.Capurro)

[Joseph Brenner]

Dear FISers,

I have no difficulty in understanding Loet's approach as measuring one form of interdisciplinarity. However, it requires well-defined quantitative entities - classes, categories and journal articles to which they apply. I thus do not think that it exhausts the possibilities of the informational domain with regard to disciplines. 

When John C. talks about "references crossing ecology, management and poltical science", what is of interest to me and perhaps others is the 'substance' so to speak of the crossing. To make things difficult (rather than easy for a change), let us assume that this substance includes, but is not limited to common assumptions and common attitudes. (My informational exchanges today are more interdisciplinary because I am paying more attention to the way in which information is processed in the different disciplines.)

The task then becomes to express the 'substance' in informational terms. What informational terms are possible that are not numbers or ad hoc Peircean categories? The first thing I see is that the corresponding logic and category theory must be non-standard or it will miss the interactions and overlaps between disciplines. The next thing might be to change to a process perspective, looking at the way in which the disciplines, considered as informational entities, influence one another, and find some formal but non-mathematical language for referring to this. Are there any suggestions for such a language?

Looking over what I just wrote off the top of my head, I note that I used the term 'way' twice. Does this suggest a new role for the informational domain?

Cheers,

Joseph
   
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Loet Leydesdorff 
  To: fis at listas.unizar.es 
  Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2015 9:34 AM
  Subject: Re: [Fis] RV: THE FOURTH GREAT DOMAIN OFSCIENCE: INFORMATIONAL? (R.Capurro)


  Dear colleagues, 

   

  For the measurement of interdisciplinarity, one can use, for example, Rao-Stirling diversity which is defined as follows (Rao, 1982; Stirling, 2007): 

   

  Δ = Σij pi pj dij                                           (1)

   

  where dij is a disparity measure between two classes i and j-the categories are in the case below journals-and pi is the proportion of elements assigned to each class i. As the disparity measure, we use the distances on an aggregated journal-journal citation map (Leydesdorff, Heimeriks, & Rotolo, in press; Leydesdorff, Rafols, & Chen, 2013). 

   

  For example, 23 publications can be retrieved as of today with the search string "au=Marijuan P*" at WoS. The journal map is as follows: 

   



   

  and the Rao-Stirling diversity ("interdisciplinarity") of this set is 01282.

   

  If I repeat the analysis with the search string "au=leydesdorff l*", I retrieve 270 documents; Rao-Stirling diversity is 0.0805.

   

   



   

  In other words, Leydesdorff is more prolific than Marijuan in terms of WoS publications, but Marijuan's portfolio is more interdisciplinary than Leydesdorff's. 

   

  One finds the relevant software at http://www.leydesdorff.net/portfolio/index.htm 

  Reference:

  Leydesdorff, L., Heimeriks, G., & Rotolo, D. (2015 (in press)). Journal Portfolio Analysis for Countries, Cities, and Organizations: Maps and Comparisons. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 



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