Special Issue Announcement: KNOWLEDGE INFRASTRUCTURES
Science & Technology Studies
Guest Editors
Helena Karasti, Florence Millerand, Christine M. Hine, Geoffrey C. Bowker
In recent decades we have witnessed important changes in research and
knowledge production. Whether these changes are promoted as a transformative
force enabling new forms of investigation or perceived as buttressing
existing forms of research, they are associated with developments in
information technologies and infrastructures. These developments aim to pull
people together, supporting distributed collaboration or facilitating new
joint activities and endeavors across domains, fields, institutions, and
geographies. They offer new opportunities for the sharing and connecting of
information and resources - data, code, publications, computing power,
laboratories, instruments, and major equipment. They often bring together a
diversity of actors, organizations and perspectives from, for instance,
academia, industry, business, and general public. The social, material,
technical, and political relations of research and knowledge production are
changing through digitalization of data, communication and collaboration,
virtualization of research communities and networks, and infrastructuring of
underlying systems, structures and services. These emerging phenomena
participate in ongoing transitions in the scholarly arena, and in society in
general: traditional ways of doing research may be challenged and knowledge
production may become more distributed and broader in participants. These
phenomena have been cast under several labels such as big science,
data-driven science, networked science, open science, Digital Humanities,
and science 2.0. Other terms used are: e-Science, e-Social Science,
e-Research, e-Infrastructure, and cyberinfrastructure.
The aim of this first special issue on the topic of knowledge
infrastructures in an STS journal is to take stock of existing research and
chart new directions. For taking stock our scope is inclusive. We are open
to investigations of knowledge infrastructures of all disciplines and
research fields, from all theoretical and methodological perspectives, from
all geographical locations. We also solicit studies of knowledge
infrastructures that are not limited to scholarly knowledge production, but
address, for instance citizen science, 'hacker science', as well as studies
that address emerging forms of knowledge production, for instance open
science and research 2.0, or studies that explore knowledge infrastructures
in commercial or public services domains. To be able to chart new directions
we encourage papers that clearly focus on knowledge infrastructures and
contribute to furthering our understanding of infrastructures for research
and knowledge production.
This special issue seeks articles that help the STS field to understand
complex issues involved with knowledge infrastructures for research and
knowledge production. We encourage empirical, conceptual, theoretical, and
methodological contributions.
Submission date: October 19, 2014
Further information available:
http://www.sciencetechnologystudies.org/node/2333
Christine Hine
Department of Sociology
University of Surrey
Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK
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