1. Donna Haraway: ‘Cyborg Manifesto’
What is a ‘cyborg’?
What questions did this article raise?
What are this reading's great strengths?
What are this reading's greatest vulnerabilities?
Where could the reading have gone further?
Your own questions on the readings.

2. Knowledge Domains & Communities of Practice
Science & Technology Social Sciences

3. the nature of knowledge
realist
social

4. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Realist nature of knowledge: world is completely objective (pure realism)
Social nature of knowledge: there is no foundation to knowledge apart from the perception of humans (purely socially determined)

5. science objectively establishes truth, but does not control the context in which the scientific discovery will assist in the creation of knowledge

6. Science & Technology Social Sciences
If scientific truth is objective, it is also blind because it ignores the social context in which knowledge is circulated
How individuals’ beliefs are formed is based on information supplied by others
social nature of knowledge
may be contentious regarding the nature of ‘truth’

7. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Scientific data may be used / misused:
to justify social stratification and prejudice
so that certain groups will appear to be inferior (e.g. behavioral research, studies of heredity and human behavior, genetics, race and IQ, psychobiology, or sociobiology)

8. Science & Technology Social Sciences
S/R: Standards of evidence are not hopelessly culture-bound, though judgements of justification are always perspectival (e.g. knowledge is truth-indicative but not absolute)
Knowledge is built through the perspectives of disciplines (processes of cultural selection, institutional arrangements that shape knowledge)

9. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Important to understand how disciplines structure knowledge
Disciplinary domains are formed by communities of practice
how do they circulate information?
what are the rules of engagement?
need to recognize the social structure of research

10. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Knowledge entails cognitive effort within communities
Communities form consensus based on:
attribution of authority
division of opinion

11. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Knowledge claims form an important part of journals’ content
Knowledge claims based on:
Epistemology: logical argument, testimony, empirical evidence
Rhetoric:persuasion

12. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Journal content analysis: reliability & attribution)
Reliability:
Source of the claim (speaker)
Bodies of evidence supporting claims
Perspectival processes shaped by social forces (gender, national origin, social structures of scholarship and research - does it embrace multiple perspectives on which knowledge claims are based)

13. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Journal content: reliability & attribution)
Attribution realized through citation of published work:
epistemic (new idea is incorporated)
procedural (author’s work is cited as proof that researcher has that knowledge -- association)

14. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Information policy literature (Rowland)
ISI citation indexes to define document test collection
Assumption: authors interact with existing knowledge through referencing behavior (use of the accumulating body of recorded literature)

15. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Accumulation of a body of recorded literature varies according to subject area (how older materials are incorporated in more recent publication through citation)
Science and technology: select nucleus of specific journals; brief span of time covering a few current years
Social sciences & humanities: greater dispersion of publications in different forms, on different subjects & over a comparatively long span of time
Ephemeral vs. classical literature

16. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Comte ( ) - taxonomy of sciences
science (physics, biochemistry)
soft science (social science)
non-science (humanities)
Price (1970) - Price’s index
how references are distributed over an archive of material
hard sciences cite works in the last 6 years

17. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Cole (1983)
fundamental differences bw disciplines lie not in citation habits but in the structure of their knowledge systems (cognitive)
how empirical knowledge is codified into succinct and interdependent theoretical statements
Cozzens (1985)
periods of intellectual focus
reception - obsolescence of literature

18. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Bradford (1934)
core ‘zones’
core - scatter determine the structure of knowledge in a discipline (older, institutionalized have core)
Nadel (1980)
catholicity of interests is a function of the maturity of a specialty (institutionalization level)

19. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Other observations
less highly structured or specialized disciplines: people read widely outside their own current areas of concern (arts and humanities - information from a wide variety of sources)
Coauthoring: sciences (apparatus for experimentation); social sciences (division of labor as strategy); humanities (coauthoring not practiced)

20. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Other observations
degree of institutionalization (professional associations, specialist journals)
institutional arrangements support & encourage research
debates over establishment of new forms of institutional knowledge and established academic fields