Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities by Eric T. Meyer, Ralph Schroeder

Abstract

Reviewed by: Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities by Eric T. Meyer, Ralph Schroeder Patricia Galloway (bio) Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities. By Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Pp. 224. $40. This volume was written by two members of the Oxford Internet Institute, both of whom have been involved with internet-enabled research projects for more than ten years. Their interest here is in defining and exemplifying what they refer to as e-research: “the use of digital tools and data for the distributed and collaborative production of knowledge” (p. 4). Eric Meyer and Ralph Schroeder argue that this new landscape is transforming all disciplines in terms of research styles, discipline configurations, collaborations, participants (academia, governments, and the private sector may collaborate and projects may encourage crowd-sourced contributions), and available tools (including the Grid of distributed computing resources and libraries of data for sharing and reuse). There are findings offered here, however, that demonstrate that the humanities do not seem to be as interested in e-research as the sciences. But the tool of choice for the creation of a sociology of e-research is the social sciences, reinforced by the realist approaches of Ian Hacking and Harry Collins and stripped of constructionist theories in favor of sociotechnical interaction network research, using, almost entirely, digital methods like bibliometrics and webometrics, applying e-research to e-research. The chapter that outlines this part of the work stems from a project in which large databases were used to detect the growth of e-research, first via funding trends throughout the developed world and then via publications on the topic of e-research as represented in the Scopus database. The poor coverage in this database of humanities publication venues is outshouted by complaints that humanists adhere to their own citation and publication styles (just as computer science and physics scholars have done). Perhaps because of this data bias this research suggests that computing and engineering have not only been central to e-research but have been driving it. It is not clear that this is simply because of a revolution in knowledge based entirely on computation. To some it might seem obvious that a huge effort is being made to justify governmental investments made in the grid of supercomputing centers (see the list of leading institutions in table 3.4) and to occupy the large numbers of graduate students who have begun flocking into European and North American computer science programs and filling up the rosters of the Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE conference proceedings. The authors point to this behavior but fail to see in it the same kind of disciplinary loyalty that is deplored for humanists. The authors make their argument for the transformative features of this new kind of research using an interesting group of case studies in [End Page 1045] which they and their students have participated. One chapter stresses collaborative computation of varied communities through the connection of multiple machines and datasets in the Swiss BioGRID; the participation of academic and citizen astronomers through the crowd-sourced Galaxy Zoo; and literary analysis by both humanities academics and fans through a wiki developed around the works of Thomas Pynchon. Another chapter details how distributed data has been pulled together for online sharing through the SPLASH project to track individual humpback whales on a global scale; the GAIN project that accumulates “psychiatric genetics” data on blood, phenotypes, and genomes to which contributing scientists would have access for research on bipolar disorder; and the Swedish National Data Service’s accumulation of longitudinal data on many aspects of the Swedish population. This chapter provides the opportunity to discuss the problematic issue of privacy that may stand in the way of sharing data on human individuals. This book is a worthwhile read even if—as the authors fully admit—it is a snapshot daring to make a prediction before all the data are in. It is especially interesting as an expression of a view from a particular perspective, which blames archivists (stereotypically described as denizens of “dusty archives”) for failing to steer researchers to digital data and argues...