The Cultural Shaping of ICTs within Academic Fields: Corpus-based Linguistics as a Case Study

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show that the appropriation of ICTs is determined by a field's specific cultural identity. Knowledge is not a homogeneous whole, but a patchwork of heterogeneous fields. These fields are most visible as embodied in academic disciplines, which have distinct cultural identities shaped by intellectual and social considerations. Scholarly communication systems evolve over time within the context of these cultural identities. The paper discusses the cultural shaping of ICTs by drawing on an ongoing ethnographic study within corpus-based linguistics. The findings suggest that cultural elements such as 'task-uncertainty', 'mutual-dependency', heterogeneity, and institutional configurations will influence the appropriateness of a specific ICT infrastructure for a particular intellectual community. For example, fields that have a highly politicized and tightly controlled research culture will develop a coherent field-based strategy for the uptake and use of ICTs, whereas domains that are pluralistic and have a loosely organized research culture will appropriate ICTs in an ad-hoc localized manner. These findings demonstrate that overlooking cultural diversity in the development and implementation of ICT infrastructures and policies could prove detrimental for fields that do not map onto 'big science' conceptualizations of knowledge production. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that effective understanding similarity and difference in patterns of scholarly communication needs to take the fine-grain of specialist fields as the unit of analysis, rather than the course-grain of the discipline.