Knowledge Space Research Articles

A Common Space of Historical Knowledge? Russia and Architectural Histories of Violence

This field note responds to the EAHN Thematic Conference 'States in Between' and revisits a book by the author in light of the violence currently unfolding in Europe following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

There is No Place Like al-Dār

Abstract A Dār is a space that offers various courses and programmes that teach the Quran, the Hadith and the different branches of Islamic knowledge that derive from, and are in conversation with, both. The question this article intends to explore is: what is the Dār? It does so by looking at the temporal and geographic context the Dār exists in, and how it is situated historically, as well as its everyday rhythms. The vignettes presented throughout the article provide insight into the ways in which a space of knowledge can exist, teasing the bounds of structure, order and rigidity, allowing us to explore potential imaginaries to the ways we have experienced, and the ways we imagine, Islamic spaces of knowledge to be.

ALEKS in High School Mathematics Classrooms: Exploring Teachers’ Perceptions and Use of this Tool

There has been a limited amount of research that has attempted to determine teaching strategies using adaptive learning systems. Most studies have attempted to measure success of the use of these technologies based on improvements in students’ test scores but have lacked to provide any information regarding the pedagogy implemented while using the tool or teachers’ perceptions of it. A basic qualitative study was conducted where five Chicagoland high school mathematics teachers, who used the Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces (ALEKS) system, were interviewed three times during one academic school year. This study asked participants to share first-hand experiences and perceptions of using ALEKS as the main learning tool. Teachers used ALEKS for assessing student understanding through its quizzes and assignments, analyzing student progress, and allowing students to practice and receive feedback on mathematical concepts. The findings of this study indicate that teachers found ALEKS to be easy to use and useful in their teaching. Specifically, teachers cited the assessment tools, built-in feedback, ability to personalize learning, and the accessibility of learning tools for students as useful in their teaching.

Promoting knowledge recommendation in innovative engineering design: a BERT-GAT-based patent representation learning approach

Since innovation in complex product design hinges on thorough engineering knowledge application, high-quality patent recommendations foster innovation in engineering design. However, many patent knowledge recommendation studies perform patent analysis without comprehensive exploration and proper organisation of knowledge, causing a superficial understanding of patents and returning arbitrary results. To mitigate this issue, a deep learning-based approach for patent representation learning and knowledge recommendation is proposed. First, a four-dimensional patent knowledge model is defined to formalise the patent attributes that critically affect the engineering design outcomes, namely patents’ domain(D), function(F), technology(T) and citation(C). Second, to exploit patent knowledge from their content and citation relationships, a representation learning approach integrating Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers(BERT) and Graph Attention Network(GAT) is introduced. Thereafter a patent knowledge space is established in which each patent is characterised by the function, technology, and citation embeddings. Third, a knowledge requirement space is also constructed by vectorising a designer’s search query via BERT model and linking it to a requirement-representing patent based on similarity. Finally, a recommender prototype is developed and showcased by the knowledge recommendation in sealing structure design tasks. Comparative experiments and application cases validate the effectiveness of our method in patent representation learning and knowledge recommendation.

Accelerating the sustainability transition of brown regions: Unlocking the speed factor

Green innovations aim to improve and reduce the environmental impact of economic activities. Thus far, research focus on the positive trajectories of green transition. Continuing in this direction we focus on brown regions (i.e. specialized in fossil-fuel technologies) and the challenges that they face to become sustainable. Taking as example German Labour Market Regions we identify brown regions and measure their transition using an innovative approach based on Social Network Analysis and Knowledge Spaces. We find that the technological relatedness to green technologies, having a high life satisfaction in the region and the presence of the green party in the local government facilitate the transition. However, strong economic structures based on brown activities do not generally increase the transition speed. Our findings imply that technological and socio-economic characteristics influence the speed of transition, a dimension not yet accounted for in the sustainability transition literature.

Individual differences in knowledge network navigation

With the rapid accumulation of online information, efficient web navigation has grown vital yet challenging. To create an easily navigable cyberspace catering to diverse demographics, understanding how people navigate differently is paramount. While previous research has unveiled individual differences in spatial navigation, such differences in knowledge space navigation remain sparse. To bridge this gap, we conducted an online experiment where participants played a navigation game on Wikipedia and completed personal information questionnaires. Our analysis shows that age negatively affects knowledge space navigation performance, while multilingualism enhances it. Under time pressure, participants’ performance improves across trials and males outperform females, an effect not observed in games without time pressure. In our experiment, successful route-finding is usually not related to abilities of innovative exploration of routes. Our results underline the importance of age, multilingualism and time constraint in the knowledge space navigation.

Epistemic justice and critical minerals–Towards a planetary just transition

Global transitions to low-carbon energy systems are heavily reliant on the large-scale extraction of critical minerals (e.g. cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements). These minerals are key components in green technological developments such as wind turbines, solar photovoltaics and electric vehicle motors. However, research has highlighted the multifaceted social and environmental costs of critical mineral extraction and processing across marginalised parts of the Global South, evidencing significant impacts on local people's health, livelihoods, human rights and land-based resources. This paper centres on epistemic justice in the critical mineral (CM) industry, an under-explored dimension of just energy transitions. Through the analysis, we identify two main forms of epistemic injustice in the CM industry: discriminatory epistemic injustice and distributive epistemic injustice. Building on Heffron's (2020) JUST framework on CM, we highlight the importance of epistemic injustice in the just transition to reveal the power dynamics, socio-environmental injustices, and exclusionary practices in the CM industry. Through bringing new insights on knowledge equity in the context of CM, we recommend creating participatory spaces for dialogue, decision-making, and knowledge sharing, which can facilitate more respectful and equitable interactions between all stakeholders, thereby contributing to more holistic understandings of a ‘planetary just transition’.

Science as exploration in a knowledge landscape: tracing hotspots or seeking opportunity?

The selection of research topics by scientists can be viewed as an exploration process conducted by individuals with cognitive limitations traversing a complex cognitive landscape influenced by both individual and social factors. While existing theoretical investigations have provided valuable insights, the intricate and multifaceted nature of modern science hinders the implementation of empirical experiments. This study leverages advancements in Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques to investigate the patterns and dynamic mechanisms of topic-transition among scientists. By constructing the knowledge space across 6 large-scale disciplines, we depict the trajectories of scientists’ topic transitions within this space, measuring the flow and distance of research regions across different sub-spaces. Our findings reveal a predominantly conservative pattern of topic transition at the individual level, with scientists primarily exploring local knowledge spaces. Furthermore, simulation modeling analysis identifies research intensity, driven by the concentration of scientists within a specific region, as the key facilitator of topic transition. Conversely, the knowledge distance between fields serves as a significant barrier to exploration. Notably, despite potential opportunities for breakthrough discoveries at the intersection of subfields, empirical evidence suggests that these opportunities do not exert a strong pull on scientists, leading them to favor familiar research areas. Our study provides valuable insights into the exploration dynamics of scientific knowledge production, highlighting the influence of individual cognition, social factors, and the intrinsic structure of the knowledge landscape itself. These findings offer a framework for understanding and potentially shaping the course of scientific progress.

Māori kai sovereignty to achieve food security

The FAO states that the term food sovereignty focuses on food for the people by placing people’s need for food at the centre of policies and insists that food is more than just a commodity. Food Sovereignty also promotes knowledge and skills by building on traditional knowledge; using research to support and pass on this knowledge to future generations; and rejecting technologies that undermine local food systems. It is essentially a movement that “recognizes that control over the food system needs to remain in the hands of producers, and is clearly focused primarily on small-scale agriculture of a non-industrial nature, preferably organic”(1). In Māori terms, Kai Sovereignty is drawn first from the relationship of foods to our needs; it is expressed through whakapapa, and has an overarching contribution to food security. Traditional foods abound in Aotearoa. The relationships are longstanding, expressive and contribute to our wellbeing in various ways(2). But the true cultural value of traditional foods is diminishing as new foods, lifestyles and experiences succeed them. Kai sovereignty therefore is at risk of being relegated to historical discourse. The FAO acknowledgement of the intergenerational role of traditional knowledge to support food sovereignty aligns well to the Māori experience. This knowledge covers a myriad of food relationships including foraging, producing, harvesting, processing, cooking and manaakitanga. We are in a renaissance period that seeks to rediscover our relationship with the pātaka, the food store. So much knowledge has been lost, but much also remains. How we draw that together in a way that acknowledges the whakapapa or historical relationship alongside the present and future. The right to achieving kai sovereignty is yet to be properly understood within our communities. The first steps lie in the knowledge space; sharing and acknowledgement of our food traditions before they are lost or misinterpreted.

Reconnecting and Reconstructing: Taking Stock of the STLHE 2022 conference

Academic conferences are key spaces of knowledge sharing and professional development. As a national society which has pledged to undergo “a robust examination of its attention to equity, diversity, and inclusion throughout the organization” (STLHE/SAPES 2021), we undertook an evaluation of the diversity of participants and presentation topics at the 2022 conference. This paper reports on some of the distinctive aspects of the 2022 conference as well as the findings of the evaluation such as diversity of participants by gender and ethnic identity, province, institution type, discipline, and more. While the 2022 conference was unique in many ways due to being STLHE’s first face-to-face conference since 2019, this report provides a useful baseline with which to compare the diversity of participants and presentation topics in future years. The report concludes with additional recommendations for programming decisions to support and evaluate equity, diversity, and inclusivity at future conferences. Keywords: conference, diversity, participation, presentation topics, Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

A semantic guide‐based embedding method for knowledge graph completion

AbstractKnowledge graph embedding aims to map entities and relations into a low‐dimensional vector space for easy manipulation. However, frequent entities are updated more often than infrequent ones during training, leading to inadequate representation of the latter's embeddings, which, in turn, affects the model's overall performance in downstream tasks. To address this issue, we propose a semantic information guide and enhance (SGE) method. The SGE tackles the heterogeneity in the frequency of entities through semantic reconstruction and a guidance network. The semantic reconstruction strengthens the semantic relevance among all entities and connects entities with different frequencies in semantic space. The guidance network extends these connections to knowledge space, enhancing the expression abilities of infrequent entities’ embeddings without compromising the embeddings of frequent entities. Experiments with four commonly used benchmark datasets show that the SGE method improves the performance of baseline models in most cases and that the method is model‐independent.

Interaction, Integration, Sectoral and Corporate Projects: Results of the All-Russian Library Forum

The Annual Meeting of Heads of Federal and Central Regional Libraries of Russia was held in Moscow on November 28—29, 2023. The event was organized by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Library and the Russian National Library. The Russian State Children’s Library took part in the preparation and holding of the meeting.The participants of the largest forum in the industry were heads and specialists from all eight federal districts of Russia (Central, North-West, South, North Caucasus, Volga, Ural, Siberian, Far East). Colleagues from the Donetsk People’s Republic, Lugansk People’s Republic, Zaporozhye region and Kherson region made presentations. 77 regions of the Russian Federation were represented at the meeting. Specialists from the Republic of Serbia were also participants in the event. The meeting was held in a hybrid format, allowing for both in-person and remote participation. Over the two days of its work, 300 in-person participants and 3,724 remote participants were registered.The main theme of the Annual Meeting of Heads of Federal and Central Regional Libraries of Russia 2024 was “Working together to create a successful future for libraries: sectoral projects, interaction, integration, sharing best practices”. The programme included five main thematic blocks: “Together. Integration of libraries of the new subjects of the Russian Federation into the library space of the country: plans and ongoing projects”, seminar-meeting “Educational and personnel policy of the industry”, “Development of the library fund: acquisition, disclosure, preservation”, “Digital transformation, artificial intelligence, neural networks for libraries, formation of the Russian electronic knowledge space”, “Modernization of libraries”.The topics discussed and the number of participants in the meeting in recent years testify to the increasing consolidation of the industry and the unflagging interest in this event.

Interaction, Integration, Sectoral and Corporate Projects: Results of the All-Russian Library Forum

The Annual Meeting of Heads of Federal and Central Regional Libraries of Russia was held in Moscow on November 28—29, 2023. The event was organized by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Library and the Russian National Library. The Russian State Children’s Library took part in the preparation and holding of the meeting.The participants of the largest forum in the industry were heads and specialists from all eight federal districts of Russia (Central, North-West, South, North Caucasus, Volga, Ural, Siberian, Far East). Colleagues from the Donetsk People’s Republic, Lugansk People’s Republic, Zaporozhye region and Kherson region made presentations. 77 regions of the Russian Federation were represented at the meeting. Specialists from the Republic of Serbia were also participants in the event. The meeting was held in a hybrid format, allowing for both in-person and remote participation. Over the two days of its work, 300 in-person participants and 3,724 remote participants were registered.The main theme of the Annual Meeting of Heads of Federal and Central Regional Libraries of Russia 2024 was “Working together to create a successful future for libraries: sectoral projects, interaction, integration, sharing best practices”. The programme included five main thematic blocks: “Together. Integration of libraries of the new subjects of the Russian Federation into the library space of the country: plans and ongoing projects”, seminar-meeting “Educational and personnel policy of the industry”, “Development of the library fund: acquisition, disclosure, preservation”, “Digital transformation, artificial intelligence, neural networks for libraries, formation of the Russian electronic knowledge space”, “Modernization of libraries”.The topics discussed and the number of participants in the meeting in recent years testify to the increasing consolidation of the industry and the unflagging interest in this event.

Physical education and health – a space for learning generic knowledge

Physical education and health – a space for learning generic knowledge

Understanding scholar-trajectories across scientific periodicals

Despite the rapid growth in the number of scientific publications, our understanding of author publication trajectories remains limited. Here we propose an embedding-based framework for tracking author trajectories in a geometric space that leverages the information encoded in the publication sequences, namely the list of the consecutive publication venues for each scholar. Using the publication histories of approximately 30,000 social media researchers, we obtain a knowledge space that broadly captures essential information about periodicals as well as complex (inter-)disciplinary structures of science. Based on this space, we study academic success through the prism of movement across scientific periodicals. We use a measure from human mobility, the radius of gyration, to characterize individual scholars' trajectories. Results show that author mobility across periodicals negatively correlates with citations, suggesting that successful scholars tend to publish in a relatively proximal range of periodicals. Overall, our framework discovers intricate structures in large-scale sequential data and provides new ways to explore mobility and trajectory patterns.

Reformed Pulpit and God’s mission: ‘Solae Doctrine’ to missio Dei

The five Solas of the Reformation, Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia, Solus Christus and Soli Deo Gloria, harmoniously or correspondingly affirm the central position of God in the work of salvation (missio Dei). The conceptualization of the missio Dei, which grew out of the 1952 International Missionary Council (IMC) reasoned on the basis of Solae doctrines, equally points to the central role of God in the work of salvation. Although the centrality of God in the work of salvation is consistently reflected through the Solae doctrine, and thus through understanding of the missio Dei, such consistency is seldom associated with the placement of the Reformed pulpit. To this end, this article draws on the available literature to show the doctrinal consistency reflected in the Solae teachings and the conceptualization of the missio Dei in relation to the placement and outlook of the Reformed pulpit. Consequently, this paper concludes that the Reformed tradition, encompassing the Solae doctrines, the conceptualization of the missio Dei, and its attitude toward the pulpit, harmoniously reflects the central role of God in the work of salvation. Within the Reformed knowledge space, this article thus makes a contribution as it discusses the placement of the Reformed pulpit in accordance with the Solae doctrines and the missio Dei, expressing the centrality of God in the work of salvation.

A process knowledge-based hybrid method for univariate time series prediction with uncertain inputs in process industry

In process industry, accurate and efficient univariate time series prediction (TSP) of key process parameters is crucial for optimizing production processes. However, noisy data and varying working conditions introduce uncertainties that hinder the modeling process. Data-driven methods have been proposed to address input-uncertain TSP models, but they often fail to obtain sufficient and high-quality industrial data for model establishment in complex and dynamic production process. The paper presents a process knowledge-based hybrid method for univariate TSP that handles noisy inputs in different working conditions. Primarily, a knowledge-embedded deep kernel network (KE-DKN) model is proposed that approximates the outputs to the knowledge space in noisy industrial environment, by embedding instantiated process knowledge as soft constraints into the conventional DKN network. Further, a two-stage training schema is designed for KE-DKN to reduce the interference superposition on the predicted variable from random noisy data and operational interferences. Moreover, the pre-trained parameters transferring is conducted from stable working conditions to mitigate the low modeling efficiency in unstable working conditions. In two cases from process industry, the proposed method delivers higher prediction accuracy and robustness than baseline methods in both working conditions, and the knowledge transfer significantly enhances the modeling efficiency in unstable working conditions.

Ethnomathematics and post-qualitative inquiry: Reconceptualization of a mathematics curriculum with Roma students.

Reconceptualization of the mathematics curriculum with Roma students adapts an methodologically alternative research model where the researcher explores like a nomad the common spaces of mathematical knowledge. This exploration reveals a rhizome which portrays the possibilities offered to the educational process when mathematics curriculum is oriented to the culture and the historical moment of the students. On the occasion of the birth of a child, a series of mathematical activities which are adapted to their historical present and acquire meaning and substance through everyday life is developed. The developed rhizome gives the opportunity to understand the essence of their daily life and to examine through mathematics power relations and way of action in this specific population group.

Charting mobility patterns in the scientific knowledge landscape

From small steps to great leaps, metaphors of spatial mobility abound to describe discovery processes. Here, we ground these ideas in formal terms by systematically studying mobility patterns in the scientific knowledge landscape. We use low-dimensional embedding techniques to create a knowledge space made up of 1.5 million articles from the fields of physics, computer science, and mathematics. By analyzing the publication histories of individual researchers, we discover patterns of scientific mobility that closely resemble physical mobility. In aggregate, the trajectories form mobility flows that can be described by a gravity model, with jumps more likely to occur in areas of high density and less likely to occur over longer distances. We identify two types of researchers from their individual mobility patterns: interdisciplinary explorers who pioneer new fields, and exploiters who are more likely to stay within their specific areas of expertise. Our results suggest that spatial mobility analysis is a valuable tool for understanding the evolution of science.

On the Identifiability of 3- and 4-Parameter Item Response Theory Models From the Perspective of Knowledge Space Theory

The present work aims at showing that the identification problems (here meant as both issues of empirical indistinguishability and unidentifiability) of some item response theory models are related to the notion of identifiability in knowledge space theory. Specifically, that the identification problems of the 3- and 4-parameter models are related to the more general issues of forward- and backward-gradedness in all items of the power set, which is the knowledge structure associated with IRT models under the assumption of local independence. As a consequence, the identifiability problem of a 4-parameter model is split into two parts: a first one, which is the result of a trade-off between the left-side added parameters and the remainder of the Item Response Function, e.g., a 2-parameter model, and a second one, which is the already well-known identifiability issue of the 2-parameter model itself. Application of the results to the logistic case appears to provide both a confirmation and a generalization of the current findings in the literature for both fixed- and random-effects IRT logistic models.