PG Student Seminar Series
Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation
http://www.issti.ed.ac.uk/research_students/seminar
Friday 3rd March 2017, 3pm - 4.30pm
Seminar Room 1.06, Old Surgeons' Hall
(http://www.issti.ed.ac.uk/about/how_to_find_us)
Negotiating Expertise: The Challenge from the Internet
Tim Squirrell (PhD Candidate, University of Edinburgh STIS)
The view of expertise propagated by Collins and Evans in The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience attempts to identify expertise ex ante, defining it as something which inheres in individuals who have tacit knowledge of a subject gained through immersion in a community. In this talk, I challenge this view in two ways. First I illustrate the sociological limitations of such a position. Second, I show through an analysis of the problems presented by online communities with respect to proper negotiation and attribution of expertise and authority that the Collins and Evans view is lacking in its ability to tackle these issues. I propose an alternative which centres around the attribution of expert status by particular audiences for the purpose of solving particular problems. Some implications of this view for those who seek to be called experts are discussed.
Vicissitudes of Controversy: An Introduction to Citation Network Analysis
Rhodri Leng (PhD Candidate, University of Edinburgh STIS)
The success of a scientific theory depends, in part, on how it is communicated; at least, communication is a necessary pre-requisite for the sharing of knowledge. My doctoral project proposes a particular analytical framework for understanding the evolution of scientific knowledge, by viewing it as a product of human communication. In this talk, I focus on the convention of citation in the modern scientific literature, which, I argue, can be used to study the dynamics of the transition from experimentation and observation to knowledge held by a wider group of scientists. As such, I posit that the quantitative analysis of citation data can be used to study aspects of the diffusion and acceptance of theoretical schemas in science. From this, I introduce citation network analysis, a methodology that applies social network analysis and graph theory to citation data to quantitatively map and analyse this diffusion, and discuss its application in my thesis. I finish with a short discussion of how this approach may be integrated into STS theory and practice, and outline where it may diverge.