Each week, in my Info Transfer and Collaboration in Science seminar (590TR), we each post a “quote of the day” from one of our readings for that week. Carole makes copies for everyone. Then, during class we each read our own and say why we chose it.

For today, I posted the following from the article chosen by this week’s discussion leader:

Therefore, it is the particular cultural identity of the specialism that shapes patterns of scholarly communication and information seeking practices, even more than the discipline. To this end information science must recognize and reflect in its own practices the knowledge producing formations of scholars, rather than clinging to overly coarse-grained analyses that better suit the conveniences of data gathering than the scholarly communities that we endeavor to serve. [28, from conclusion]

Fry, Jenny and Sanna Talja. “The Cultural Shaping of Scholarly Communication: Explaining E-Journal Use Within and Across Academic Fields.” Proceedings of the 67th ASIS&T Annual Meeting, vol. 41, 2004: 20-30.

I like Lian’s choice from another article, too.

The perspective of epistemic cultures, as an approach to understanding knowledge production, keeps sight of the fact that science is pursued not only by individuals or collections of individuals. Knowledge-making must be understood in terms of the material and symbolic dimensions needed to run experiments and communicate with others in the field. This notion helps to maintain an analytic stance that avoids technological determinism (the idea that technology determines social relations), that keeps sight of the contents and specificities of different types of work and that doesn’t overly focus on the technical requirements of new tools

Wouters, Paul and Anne Beaulieu. “Imagining E-Science beyond Computation [chap. III].” Hine, C. (Ed.), New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-Science. Hershey: Information Science Publishing, 2006.

The important question, for me, is what these ideas—taken seriously—mean for the design of systems that serve interdisciplinary “scientists?” And, of course, the myriad questions that simple one implies.