Communication Science Seminar Series: Paul Wouters
Professor Paul Wouters, known for his work in the field of Knowledge Dynamics and his ideas on new ways of communication by scientists, will give a seminar entitled ‘E-science and the End of Theory’ on Wednesday May 13th 2009, from 15.00-17.00 hrs. in room V111 of the Leeuwenborch, Hollandseweg 1, Wageningen.
Short biography
Paul Wouters (1951) is programme leader of the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, and professor of Knowledge Dynamics at the department of sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is also visiting professor of Cybermetrics at the University of Wolverhampton. Paul has a Masters in biochemistry (1977) and a PhD in science and technology studies (University of Amsterdam, 1999), and worked as journalist and science journalist for a variety of newspapers and journals. He was coordinator of the Dutch STS Graduate School WTMC together with Annemiek Nelis (2001-2005) and has taught at the University of Amsterdam. Paul has published on the history of the Science Citation Index, on scientometrics and on the way the criteria of scientific quality have been changed by citation analysis. He is now focusing on the role of ICTs in the practice of knowledge creation. He is particularly interested in the design and analysis of new scholarly practices in the humanities and social sciences. His personal page is located at the Virtual Knowledge Studio. Paul Wolters publishes a website about the future of research: www.researchdreams.nl.
Wouters on the subject:
“What are the implications of the emergence of massive searchable amounts of data for scientific and scholarly research? This question was brought up in a provocative way in a recent article by Chris Anderson, editor of the cyberhip journal Wired. In an article entitled “The End of Theory”, Anderson claims that scientists need no longer rely on hypothesis or experimentation. Increasingly, we will all be children of the “The Petabyte age”. This age is different because more is different. According to Anderson, “at the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics.” This calls for “an entirely different approach”, which does no longer aim for a visualization of the data in its entirety. Rather than wanting to understand the data, we first need to approach them mathematically, and only establish a context for them later. In short, this means that we are no longer in need for theory in the traditional sense of the word. In the words of Anderson: “Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.”
Now, if there ever was a challenge to scientific methodology, this might be one. But is Anderson right? What is actually the evidence that scientific and scholarly theory will be irrelevant, or less relevant, in the near future thanks to new data mining tools and methods? And what are the longer term implications of this line of reasoning? If theory goes out the door, what about methodology? And what will be the consequences for higher education and research training?
In this lecture, I will explore these questions in the framework of an exploration of the different scenarions of the future of scientific and scholarly knowledge creation that are currently en vogue”.