1.
• Epistemic Cultures
ESU Leipzig, 2016
Dr Jennifer Edmond
Trinity College Dublin

2.
Research as Culture(s) 1
- CP Snow, 1959 Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures”
- Scientists versus ‘literary intellectuals’
- Questionable criteria, such as ‘optimism,’ and ethical engagement
- European Commission
- ‘Science’ = ‘Wissenschaft’
- Boyer, “Scholarship Rediscovered”
- Scholarship of Discovery, but also of Integration, Application and Teaching
- Unsworth, “Scholarly Primitives”
- Proposes a (very popular) model of the process of scholarship
- Discovering, Annotating, Comparing, Referring, Sampling, Illustrating and
Representing
- Focusses however on the interaction of the scholar with the world (information
retrieval) rather than the interaction of information in and through a scholar’s
apparatus

3.
Research as Culture(s) 2
- Knowledge creation is a community process
- Durability of peer review
- Difficulties of interdisciplinary work
- General agreement among experts as to what is or
isn’t a contribution
- Epistemic processes as discipline specific, but not ad
hoc or subjective
- Knowledge Creation in the Humanities differs from the
Sciences

4.
What does and Epistemic Culture Look Like?
“….our educational systems focus on teaching science and business students to
control, predict, verify, guarantee, and test data. It doesn’t teach how to
navigate “what if” questions or unknown futures. As Amos Shapira, the CEO of
Cellcom, the leading cell phone provider in Israel, put it: “The knowledge I use
as CEO can be acquired in two weeks…The main thing a student needs to be
taught is how to study and analyze things (including) history and philosophy.”

5.
Epistemic Cultures, Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999)
- Subtitle: “How the Sciences Make Knowledge”
- In depth ethnographic study of High Energy Physics and Microbiology
- Numerous relevant questions investigated
- How is work described?
- Organic (HEP) versus inorganic (MB) metaphors
- How are identities formed and maintained?
- Multiple versus team authorship norms
- How does a laboratory function?
- Laboratory roles (social versus object)
- Laboratory ‘capital’ (access to skills, techniques, instruments)

6.
SPARKLE Project
Scholarly Primitives and Renewed Knowledge-Led
Exchanges
- Premise: We cannot deepen interdisciplinary collaboration until we
understand each other better
- Problem: There is no Knorr-Cetina for the humanities, primitives
approach not fundamental enough
- Method: 9 in-depth interviews with historians about how they create
knowledge
- Team: Developed collaboratively by a humanist, computer scientist and
a professor of design

7.
SPARKLE Project
Scholarly Primitives and Renewed Knowledge-Led
Exchanges
- Findings
- Historians are physically mobile (‘pre-agrarian’ knowledge
creation)
- Historians develop complex strategies to overcome time
limitations (c.f. John Guillory, ‘the clock time of scholarship’)
- ‘Seeing’ is a key metaphor, including peripheral forms of
professional vision
- Serendipity is also key, in the sense of having a ‘prepared mind’
- Humanists DO create knowledge outside of the writing process
- Humanists DO Collaborate (but not the way you think)

8.
- Theoretical perspectives
- Methodological
Approaches
- Secondary Sources
- Primary Sources
- Lived Experience
Humanities?
Biology/PhysiologyHigh Energy Physics
NO ‘RAW’ DATA!
GAP!
Instrumentation
This image: CERN-AC-
0910152 by CERN is
licensed under CC-BY-
SA (no mods)

9.
The SPARKLE Protocol
The purpose of this interview is to describe, in detail, your
research/epistemic process, through the lens of a particular ‘act of
scholarship’ – in most cases, a published scholarly article.
The questions below are intended to be answered in reference to a
single piece of written work: that said, if you can’t remember
specific parts of the process, or if you feel a particular work was
atypical in certain aspects of its development, feel free to add
general information about how you perceive your research
process.

10.
The SPARKLE Protocol
1. What is your field of study, and research interests?
2. What is the singular idea/insight/argument of the paper?
3. Where did the idea come from (personal experiences, gaps in research, outgrowth from another project, source
material stumbled upon)?
4. How did you start working on it? What was the form of the first idea? A doodle? A textual outline? An image? A
scribbled note?
5. How did you develop the argument? What were the inputs to the thinking and the argument? How did you identify
what literature to search? How did you identify or what were your methods to identify the search terms to get to the
literature? What other inputs did you call upon?
6. Describe the spaces (physical and virtual) where you work? How do you record your data as you go along (eg Did you
print things out and noted on the margins? Comment on the digital document? Doodle / note in a notebook?)
7. How did you know when you were done with the research? Did this point come before, during or after the writing up
process?
8. How did you start to write the first draft of the paper – what sections did you write first and what followed after that?
How long did you work on this manuscript? How many revisions did you produce? Did it move as a largely steady
flow, or were there interruptions (from other work or projects, or because of something inherent in this research)?
9. Where did you publish it? Why and how did you end up publishing at this venue?
10. How was it received? What kinds of feedback and comments (eg from reviewers, colleagues, students) did you get?
Did you make efforts to share the work with others before finishing or publishing it?
11. Were there ‘breakdown’ moments that made you change/modify the argument? How did you overcome them?

11.
The Humanist and the Computer Scientist
11
Owen Conlan, Adaptive HypermediaJennifer Edmond, German Literature

12.
The Works Described
“The Semiotics of Schizophrenia: The
Artistry and Illness Unica Zürn”
Sole authorship
Modern Language Studies, 2002
12
“Multi-model, metadata driven approach to
adaptive hypermedia services for
personalized eLearning”
WithV.Wade, C. Bruen, M. Gargan
Proceedings of Second International
Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and
Adaptive Web-Based Systems

13.
Where did the Works Come From?
- Audited graduate seminar (novel)
- Thin secondary material
- Body of theoretical work on women,
creativity and mental states
- Serendipitous personal encounter
- Medical literature, DSM and PDR
13
- Extension of PhD work
- Availability of cohort of test subjects
- Clear context for development
- Technical work of two particular centres
of excellence

14.
Work Spaces
- Office
- Home (Sofa)
- Library
- Coffee Shop
- Bus
14
- Focus on the availability of the
virtual space (dev environment)
- Focus on spaces that supported
the collaboration (white board)

15.
Starting and Ending Work
• Scribbled marginalia gradually coalesce into
chunks that can then be drafted
• Clear end point due to lack of secondary
material, no need to wait for recursion
• Some feedback from conference
• Write up a part of the epistemic process
• Published in the journal of the conference
where it was presented
• Won a prize, cited in a later biography
15
• Reference to iterative cycles of user
engagement
• Tipping point when system works for users
• Collaborative, so input of others (including
other disciplines ‘baked in’)
• Write up largely after epistemic process is
completed
• Presented at a major CS conference
• Good citation track record

16.
Conclusions
• Computer science is a social science, grounded on the expectation that users know and will
gravitate toward what they want
• Humanities methods are integrative, multimodal and peripatetic.
• Need for
• Different kinds of dialogues (we may be asking each other the wrong questions)
• Different kinds of research spaces (‘augmented research environments’), more work
with engineering and design
• More nuanced forms of engagement, for example where a ‘tooling’ approach may be
to advanced
16

17.
A Word on Epistemicide
Budd Hall, “Beyond Epistemicide: Knowledge Democracy and Higher Education,”
“Just as colonial political practices carved up the globe in the 18th and 19th centuries, knowledge,
the intellectual energy by which humans operate became colonized as well. The process of
dispossession of other knowledge is a process that Boaventura de Sosa Santos, a Portuguese
sociologist, has called epistemicide, or the killing of knowledge systems.”
Documents the ‘four epistemicides of the Long 16th Century,’ perpetrated against the Muslims and
Jews expelled from Europe, the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, the Africans taken and sold
as slaves and the women persecuted as witches.
After this: "...modern science …[was granted] the monopoly of the universal distinction between
true and false to the detriment of … alternative bodies of knowledge”

18.
• Question Time…
www.parthenos-project.eu
Jennifer Edmond
Trinity College Dublin
edmondj@tcd.i
e
www.tcd.ie