Open Password – Monday July 12, 2021
#946
ISI 2021 – B. Jörs – Information Behavior – Daniel Kahneman – Informing Science – Prospect Theory – Proceedings – Neighboring Disciplines – EB Cohen – Information Behavior and Information Literacy – Information Seeking – Information Search – Information and Media Literacy – Information Search Competence – Dunning-Kruger -Effect – Search Engine Optimization – S. Schultheiss – D. Lewandowski – Thomas Schmidt – Christian Wolff – Google – Algorithms – Neurobiology – Philosophy of Science – Philology – M. Spitzer – Neurology – Critical Rationalism – D. Cetta – J- Griesbaum – T. Mandl – E. Montanari – M. Burghardt – Christa Wormser-Hacker – Digital Humanities – German National Library – Research Data Infrastructure – Digital Humanities – Digital Social Sciences – Text+ – Joint Authority File – NFDI – FIZ Karlsruhe – Joint Science Conference – NFDI4Culture – NFDI4Chem – FAIR – NFDI4DataScience – NFDI4MatWerk – MaARDI
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Cover story:
ISI 2021 – A small subject between “data” and “knowledge” I
II.
German National Library: A research data infrastructure for the digital humanities and social sciences
III.
FIZ Karlsruhe: Participating in three consortia of the National Research Data Infrastructure
ISI 2021
A small compartment between “data”
and “knowledge” I
Notes on the (virtual) “16th International Symposium of Information Science” (ISI 2021), Regensburg)
By Prof. Dr. Bernd Jörs, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences
If a program committee for a scientific symposium is made up of 65 people, then one can look forward to a broad and qualitatively sound program and symposium, even if the need for coordination between the 65 committee members must have been extremely complex.
Due to Corona, the three-day symposium had to take place and be organized virtually. Nevertheless, Regensburg was chosen as the official conference location and, probably in memory of Rainer Hammwöhner, who unfortunately died far too early, the topic “Information Science and its Neighbors from Data Science to Digital Humanities” was chosen as the subtitle of the conference topic “Information between Data and Knowledge”.
After all, it was Rainer Hammwöhner (in collaboration with David Elsweiler and Christian Wolff) who, back in 2015, pointed out the fact that German-speaking information science was frightened by the seemingly naive ignorance of the international “Information Behavior” research field for many years:
“ You won’t really be doing German-speaking information science an injustice if you characterize it as a late developer when it comes to information behavior. One of the editors of this special issue still remembers being asked by a colleague from down under at the information science symposium in Cologne in 2007 why there was no research on this topic in Germany, when there was in the English-speaking community “ It has been a hot topic for years ” (David Elsweiler, Rainer Hammwöhner and Christian Wolff, Regensburg: Information behavior as a research subject, in: Information. Science & Practice 2015; 66(1): 1–2).
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Daniel Kahneman and the entire research branch of “Informing Science” have been forgotten.
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At the latest, the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 to the psychologist and behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman (together with Amos Tversky/posthumously), which shook economic sciences and attacked them head-on, should have required an early awakening and earlier research commitment in the “small subject” of information science. Since its publication in 1979, Kahneman’s “Prospect Theory” has been considered the most frequently cited theory of the last forty years in the scientific community and its countless specialist domains. Information and library scientists supposedly love such scientific citation measures, but perhaps only as pure numerical values without any technical connection or reference. This ignorance of the best-known theory of behavioral science seems to continue on the part of the “small subject” if one takes the trouble to study the contributions and the respective bibliographies to the proceedings of the proceedings (ISI 2021) and does not even find the name Kahneman. A sobering document that shows a lack of exchange with neighboring disciplines. Just marginal position.
With such a rather provincial-seeming understanding of science, it is not surprising that scientific developments such as “Informing Science”, which is also Anglo-American in nature, despite its numerous conferences on “Informing Science and Information Technology”, despite its specialist scientific presence (Informing Science – The International Journal of an Emerging Transdisciplinpline ; https://www.informingscience.org/Journals/InformingSciJ/Overview) and despite their research focus is not acknowledged in this country. However, this would be urgently needed, as this discipline in particular has been dealing with questions of information behavior in library and information science in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary manner for decades:
“The fields that comprise the transdiscipline of Informing Science: provide their clients with information, in a form, format, and schedule that maximize its effectiveness: 1. Biological and psychology issues in how clients attend, perceive, and act on information provided; 2. The decision making environment itself, including sociology and politics; 3. Issues involving the media for communicating information and 4. Error, bias, misinformation, and disinformation in informing systems” (Eli B. Cohen: A Philosophy of Informing Science in: Informing Science: the International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline Volume 12, 2009, page 5).
The search for literature references to “Informing Science” in the ISI 2021 conference proceedings is also unsuccessful. Is it because the namesake “Institute of Informing Science” (ISI) is not referred to for “competition reasons”? Probably not.
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A very narrow view of information behavior.
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However, it is worth recognizing that the topic of “Information Behavior and Information Literacy” was addressed in two sessions and provided insight into the various research activities on information behavior. However, this mostly happened with a very limited user-side view of a reduced information behavior research focus with a view to the “information seeking” or “information search” sub-question, which ignores a holistic behavioral scientific view of the users. Other fundamental behavioral and cognitive science as well as neurobiological heuristics of information behavior can rarely, if ever, be found in information science research. This is also not the case in the contributions to the ISI conference 2021. Just think of mental accounting, representativeness, anchoring, priming, nudging, framing, availability, affect, salience, group thinking, Choice overload, simplification and herd behavior heuristics or dozens of well-known forms of bias (recall, overconfidence, confirmation bias, halo, recency and primacy effects). And so forth.
Once again, one gets the impression that the “Information Behavior” research field of information science, which was chosen as the main topic of the conference, was only chosen in order to link it with the supposedly unique and domain-dependent “Information Literacy” competence of German-speaking information science. This is an extremely narrow view of information behavior. Trying to use this “information seeking” or “information search” lens to uncover the reasons for the increased use of fake news or disinformation as well as “information literacy” effects is likely to reinforce the marginal position of the “small subject” of information science in the knowledge community . There is a risk that this reduced view will not be taken seriously internationally.
As the contributions in the proceedings show, German-speaking information science continues to believe that it is the predetermined domain and responsible discipline for “information and media literacy”. People feel responsible for comprehensively researching these questions in all scientific disciplines, especially in the field of education. By adding and relying on computational linguistic methods, one claims almost sole claim to this area of competence. This means that the sub-discipline of information behavior is being abused to support the claim to a “concept of competence” that has not yet been clarified.
Once again, an old dilemma is highlighted this time by the proceedings. Everyone points to the exorbitantly increased danger potential of disinformation or fake news, as if these forms of intentional and unintentional misinformation had not existed historically. Everyone wants “information literacy” and/or “media skills” to be taught more, if possible in or from primary school, and some even from preschool age.
Library science is assigned and granted the teaching of this “competence” as a unique selling point, according to the motto: “Where can I find something?” So it is specifically about teaching a “finding competence” or “information search competence”. Kind of research skills. But the cognitive distortion, i.e. the claim to a “judge function” as to what is right and wrong information based on overestimation of one’s own knowledge and skills, has already been critically pointed out several times in Open Password. You have to think about the Dunning-Kruger effect here. Real operational help for practice, for example in schools and companies, is also provided by the documentation of the research efforts and session contributions of the ISI 2021, if at all. The concept of information competence remains non-binding, is not specifically operationalized and is hardly enriched with transfer offers. Evidence that this can be used to “fight” disinformation sustainably, identify fake news more quickly, filter out relevant information from irrelevant information and make it easier to find, distinguish between true and untrue statements, and evaluate search engine results better is once again lacking.
General references to knowledge of search engine optimization and the differentiation of generic and advertising-based displays of search results are probably useful as extended training in information literacy because they reveal the deficits in the knowledge of users (Sebastian Schultheiss; Dirk Lewandowski: (Un)known actors on the search results page ? – A comparison between self-assessed and actual search engine skills of German Internet users; in: Thomas Schmidt; Christian Wolff (Eds): Writings on Information Science 74, Regensburg, 2021, pp. 218-247. But here too, modesty if not humility is necessary. The algorithms of the (Google) search engine with their over 200 variables and the use of mathematically highly complex “Fast Fourrier Transformations” are legally protected as a trade secret and are not accessible to the public. So it’s just a matter of guessing. Search engine optimizers are participants in a permanent testing and guessing game against the search engine operators. They don’t know how the search results are really algorithmically generated.
So what substance remains for the demands on “information competence” that one would like to “sell” as one’s own core competence or essential cultural technique (such as arithmetic, writing and reading)? The ISI 2021 proceedings also show that the aim is to counteract the phenomena of disinformation with “information literacy”. This is an honorable request inside and outside of educational institutions. But is this a “competence”?
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Where are the inputs from neurobiology, philosophy of science and philology?
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A broader view of the interdisciplinary research field of information behavior would help to reveal more about user expectations and behavior patterns when it comes to fake news and the intentional production of disinformation and not just look at “information search” or “information seeking”. If one attributes the reasons for inadequate “information literacy” and the “copy-paste culture” in the age of “information overload” solely to a lack of knowledge of the correct “information search strategies” in libraries and specialist databases, this considerably reduces the explanatory power of one’s own research results. If “information behavior” approaches are to be included as endogenous and exogenous explanatory variables, then the investigations into information behavior should start much earlier, for example with the formation of will or the intrinsic motivation of users.
Neurobiological behavioral research has been presenting remarkable research results for a long time:
“ User behavior is shockingly naive: “When dealing with two contradictory pieces of information, people usually try to confirm one of the sources by asking competent people or looking for another source. Specialist books are rarely used. Project participants were significantly more likely to simply use the more understandable source and were less likely to try to refute a source. […] It was also shown that students tend to prefer easily accessible sources regardless of their credibility ” (M. Spitzer: Digital 0.0. Against the post-factual educational policy; in: Neurology, 4/2017, pp. 205-212 , pages 207-208).
It has been pointed out several times elsewhere that in addition to the relevant domain-specific prior knowledge, one thing must be added – the basic epistemological and scientific-theoretical attitude of a critical-rational attitude of the users in the information (search) competence or, better, research competence as well as in the discovery of any fake news:
“This particularly includes a scientific-theoretical attitude that follows the principles of common paradigms such as critical rationalism. Perhaps, one might ask here, beyond subject- or process-related skills, the willingness to question things critically and rationally (Jörs) forms the epistemological foundation of information competence” (D. Cetta, J. Griesbaum, T. Mandl, E. Montanari : Position papers. Information literacy and information literacy education: Current status and perspectives.
Information science continues to look the other way when neighboring sciences such as cognitive and neuroscience point out the limits of high demands on information literacy. Last but not least, neurobiology has once again made increasingly critical references to what it sees as the problematic term “information” or “media literacy”:
“ The whole thing (meaning information or media literacy, the author) seems reasonable and sensible upon cursory inspection, but there is a crucial catch: There is no general ability to distinguish truth from falsehood because such an ability does not exist can give “(M. Spitzer: Cuneiform, Kant and sales contracts, in: Neurology 2020; 39; pages 198-205, page 201).
And further:
“ In order to make a judgment about the truth or falsity of a statement about anything – no matter what it is about – one fundamentally needs prior knowledge of the subject matter in which this statement is embedded. An ability to immediately see, so to speak, the truth or untruth of snippets of information from any source – without any prior knowledge (and which is not identical with intelligence, thinking ability, stamina or willpower, because these abilities already exist, which is why they already have a name have), does not exist. That’s why you can’t learn to google it . Rather, it is the knowledge in a certain subject area (area of being) that allows one to understand details in this subject matter. Such knowledge does not consist of a structureless collection of facts (snippets such as the answer to the question “Which Indian naked frog can copulate at minus 4 degrees Celsius?”), but is fundamentally, as has long been known in philology, networked and relevant to action (M. Spitzer, ibid, page 201).
The proceedings of the ISI 2021 do not give the impression that these results and objections from the neighboring discipline(s) relevant to behavioral science have really been taken into account. The relationship between information science and digital humanities was considered tense years ago (Manuel Burghardt*, Christian Wolff and Christa Womser-Hacker, information science and digital humanities, in: Information. Wissenschaft & Praxis 2015; 66(5–6): pages 287– 294). This relationship was discussed again at ISI 2021 (M. Burghardt; Jan Lehmann: Same same, but different? On the Relation of Information Science and the Digital Humanities – A Scientometric Comparison of Academic Journals Using LDA and Hierarchical Clustering, in: Thomas Schmidt ; Christian Wolff (Eds): Information between Data and Knowledge. Writings on Information Science 74, Regensburg, 2021, pp. 173-200). The professional exchange with the digital humanitites should be used by information and library science to assess their one-sided fixation on “information competence” from a hermeneutic-philological critical perspective.
One reason for this is based on this fact:
“ The science of dealing with texts has definitely existed – for a very long time, since texts have existed, i.e. since cuneiform writing and hieroglyphs. It is called philology. And just as we don’t need a new science of materials called “molecular literacy” because chemistry has been around for a long time, we don’t need media literacy because philology has been around for a very long time. … Let’s keep in mind: media literacy is something that either cannot exist (because “truth literacy in general” does not exist) or something that has been around for a very long time and does not need a new name. (M. Spitzer; ibid, page 202).
But that’s not what representatives of the “small subject” information science want to hear.
Read the final episode: In university information science, only information ethics, information competence and information assessment? – Allowed the decline of a practical and labor market-oriented information economy – Barely noticed by data science and artificial intelligence – Is information science at the end? Library science will probably stay
German National Library
A research data infrastructure
for the digital humanities and social sciences
(DNB) With the approval of the “Text+” network by the Joint Science Conference, the initiative will be funded by the German Research Foundation for an initial period of five years. With its commitment to “Text+”, the German National Library continues its activities in the field of digital humanities, the digital humanities and social sciences, in accordance with its strategic priorities, and actively promotes networking with science. The “Text+” network includes more than 30 partners from university and non-university research institutions and memory institutions. Its goal is to preserve text- and voice-based research data in the long term and to enable its widespread use in science.
The German National Library contributes to the “Text+” data corpus with freely usable information such as metadata and digitized tables of contents as well as new opportunities to work scientifically with its digital holdings within the framework of legal requirements using text and data mining. The GND common authority file also offers a basis for becoming the basis for semantic networking as a cross-divisional indexing tool. It is developed in cooperation with libraries, library associations and other cultural and scientific institutions. The GND currently contains around 8.8 million standardized data sets for people, corporations, conferences, geographical areas, subject headings and work titles, which are constantly being supplemented, updated and used.
“Text+” is building a research data infrastructure focused on voice, written and text data as part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). As the foundations of human culture, knowledge and communication, these materials encompass several thousand years of cultural heritage, which have often been collected and enriched over many years by researchers from the humanities and related disciplines. The network will initially focus on digital collections, lexical resources and scientific text editions. Such digital data is of great importance for all language and text-based disciplines, especially for linguistics, literature and cultural studies, philosophy, classical philology and anthropology. Since text and language continue to play a central role in communication, a variety of other disciplines can benefit from “Text+”, including social, economic and political sciences.
FIZ Karlsruhe
Participated in three consortia of the National Research Data Infrastructure
(FITZ Karlsruhe) The federal and state governments have decided to support ten additional consortia in the NFDI. FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure is primarily involved in three: in the consortium NFDI for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (NFDI4DataScience), in the consortium for materials science and engineering (NFDI-MatWerk) and in the Mathematical Research Data Initiative MaRDI.
As part of the development of the NFDI, the Joint Science Conference (GWK) of the federal and state governments decided to support ten additional consortia. The basis is a funding recommendation from the German Research Foundation (DFG), which was preceded by a multi-stage science-led review process. A total of nine consortia were approved in the first round of funding in June 2020. The two consortia NFDI4Culture and NFDI4Chem, in which FIZ Karlsruhe is involved as a co-applicant, began their work with the start of funding in October 2020. A third round of funding will follow next year, so that a total of up to 30 consortia will be active.
Once again in the role of co-applicant, FIZ Karlsruhe is playing a key role in three of the consortia currently being launched. Here, a particular focus is on the implementation of the FAIR principles for research data. “FAIR” stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The aim is to optimally prepare and make accessible research data for people and machines – unhindered and without loss.
The NFDI4DataScience consortium pursues the development, establishment and maintenance of a national research data infrastructure for the areas of data science and artificial intelligence. The ultimate goal is to make essential digital artifacts, i.e. research data, software and pre-trained models, available, to link them with each other and to offer innovative tools and services. The
NFDI-MatWerk consortium is creating a digital data space tailored to the needs of materials science and engineering, which maps the highly complex relationships between the different material data and should have low technological barriers to its use. To this end, NFDI-MatWerk is striving for a material ontology that enables easy data sharing, complex search queries and evaluations across distributed data sources via a graph database infrastructure – an excellent basis for next-generation AI.
Mathematical research data ranges from databases for special functions and mathematical objects to aspects of scientific computing such as models and algorithms. The future portal of the Mathematical Research Data Initiative MaRDI will create an infrastructure that will enable research data to be systematically secured, accessed and made usable via decentralized and networked knowledge and data storage.
Goals and tasks of the NFDI. The NFDI is intended to systematically open up the science and research data sets, which are now often stored decentrally, in project form and temporarily, for the German science system. The NFDI is designed by users of research data and infrastructure facilities who work together within and between consortia. The NFDI is intended to set standards in data management and, as a digital, regionally distributed and networked knowledge repository, to sustainably secure research data and make it usable
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