Christine L. Borgman

"Big data" is on the covers of Science, Nature, the Economist, and Wired magazines, on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. But despite the media hyperbole, as Christine Borgman points out in this examination of data and scholarly research, having the right data is usually better than having more data; little data can be just as valuable as big data. In many cases, there are no data - because relevant data don't exist, cannot be found, or are not available. Moreoever, data sharing is difficult, incentives to do so are minimal, and data practices vary widely across disciplines. Borgman, an often-cited authority on scholarly communication, argues that data have no value or meaning in isolation; they exist within a knowledge infrastructure - an ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects, and relationships. After laying out the premises of her investigation - six "provocations" meant to inspire discussion about the uses of data in scholarship - Borgman offers case studies of data practices in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and then considers the implications of her findings for scholarly practice and research policy. To manage and exploit data over the long term, Borgman argues, requires massive investment in knowledge infrastructures; at stake is the future of scholarship. -- from dust jacket.

"Will the emerging global information infrastructure (GII) create a revolution in communications equivalent to that wrought by Gutenberg, or will the result be simply the evolutionary adaptation of existing behavior and institutions to new media? Will the GII improve access to information for all? Will it replace libraries and publishers? How can computers and information systems be made easier to use? What are the tradeoffs between tailoring information systems to user communities and standardizing them to interconnect with systems designed for other communities, cultures, and languages?" "This book takes a close look at these and other questions of technology, behavior, and policy surrounding the GII."--BOOK JACKET.

"In Scholarship in the Digital Age, Christine Borgman explores the technical, social, legal, and economic aspects of the kind of infrastructure that we should be building for scholarly research in the twenty-first century." "Borgman describes the roles that information technology plays at every stage in the life cycle of a research project and contrasts these new capabilities with the relatively stable system of scholarly communication, which remains based on publishing in journals, books, and conference proceedings. Analyzing scholarly practices in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, Borgman compares each discipline's approach to infrastructure issues. In the process, she challenges the many stakeholders in the scholarly infrastructure--scholars, publishers, libraries, funding agencies, and others--to look beyond their own domains to address the interaction of technical, legal, economic, social, political, and disciplinary concerns. Scholarship in the Digital Age will provoke a conversation among all who depend on a rich and robust scholarly environment."--Jacket.

Techniques of mathematical and statistical analysis of books and other media of communication are applied to such works as research reports and scientific journals. About half of the 15 articles are from a special issues of Communication research 16(5), 1989. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.