After receiving the comments from my committee, this past month has given me time to consider several issues surrounding my topic of knowledge production on Wikipedia. As I described in a previous post, I deciphered my own proposal and found that there were two different research questions being asked. I am partial to: What is going on with Wikipedia? Obviously this is a general question and has to be further refined.
From my point of view, I see value in not just asking “What is the Wikipedian Method”, but asking what is new about it. I think this is a valid question and a question that I would like to pursue with this study.
To know the new I must understand the old. There have been a number of options that I have looked at to achieve this goal.
—René Descartes [1596–1660], mathematician that created Cartesian space
Since I first began my thesis I have been sure that I would be involving Deleuze as a philosophical framework to help guide my work. It wasn’t always apparent how I would achieve this. I suppose some things take some time. While I was reading Christan Bök’s ‘Pataphysics this past week I came across a passage that began to trailblaze a thought.
What Deleuze and Guattari might call the royal sciences of efficient productivity have historically repressed and exploited the nomad sciences of expedient adaptability ([1980] 1987, 362). A royal science is a standardized metaphysics: it is deployed by the state throughout a clathrate, Cartesian space, putting truth to work on behalf of solid, instrumental imperatives (law and order). A nomad science is a bastardized metaphysics: it is deployed against the state through an aggregate, Riemannian space, putting truth at risk on behalf of fluid, experimental operatives (trial and error).
Retracking Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible and The Suburbs as a single album
I love Arcade Fire. My love for them has lasted a long time. Strangely enough, I haven’t been overly-excited about their second and third albums — The Suburbs of course having won the Grammy’s this year). I still think they are missing the mark. I suppose it’s in part my young twenty-year old self’s fault for this. I still cling to the music when I first heard it; when their voices were fresh and the back of my ears were still wet.
So instead of falling into the jaded throes of musical apathy, here is The Suburbs and Neon Bible and retracked as a single album. I believe this rephrasing will kindle that heart-warming sound that I once heard.
As I stated in my last post I have to consider which direction I am going to proceed in. Do I want to know how Wikipedia works or what is going on? Both questions are interesting to me. However, I think that analyzing what is going on between Wikipedia and its predecessors is the question that fits my mode of questions two systems is more in keeping with my interests. Therefore, the most pertainent task ahead of me to choose an encyclopedic product that exists both on Wikipedia as well as an older encyclopedia. These however are not the only criteria. The article should also be one of the most revisied articles and heavily trafficked on Wikipedia.
One of the comments that I received from my committee was that throughout the proposal I’ve posed too many unrelated questions. By reading different sections of my proposal I have seen that these questions seem to be pulling the research in different directions. In response to this issue I have sifted through my proposal and extracted all the explicit and implied questions that my review of literature suggests.
In total, I counted twelve separate questions. Although some are interrelated to a degree, there is a lack of cohesion among all. In fact, it seems as if I had tried to consolidate two separate research directions within each question. For instance, “What conflicts/tensions exist between the self-organizational mechanisms of Wikipedia and the institutional knowledge production.” In this single breath I inquire about social construction via mechanisms as well as tensions surrounding institutional knowledge.
Thus, I have discovered that there are two research projects that I describe in my proposal. In their simplest forms:
The goal of the proposed research is to explore the challenges and the concessions that a community of practice makes in negotiating its identity within an institutional framework. In the present study the community of Wikipedia is analyzed as being socially constructed from a history of encyclopaedism. The importance of this lies in studying what utopian encyclopaedism takes for granted and how these naturalized assumptions come to manifest themselves in todays encyclopaedic projects. To do so, the study analyzes how an online community of practice constructs informal social control mechanisms. The construction of these social controls is further contextualized through an in-depth exploration of the cybernetic and typographic technologies that contribute to Wikipedia’s social construction.
By analyzing these interactions, the proposed research attempts to discover how a community negotiates the very fundamental aspects of identity and its goals in view of institutional pressures of encyclopaedism.
After years of using concept maps, I have a fondness for their ability to make connections to ideas that I normally would not consider. While researching for my thesis I came across Catgraph, a visualizer which outputs a network of either PNGs, PDFs, SVGs, etc of the supercategories, subcategories or articles from Wikipedia.
Steve Jankowski is both a graphic designer and an academic. His works range from the development of identity systems and webdesign to questioning the cultural consequences of technological invention.
