Increasingly, technology mediated interactions play a significant role in science and engineering research. This proposal will manage a workshop to identify and address issues surrounding the impact of advances in information and communications technologies and the resulting human disengagement with the natural world on research and education in the information sciences.
The proposed workshop will take a very broad view and bring together creative and visionary thinkers from five disparate constituencies. The organizers will invite leaders from information schools, key thinkers in CI, thought leaders from the IT worlds, representatives from cognate fields, and CI researchers from minority-serving institutions. The workshop will result in papers outlining the intellectual frontiers of iSchool research and synergies produced in the workshop, which will be presented at major conferences and published in appropriate journals.
We are witnessing a sea change in the way in which information is generated, stored and deployed. Streaming sensor networks produce terabits of data per day across many fields of human and natural concern (generation). With the rise of the database as a key unit of exchange within and between fields, we are witnessing a transformation rivaling that of the printing press (storage). New fields such as virtual archeology are producing new kinds of knowledge impossible even 30 years ago (deployment). A concern for our nation moving forward is understanding how to grasp these developments and stay at their helm. A fundamental challenge in a number of disciplines is adapting long-held practices to enable new ways of knowing (both knowledge production and expression), leveraging the emerging new suite of tools. This qualitative change, slowly being felt, may ultimately be as impactful as the change from oral to literate cultures. Two exploratory workshops were convened to examine the impact of advancing technologies on the practices of scholarship across disciplines. The first was held in Chicago in 2011 on the topic of "Emerging Configurations of the Virtual and the Real." The second workshop, held in Pittsburgh in 2013, addressed "Scholarly Communication." The two workshops that comprise this project offered a unique perspective by taking stock of innovations in practice and generating potential new innovations in scholarship. The results have been primarily disseminated through the two websites whose home pages are shown.
