David and I received word earlier this month that our article on “Naturalized Metaphilosophy” has been accepted for accepted for a special issue of Synthèse on Representing Philosophy. (Thom Brooks’ blog has the last copy of the CFP that is easily accessible.)
ABSTRACT. Traditional representations of philosophy have tended to prize the role of reason in the discipline. These accounts focus exclusively on ideas and arguments as animating forces in the field. But anecdotal evidence and more rigorous sociological studies suggest there is more going on in philosophy. In this article, we present two hypotheses about social factors in the field: that social factors influence the development of philosophy, and that position of status and reputation—and thus social influence—will tend to be awarded to philosophers who offer rationally compelling arguments for their views. In order to test these hypotheses, we need a more comprehensive grasp on the field than traditional representations afford. In particular, we need more substantial data about various social connections between philosophers. This investigation belongs to a naturalized metaphilosophy, an empirical study of the discipline itself, and it offers prospects for a fuller and more reliable understanding of philosophy.
Download “Naturalized Metaphilosophy” (PDF)
We’ve just opened access to a test drive of the site at www.phylosophy.net. At present, you can search for individuals and institutions within the database, and explore connections between them using links. The most recent degrees and appointments from our core set of schools are included, as well as advisors. For a good, complete sample, check out our home institution, CUNY, as well as some of our recent PhDs, such as James Snyder, Fritz McDonald, and Christine Vitrano.
At this point, the data is still tabular, but we’re making steady progress on our first visualization, which should be an institutional timeline. Charts, graphs, and network maps should follow in the coming months. We’ve also disabled account creation and data editing/uploading for the moment, until the rest of our initial, verified dataset has been entered.
After you’ve had a chance to play around a bit, drop us a line in the Feeback section of Phylo forum or via email (phylo@phylosophy.net) with your initial thoughts on site design and usability.
Increasingly, I think we’re saddled with what I’m calling the “hundred years” problem. By that, I mean that from at least 2000 forward, it’s fairly easy to compile degree, appointment, and publication information, since (nearly) all of it is published on the web (and sometimes even available in RSS, XML, or flat data formats). Some of this harvesting is complicated by nonstandard metadata, but web-wide standards like Dublin Core are emerging to address these worries.
So much for the future. Let’s consider the more distant past—namely, information before 1900. Much of this isn’t available at all for minor figures in the field (which probably makes up the greatest percentage of the field), and information on major figures is the province of specialized historians and archival efforts. Google Books and the Universal Digital Library are making some headway in archiving older materials, but the process is slow-going and it’s limited to books at the moment (we are, after all, interested in other records as well). Incidentally, UDL estimates that no more than 10 million of the 100 million books since recorded history were written before 1900. Those 10 million will be a huge task, but the bigger task is 1900-2000, at least by the numbers game.
And that’s where we’ve entered. In focusing on North American philosophy since the first dissertations in the 1880s, we’ve started off Phylo right in the middle of these hundred years of densest material. The problem, of course, is that it’s close enough to the present to obtain, yet time-consuming and costly enough to present a real deterrent. We will, of course, have plenty of this information from the start, given the longevity of the programs we’ve chosen to research. But complete saturation looks almost as difficult here as it does for pre-1900 data, where we often don’t know how much exists (and thus how complete our current records are).
Recognizing this problem has led us to think more about our longer short-term goals. Without a great chance of success in filling in 1900-2000 data, it might make sense to start expanding back further, to pre-1900 information that historians already have available. We’ve always know this will require some conceptual changes (e.g., ‘degree’ and ‘institution’ need to be understood more metaphorically as periods of study and places where philosophy happens). In light of the hundred years problem, though, it might be useful to make these changes sooner and start collecting more varied data from earlier periods in philosophy.
David and I both attended presentations on ISI Web of Science today. WoS is taking an interesting and, in many ways, different approach as a search tool. Here are a few of the things that stood out:
- Keywords are de-emphasized. There is no taxonomy associated with WoS (since it is so interdisciplinary in scope), so users are encouraged to search by authors (including their home institutions) and particular publications. WoS does assign keywords to articles using an algorithm that looks at titles and summaries, so users can search by topic, but it’s certainly not the preferred method.
- Influence is understood in terms of citations. Each record is tagged with as many citation links as possible (only journal articles are included). As searchers, we were shown how to find the handful of mega-articles that hundreds of other articles on a topic all cite in common. If this really is a good measure of influence, it seems possible that one could jump into any topic knowing virtually nothing about its major players and sift them out from pure citation counts.
- H-scores. Certain Doubts has had several posts about h-scores in the past few months, so I’ll simply refer you to discussions on 29 Nov, 13 Dec, 15 Dec, 17 Dec, 19 Dec, and 28 Dec.
- Search queries seem pretty user-intensive. There’s no fuzzy search capabilities (”Did you mean X?”), so there was a lot of emphasis on wild card and truncated search strings. (See below.)
- Some attempt at visualizations. I noticed two kinds of citation reports available for viewing. One shows the number of publications returned for any search; the other shows the number of citations within that publications set. These charts are static images generated upon request, and seem similar to Scopus’ visual capabilities (although I wouldn’t know because the server always times out before my image is generated by Scopus). Here are the two charts I generated for “rawls AND justice”.
WoS has data for arts and humanities going back to 1975, and I think it will be interesting to see how much it catches on in the humanities and in philosophy. One general limitation—one that I raise in the An Introduction to Phylo—is the way in which this tool makes the user do the work, rather than the other way around. I was struck by how much presenter of the session was essentially training us to work with the tool by favoring publication data over keywords and filtering searches in certain ways, rather than giving us an intuitive tool that worked however we found most natural. In general, I think this underscores the need for more participatory design in building search tools.
Beyond just asking users what they think of the tools we’ve built, we need to learn more beforehand about how they process information and in what forms they find that information most cognitively salient. I think we’ll learn some of this once we launch and revise our displays, and I hope we can come up with some model of participatory design that facilitates the process.
