Semantic publishing has long been a holy grail in the quest for more open, democratic and navigable science communication. However, the “semantic web of science” dream has also been notoriously elusive. Fortunately, advances in AI and decentralization, coupled with disillusionment from the current extractive scientific system, are converging to make this vision an exciting and imminent possibility. This talk will present the Sensemaking Networks project, a new kind of social network combining AI and semantic nanopublishing, to improve how we collectively curate, evaluate, disseminate and discuss scientific research.
“The internet is a tool for thought and might as well get good at it.” – Gordon Brander
We’ll try to unpack that line, and discuss how our everyday activity on the web can actually contribute to collective intelligence — with the right tools and practices. To answer, we’ll introduce the fascinating field of stigmergy, which studies how collective intelligence emerges from local environment modifications, such as ant pheromone trails. We’ll then present two stigmergy-inspired projects we’re working on that apply decentralized web technologies towards more regenerative information ecologies:
‘Dark research’ refers to skills and knowledge which are often significant factors in successful research, yet are rarely covered by any formal graduate university curricula. For example, (1) how to find and formulate research questions, (2) how to manage references & project workflows and not drown in the oceans of information, (3) how to write and maintain reproducible research code and experiments, and (4) how to forge connections and collaborations with the wider scientific community. In this meeting I’ll present some of my experience and tools for grappling with these challenges, centering around Notion for (2) (and pretty much everything else also 🙃), Weights and Biases for (3) and Twitter + Hugo Academic web pages for (4).