19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Open Communication
Digital Disciplinary Differences – Field Differences in Computer Mediated Science
Gaston Heimeriks (gaston.heimeriks@niwi.knaw.nl) and Peter Van den Besselaar
NIWI-KNAW,
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
http://www.niwi.knaw.nl/en/maatschappijwetenschappen/staf/gaston/toon
Computer mediated communications play an increasingly important role in research.
Not only are many aspects of scientific research now represented on the Internet,
the introduction of new means of communication has also influenced processes
of knowledge production. This creates a new challenge to the study of science
by traditional methods. The Web and the Internet are a source of data on a very
large scale. Ideally, the computer-mediated communications of universities could
provide information about the context of knowledge production that cannot be
easily obtained from other sources. As a consequence, the use of Web data for
science and policy-oriented measurements will be quite seductive. Whether or
not this is meaningful, however, and how these types of measurements might influence
policies and quality control mechanisms is still an open question. One of the
problems is related to the disciplinary differences in computer-mediated communications.
We argue that disciplinary differences are increasingly important on the web.
The wide variety of data analysis tools, means of data storage, processing capacity,
software tools, information delivery technologies, and electronic networks that
constitute the infrastructure which provides scientists with new means of communication,
create a communicative plurality and communicative heterogeneity that increasingly
reflects discipline specific patterns and needs.
Traditionally, scientific communities could be described as a network of papers
published in scientific journals addressing an academic audience. The informational
turn in research not only introduced new means of communication (
We present some of the results of a three-year research project about the interaction of ICT and science and technology. We empirically explore the claims and hypotheses on the use of ICT in a variety of research areas using web-data about all EU universities. The web-characteristics of university departments in a number of disciplines were selected to represent various Mode 1 and Mode 2 fields as well as covering natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. The results indicate that the websites of the departments show pronounced disciplinary differences.