Keynote given at the NFAIS 2018 meeting in Alexandria, Virginia, USA on 28 February 2018
The world of information is transforming at a bewildering pace. The assumptions of yesterday, the stable institutions and cherished practices increasingly seem to be vanishing before our eyes. The first assumption of any new strategy seems to be “what would this look like if we built it from scratch, today”. And yet continuity matters, we don’t build new tools, institutions and practices from scratch, they evolve in a messy and contingent way from what we have available to us in the moment.
In this talk, Neylon unpicks the underlying drivers of change, and how they are coupled to a long history of how we manage information. Neylon will discuss how the different perspectives of important groups—scholars, publishers, funders, platform providers and the myriad of information professionals—lead to a partial focus that can make us simultaneously fearful of the change we see and blind to the shifts that actually matter.
If the arc of history bends towards justice then it follows that the arc of our knowledge and information environment necessarily bends towards greater scale and greater diversity. At the same time it is the values that underpin scholarship and the various ways in which we identify with the project of building knowledge, that drive us forward. If we are to take advantage of change, we need to understand what it is that must stay the same.
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1. Will we still recognize ourselves?
Identity and Community in a Transforming Information Environment
@cameronneylon
cn@cameronneylon.net
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0068-716X
6. “You need to spend half a
day a week in the library
reading the new journals”
My project supervisor, 1994
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecadman/486261295 CC-BY-SA
57. Many of the discussions of the future at
CERN and the LHC era end with the
question – “Yes, but how will we ever keep
track of such a large project?”
58. Many of the discussions of the future at
CERN and the LHC era end with the
question – “Yes, but how will we ever keep
track of such a large project?”
https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
64. He who receives an idea from me, receives
instruction himself without lessening
mine; as he who lights his taper at mine,
receives light without darkening me.
Thomas Jefferson
65. [ideas are as if] benevolently designed by
nature, when she made them, like fire,
expansible over all space, without
lessening their density in any point;
Thomas Jefferson
66. . . . I dare speak confidently and
positively of very few things, except of
matters of fact.
Robert Boyle
67. “Of my being somewhat prolix […] I thought
it necessary to deliver things circumstantially,
that the Person I addressed them to might,
without mistake, and with as little trouble as
is possible, be able to repeat such unusual
Experiments”
Robert Boyle
68. [I will answer Linus’ objections] partly,
because the Learned Author, whoever he be
having forborne provoking Language in his
Objections, allowes me in answering them to
comply with my Inclinations & Custom of
exercising Civility, even where I most dissent
in point of Judgement.”
Robert Boyle
69. [I] speak so doubtingly, and use so often,
perhaps, it seems, it is not improbable,
and such other expressions, as argue a
diffidence of the truth of the opinions I
incline to, and that I should be so shy of
laying down principles
Robert Boyle
86. [They are]…precisely inventing through
the intermediary of instruments and the
artifice of the laboratory, the
displacement of points of view that is so
indispensable to public life.
Latour, Politics of Nature
87. How can one take new beings into
account if one cannot radically change
the position of one’s gaze?
Latour, Politics of Nature