Virtual Knowledge Experimenting in the Humanities and the Social Sciences

Today we are witnessing dramatic changes in the way scientific and scholarlyknowledge is created, codified, and communicated. This transformation is connected to the use ofdigital technologies and the virtualization of knowledge. In this book, scholars from a range ofdisciplines consider just what, if anything, is new when knowledge is produced in new ways. Doesknowledge itself change when the tools of knowledge acquisition, representation, and distributionbecome digital? Issues of knowledge creation and dissemination go beyond thedevelopment and use of new computational tools. The book, which draws on work from the VirtualKnowledge Studio, brings together research on scientific practice, infrastructure, and technology.Focusing on issues of digital scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, the contributorsdiscuss who can be considered legitimate knowledge creators, the value of "invisible"labor, the role of data visualization in policy making, the visualization of uncertainty, theconceptualization of openness in scholarly communication, data floods in the social sciences, andhow expectations about future research shape research practices. The contributors combine anappreciation of the transformative power of the virtual with a commitment to the empirical study ofpractice and use. The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket.