Philosophy of Cognitive Science Seminar: Mapping Knowledge

The next meeting of the seminar „Philosophy of Cognitive Science” will take place on February, 22th, at 10:30 (AM Warsaw, CET). Our guest will be Radim Hladík (Czech Academy of Sciences, Centre for Science, Technology and Society Studies). We will discuss a draft [ co-written with Yann Renisio (CNRS/SciencesPo, Centre for Research on social InequalitieS (CRIS))]: Mapping Knowledge – Topic Analysis of Science Locates Researchers in Disciplinary Landscape.

Abstract: This study addresses the gap between knowledge and its producers by constructing an epistemological coordinate system that locates individual re- searchers within the scientific landscape. Drawing on a comprehensive national dataset of scientific outputs, we build a topic model based on a semantic network of publications and terms derived from textual content comprising titles, abstracts, and keywords. We apply compositional data transformation techniques to enable a geometric analysis of topics across disciplines. The design yields four important results. 1) Hierarchical clustering confirms an alignment between traditional disciplinary classification and our empirical, bottom-up topic model. 2) Principal component analysis reveals three axes — Culture-Nature, Life-Non-life, and Materials-Methods — that primarily structure this scientific knowledge space. 3) The projection of individual researchers via their topic portfolios allows to locate them relationally on these three continuous measures of epistemological distinctions. 4) The robustness of our approach is validated by examining the links between researchers’ topic orientation and supplementary variables such as publication practices, gender, institutional affiliations, and funding sources. Our method could be applied to inform various science policy and evaluation practices, as well as to uncover associations between products and producers in other cultural fields.

This time we will meet  online at Google Meet. E-mail Dr. Przemysław Nowakowski przemyslaw.nowakowski@ifispan.edu.pl for the Google Meet link.

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