SYSTEMS THEORY APPROACH TOWARD THE PRODUCTION, DISSEMINATION, RECEPTION, AND UTILIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge production, discovery, and application

• the relationship between knowledge codification and creativity -knowledge growth as a result of knowledge structures
• creating social climates for discovery and innovation: when cultures interact, R&D expenditures, bureaucracy and the social organization of innovation, incentives, nurturing genius
• think tanks around the world
• the social statuses and roles of intellectuals, prophets and seers -comparing the social status of the historian vs. the seer -the ideal of the university
• implications of 45% of all federal funds for university researching going to the nation's 126 medical schools
• legitimation and verification systems

Data on the Top American Research Universities

Listing of Guggenheim recipients

Nobel Winners Archive

TRIZ Theory of Inventive Problem Solving

Pulitzer Prize Winners Archive

The MacArthur Foundation

Knowledge creation and technological innovation are often not planned. There is the serendipity factor. Ken Chowder's "Eureka!" (Smithsonian, Sept. 2003)

Joseph Rouse - What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge? - Configurations 1:1

Encodings for transmission and decision-making processes; sorting and labeling

• symbols and semeiotics
• mathematics as a way of knowing: when do numbers speak louder than words?
• the social parsings of space, time and temperature
  • Why does the United States refuse to go on the metric system?  The country was supposed to be measured in meters and kilos by 1980.  What happened?  Look at the venom the measures generate.  At metricsucks.com we learn it is the source of many of the world's problems, including Starbucks coffee, rap music, Jerry Springer and government conspiracies! 
  • Of temperature, Daniel Boorstin observes in The Discoverers:
    "Others all over Europe were now beginning to speak the language of machines, parsing experience by novel grammars of measurements.  Familiar experience was transformed.  Nothing was more remarkable than the new way of thinking about heat and cold.  Hot and cold, dry and moist, were distinctions obvious to the touch.  According to the ancient Greeks, these qualities combined to make the earth, air, fire, and water of which the whole world was made.  Just as today we treat odors or tastes as different kinds rather than different quantities, so it then was, as we have seen, with temperature" (p. 369).
  • For a good story of the rise and fall of a new system for time reckoning, read about the French Thermidor 
• matters of language translation: is it ever possible?
• sociology of bureaucratic recordkeeping (e.g., Elizabeth Yakel's "The Social Construction of Accountability")
• the disappearance of the art of shorthand
• cryptography

• An  interesting case study can be made of  U.S. intelligence attempts in the mid-1990s to force all of our computers to be equipped with the Clipper chip, an encryption chip that would allow law enforcement to decrypt all data passing through our systems.  A nice touch, revealed in released documents, obtained in 2001 through the Freedom of Information Act, was the proposal to share this technology with such close allies as China, Pakistan and Syria.
• Yahoo's links to Codes, which includes links to the stories of the Navajo Code Talkers
• StegoArchive.Com  "Steganography simply takes one piece of information and hides it within another. Computer files (images, sounds recordings, even disks) contain unused or insignificant areas of data. Steganography takes advantage of these areas, replacing them with information (encrypted mail, for instance). The files can then be exchanged without anyone knowing what really lies inside of them. An image of the space shuttle landing might contain a private letter to a friend. A recording of a short sentence might contain your company's plans for a secret new product."
• Center for Social Informatics--involving "the body of research and study that examines social aspects of computerization -- including the roles of information technology in social and organizational change, the uses of information technologies in social contexts, and the ways that the social organization of information technologies is influenced by social forces and social practices."
• National Cryptologic Museum
• Translation strategy when conducting the European Social Survey

Knowledge transmission and dissemination

According to their 2000 "How Much Information?" study, a research team from the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley estimates "the world's total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth."

• where our knowledge comes from -- censorship; on being overhead; killing the bearer of bad news
• disinformation
• how transmission form shapes content
  -- implications of the speed of diffusion owing to technological innovation
• implications of predicting natural and social disasters
• in 2002, a group of scholars who had urged a boycott of expensive scientific journals formed the Public Library of Science
• bumper stickers and bathroom stalls are among the few sites where common folk can make public their editorial comments
• a social psychology of knowledge transmission: disclosure rules; persuasiveness (ethos, pathos, logos and social power)

Create Change: A resource for faculty and librarian action to reclaim scholarly communication

Origins of Writing class project of David F. Lancy's Utah State anthropology class

Dianne Tillotson's Medieval Writing

Clay Tablets - The Ancient Art of Writing

Storytelling: The Art of Knowledge develops the importance of sharing narratives in six Canadian Native communities

The History of Printing

KB7QOP's Morse Code Page

Forbes ASAP: Telecosm Archive

The Babbage Institute for Knowledge and Information Technology

Essays on Information Technology

Social and Economic Implications of Information Technologies: A Bibliographic Database Pilot Project (NSF)

Yahoo links on:Censorship and the Net

Know Your Enemies

Project Censored

Receptivity/sensoring and decoding/interpreting; feedback mechanisms

• the social psychology of perceptual biases and distortions
• information overloads and the perceptual biases of social groups: groupthink
• the receptiveness of the "liberally educated"

Memetics Index

Paleography defined

Storage and Retrieval: Social memory systems

According to the University of California-Berkeley study "How Much Information? 2003," the quantity of new information produced in 2002 was five exabytes, equal in size to one-half million libraries each containing a quantity of digitized  information equal in size to the entire print collection in the Library of Congress!  Who decides how much of this information glut is worth preserving?  In what format is it best preserved to allow easy retrieval--and perhaps knowledge to be gleaned from it?  Other topics:

• the computer: confidentiality vs. privacy invasions; information thefts; the Freedom of Information Act
• "Exploring Charging Models for Digital Cultural Heritage" goal is "to investigate some of the underlying assumptions being made in the move from previously analog photographic services into the realm of digital capture and delivery, in particular to look at how marketable, cost efficient and income-stable the new digital services and resources are in comparison with previous methods"
• collective remembering and forgetting: the sociology of history; "lost knowledge;" Holocaust revisionism and historical revisionism in postwar Japanese textbooks
• The Memory Hole site with goal of "rescuing knowledge, freeing information"--to expose what "we're not supposed to know (or that we're supposed to forget)."
• Google Bombing

Conceptualizing decision-making units and processes: On how knowledge is put into use

• bureaucracies and information flows: management isolation; the momentum of piecemeal decisions; time horizons
• groupthink
• case studies: the Challenger disaster; juries in action; community advisory committees
• whistle-blowers

CASE STUDIES IN PERSONAL AND INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE

Applications to Religion: Morality, Ethics and Pluralism

Religious knowledge has long been a favorite case study for practitioners of the sociology of knowledge. As a knowledge type, religion gives recipes for ways of making sense out of life's ultimate frustrations and existential dilemmas. As Durkheim observed in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life "Religious conceptions have as their object, before anything else, to express and explain, not that which is exceptional and abnormal in things, but, on the contrary, that which is constant and regular."

Think about Americans' responses to the following question: Which of these statements comes closest to describing your feelings about the Bible?

• The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.
• The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word.
• The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men.

Prediction time. What percent of Americans do you believe believe that the Bible is the word of God and should be taken literally? How would you believe this belief various across the spectrum of Christian faiths? Are strongly religious persons more or less likely to agree? What is the relationship between education and the likelihood of holding this belief? Ready? Click here to see the relationships.

Intriguing, no? It brings to mind the parallel between the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility and the Protestants' position of scriptural inerrancy--both extreme matters of faith. As Robert Bellah observed, only in the West does belief in the sense of assent to the truth of specific dogmas been regarded as essential to faith.  Among the many possible research topics in the sociology of religious