About Me
Hello World!
Early InPhO Concept Map
You’ve managed to stumble across my little corner of the Internet. I currently work in the HPS and SLIS departments at IUB under two of the most interesting and capable professors I’ve had the fortune to meet: Colin Allen and Katy Börner. I graduated with a History of Science B.A. from UF in ‘09, where I slaved researched for the infinitely patient Robert A. Hatch, who taught me more in four short years than I’d yet learned in aggregate over my entire life.
I split my time between the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO) and the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center (CNS). At InPhO, I program and design visual, navigable representations of our dynamically generated taxonomy of ideas, analyze relational networks (influenced, disagreed with, etc.) from our Thinkers database, and map and compare philosophical ontologies. The CNS keeps me busy with all sorts of scientometric analyses, and I am also involved in the development of large scale network analysis tools such as the NWB, creating workflows, providing software feedback, and writing documentation.
Co-authorship network created using the Network Workbench Tool
Research
My main research is in modeling and mapping the growth of science on a large scale – thematically, geographically, and temporally – hoping eventually to reveal what conditions yield the most rapid rate of discovery and innovation. Looking back, we see times when scientific progress lurches forward at alarming rates, times when studies come to a halt, times when great minds exposit to deaf ears. Sometimes the reasons are obvious: burned libraries, overthrown empires, new sources of funding, technological breakthroughs, wars that need to be won. But these are heavy brush-strokes painted across the canvas of history.
If we could somehow view the whole of scientific endeavors for the last thousand years, across every topic and in every city, with the same fine granularity used to research modern-day science, imagine how much we could learn. By zooming out and looking for “hot spots” of innovation in the history of science, and by understanding the environment in which these hot spots formed, we can learn how to induce those same ideal conditions in modern day research. If the synthesis of new ideas in physics tends to come from young researchers working on their own and with backgrounds in other fields, funds can be allotted to make sure more of those exist. If medical innovations come fastest when small groups of experts collaborate, or if science in general runs smoother in small-world type collaborative networks rather than completely connected networks, that information can be used to focus funding in just the right way to improve the rate of innovation.
The closest we can come to that fine granularity, to understanding how science works outside of its context, is by using as many huge historical data sets as we can find. Scientometricians and others in related fields do an amazing job of learning the structure of modern science, but that structure is necessarily bound to the mediums it inhabits. Modern science is a beast of national laboratories, e-mails, universities, cited journals, click-throughs, conferences, and page hits. Marshall McLuhan may or may not have been correct when he claimed “the medium is the message,” but there is no doubt that the medium plays a large role in how science is adopted, disseminated, and studied. That role cannot be understood without stepping back and viewing all of the alternatives – correspondences, scientific societies, book transcriptions, etc.
The task, then, is to collect as much data as possible, as far back as we can. We should track where books traveled within Medieval Europe and Asia, who corresponded with whom, how often, and about what, during the Early Modern period, who taught whom and where scientists studied, how many books were published in what languages, what universities had copies of which journals, where shared resources went. This is an impossible amount of data, of course, and can only exist if created collaboratively and in the spirit of openness. These are not ideas; they are numbers and data points, and they should be accessible and compatible and aggregated in one place, a History of Science Data Commons, so to speak. More on that project coming soon.
For now, I am content using data I have collected myself. Under Dr. Hatch, I worked on collecting large amounts of Republic of Letters correspondence network data and was able to use it to map the collaborative landscape of Early Modern science. I am currently working on a similar project for Medieval learning, collecting network information and applying modern-day scientometric techniques in order to find communities and structures that might be otherwise unapparent.
Interests
Courtney and I contact juggling
Thankfully for my friends and family I do not work 24/7. When not working, I can often be found juggling, attending renaissance festivals, geocaching, camping, campaigning for rational inquiry, and reading science fiction & fantasy novels. When I feel guilty about not working, but not enough to actually get back to work, I read about physics, cognitive science, and linguistics. I am also perpetually writing a history of the obscure art of contact juggling.
Juggling knives in Calgary
Juggling has been a big part of my life for nearly a decade now; I was president of Objects in Motion (UF Juggling Club) for a few years and brought the club from 3 to 30 active members. I’m now involved in the IU Juggling Club, and juggle regularly at the Bloomington Farmer’s Market. I have performed as far north as Calgary, as far east as New York City, all the way south in Miami, and all sorts of places in between. None of that would have been possible without my good friends and co-performers in the Spherocity contact juggling troupe: Matt, Jay, Cory, Courtney, Steve, and Leighanna. Thanks to Nick, Nicole, Leah, and the rest of the crew, Objects in Motion keeps growing larger and better and I miss them terribly. And if you’re reading this, Sierra, you should start juggling again.
As if there’s not enough on my plate already, I’m also involved in two wonderful pseudo-academic organizations. I co-founded Sophosessions with Warren C. Moore, the coolest cat I know, in my junior year at UF. The group still meets a little more than monthly and allows its two-dozen members to present talks on whatever they feel like, from Chinese calligraphy to Zen Buddhism to advanced fractal mathematics to building robots. Then everyone goes to Ben & Jerry’s. I still webcast into meetings whenever I can, but it’s just not the same without the ice-cream. The Venerable IU Beer & Algorithms Club fills two Monday nights a month, and I get to listen to a bunch of Computer Science and Math graduates present their favorite algorithms in gory detail, all while eating a tasty meal and enjoying an equally tasty beverage. What could be better?
When not doing any of that other stuff, I’m probably wasting my time on Google Reader or updating Twitter. You can read my favorite blog and news posts here, or follow me on Twitter via @scott_bot.