Cathy Blake, associate professor and CIRSS associate director, has been invited to present at the Symposium on Cognitive Systems and Discovery Informatics at Carnegie Mellon University, to be held at the Silicon Vally Campus on June 21-22, 2013. The symposium will explore the intersection of the discovery informatics and cognitive systems movements, bringing together researchers from a number of disciplines who study the scientific enterprise from different perspectives, and will work to develop a research agenda in discovery informatics that moves beyond the current 'big data' trend.
Blake will present "Living on the Edge of Science: A Pilot Study of Concept Formation in Toxicology Literature."
Abstract
Published articles have been the primary mode of scholarly communication for more than a century and continue to play an important role, particularly when measuring a scientist's productivity. These articles also provide an historical account of how new knowledge has evolved over time as demonstrated by Zelling's seminal work on the scientific sub-language used in microbiology and immunology during the time in which the germ theory was being developed. In contrast to the relation level analysis offered by Zelling and subsequent framings of scientific rhetoric, we provide a micro-level perspective by analyzing the evolution of noun phrases within a collection of scientific articles on toxicology. Such an analysis provides insight into the co-creation of language at the edge of science and has important implications for tools that attempt to unify differing surface level representations of the same concept.
Symposium details are available online.