Talk Title:  Steps Towards an Infrastructure for Scholarly Synthesis

Speaker:  Dr. Joel Chan, Assistant Professor; Assistant Director, PhD Information Studies; Associate Director, HCIL

Location: HBK 2105 and Zoom

Abstract:  Sharing, reusing, and synthesizing knowledge is central to research progress. But these core functions are not well-supported by our formal scholarly publishing infrastructure: documents aren’t really the right unit of analysis, so researchers resort to laborious “hacks” and workarounds to “mine” publications for what they need. Information scientists have proposed an alternative infrastructure based on the more appropriately granular model of a discourse graph of claims, and evidence, along with key rhetorical relationships between them. However, despite significant technical progress on standards and platforms, the predominant infrastructure remains stubbornly document-based. What can HCI do about this? Drawing from infrastructure studies, I diagnose a critical infrastructural bottleneck that HCI can help with: the lack of local systems that integrate discourse-centric models to augment synthesis work, from which an infrastructure for synthesis can be grown. In this talk, I’ll describe what we can and should build in order to grow a discourse-centric synthesis infrastructure. Drawing on 3 years of research through design and field deployment in a distributed community of hypertext notebook users, I’ll sketch out a design vision of a thriving ecosystem of researchers authoring local, shareable discourse graphs to improve synthesis work, enhance primary research and research training, and augment collaborative research. I’ll discuss how this design vision — and our empirical work — contributes steps towards a new infrastructure for synthesis, and increases HCI’s capacity to advance collective intelligence and solve infrastructure-level problems.

Bio: Dr. Chan’s research and teaching explore systems that support creative knowledge work. He conceives of “systems” very broadly, from individual cognitive skills, interfaces, tools and practices, to collaborative and organizational dynamics and tools, collective intelligence and crowdsourcing, social computing, all the way to sociotechnical infrastructures within which knowledge work is done. Dr. Chan is also broadly interested in creative work across many domains, although he spends most of his time considering the disciplines of design and scientific discovery. His long-term vision is to help create a future where any person or community can design the future(s) they want to live in.

Before coming to the College of Information Studies, Dr. Chan was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Project Scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Chan received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.