Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (Hardcover)

by Christine L. Borgman (Author)
Key Phrases: digital dilemma, scholarly information infrastructure, scholarly infrastructure, United States, The View, The Continuity of Scholarly Communication (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Advances in communication and information technologies are connecting library, information, and computer sciences with subject matter disciplines to e-enable a growing range of research practices—from data collection to publication and archiving. Professor Borgman is one of the few authorities in this emerging space who can speak clearly to all the relevant disciplines about the inter-related technical, social and institutional developments reconfiguring how scholars do what they do. This book will be of great value to students, researchers, and policy-makers interested in the implications of the digital age on scholarly work."
—Professor William H. Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

"As Borgman asserts and illustrates, work is well underway to build an advanced information infrastructure to support scholarship and learning under many alternate rubrics. Lacking in much of this work, however, is an adequate appreciation of the intrinsic technical and social nature of infrastructure—cyber or otherwise. In Scholarship in the Digital Age, Borgman has made a significant contribution to such understanding in ways that will have practical payoff for both the creators and users of emerging information infrastructure. She has also linked many important threads of research and development for building and understanding contemporary platforms for knowledge communities. This is an excellent book."
—Daniel E. Atkins, Professor of Information, Computer Science and Engineering, and Founding Dean, School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

"In a world where scientific networks and communication are now increasingly visible and open, Borgman has illuminated the discussion of the scholarly communication system itself."
— Nature

"There is no one better qualified than Christine Borgman to reflect on how scholarship is being affected by the emergence of digital technologies. She brings deep understanding about the practices of scholars, the historical and social forces that shape them, and the characteristics of the emerging technologies. This book is required reading for all those interested in twenty-first century scholarship."
—Gary M. Olson, Paul M. Fitts Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, School of Information, University of Michigan

Product Description
Awarded 2008 "Best Information Science Book" by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

Scholars in all fields now have access to an unprecedented wealth of online information, tools, and services. The Internet lies at the core of an information infrastructure for distributed, data-intensive, and collaborative research. Although much attention has been paid to the new technologies making this possible, from digitized books to sensor networks, it is the underlying social and policy changes that will have the most lasting effect on the scholarly enterprise. In Scholarship in the Digital Age, Christine Borgman explores the technical, social, legal, and economic aspects of the kind of infrastructure that we should be building for scholarly research in the twenty-first century.

Borgman describes the roles that information technology plays at every stage in the life cycle of a research project and contrasts these new capabilities with the relatively stable system of scholarly communication, which remains based on publishing in journals, books, and conference proceedings. No framework for the impending "data deluge" exists comparable to that for publishing. Analyzing scholarly practices in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, Borgman compares each discipline's approach to infrastructure issues. In the process, she challenges the many stakeholders in the scholarly infrastructure—scholars, publishers, libraries, funding agencies, and others—to look beyond their own domains to address the interaction of technical, legal, economic, social, political, and disciplinary concerns. Scholarship in the Digital Age will provoke a stimulating conversation among all who depend on a rich and robust scholarly environment.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (October 31, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262026198
• ISBN-13: 978-0262026192
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #72,203 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seminal Work, Broad Overview, Provocative on All Fronts, June 18, 2008

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

FINAL REVIEW 22 June 2008

This is not a technical book, it focuses more on the socio-political aspects of how knowledge is communicated among scholars. While it addresses fraud, it does not address the ideological war against science, high crimes and misdemeanors including deliberate lies to the public, or the nuances of "fog facts" and "lost history."

The author brings to this effort past experience in the Alexandria Digital Earth prototype project, and the National Research Council's signposts in cyberspace inquiry.

It would be good to have other reviews.

Overview comment: The author has done an extraordinary job in designing this book--writing it must have been easy once the seven page outline of detailed contents was created.

My notes:

+ National Science Foundation (NSF) did not begin investing in cyber-infrastructure until 2006 (my first web site was created in 1994).

+ Grab this lady for the project. She integrates informaiton science, information psychology, information sociology, information politics, and information culture in a manner so well presented I don't mind the headache.

+ Cites G. C. Bowker on data diversity, and ends the book with the observation that search and retrieval across specialized data sources is till very difficult (See Steve Arnold's chapter <Search panacea or ploy:
Can collective intelligence improve findability?>, URL in the comment.

+ Words and concepts covered by the author, with substantive citation, that I found particularly interesting:

- Data withholding
- Knowledge diffusion
- Consequences of misconduct
- Cultural memory
- Open standards
- Accidents
- History and sense-making
- Cultural boundaries of science (see Dick Klavans and Brad Ashfords' lovely Maps of Science web site)
- Knowledge lost
- Bibliometrics, data as capital
- Ecologies of knowledge
- Ethnography of infrastructure within communities
- Communities of learning, meaning, identity
- Internet Time and unreliability of search engines
- Geographies of the Internet (the project is mapping substnative knowledge)
- The end of isolated inquiry and isolated conclusions (far future)
- "outcomes" and "results" are not in this book--it is a survey
- book's major self-limitation is its exclusive focus on academia--the other seven tribes of intelligence (government, military, law enforcement, commerce, media, non-profits, and civil societies including religions and labor unions are not addresses at all)
- talk about data intensive science but unwitting of urgency of getting to real-time science (changes that used to take 10,000 years now take 3)
- no discussion of retrospective research
- dismissive of self-publishing
- pre-print lag times to publishing are worse than the government
- peer review is broken (as well as tedious)
- conferences not yet digital
- dissemination, diffusion, publicity, transparency, discourse
- search and dfiscovery very corrupt (see Arnold--less than 2% efficacy)
- publishers losing ground to online (greed is killing them as well)
- termporal patterns and pattern analysis of the aggregate knowledge

Heart of the book is the issue of open access combined with the immaturity of the content, tools, and architecture of the digital world of knowledge. Legal, cultural, and technical obstacles will not be settled soon.

I put this book down with two thoughts: it is a stellar piece of well-documented and well-conceived reflection--and it barely scratches the surface of what can and should be known about scholarship in the digital age, to include call centers in China and India able to teach their respective 1.5 billion poor populations one cell call at a time. Schools and universities are still in the industrial era, half advanced day care and half prison. Knowledge is no longer an academic domain--it is the world brain emergent, with eight tribes of knowledge ignoring one another in 183 languages we don't speak, with the cell phone, not the laptop, as the great equalizer and enabler of the wealth of networks.


See also:
The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
The Age of Missing Information
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent roadmap for the next decade, May 28, 2009

By	Timothy Murray (Queens, New York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have spent the last dozen years working to put scholarly journals online, and thought that I was nearly done. Christine Borgman's book raises the questions that, I expect, will define the next dozen years of my career.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Circles around its thesis, March 11, 2009

By	Trevor Burnham (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a book that defines a central problem of information science: Ensuring that scholarly data is accessible and preserved. Right now, Borgman argues, we're failing on both counts. Not that she would make such a broad statement in this detailed treatise, which gives a broad overview of its subject but fails to illuminate it with any kind of narrative. The book is full of lines like this: "Efforts to 'database the world' of science are creating large repositories in some fields." The book would benefit tremendously if she would go into depth with one particular repository, to give the reader something concrete to grab a hold of rather than stating abstract facts over and over.

Borgman makes a compelling case that we have a problem; now we need someone to tell us how to solve it.