By Rob Mitchum // November 22, 2013
The Internet has revolutionized the way we access and use the vast amount of knowledge accumulated by mankind. With the Knowledge Lab, CI fellow James Evans is taking these advances to the next level by using these massive libraries of information to study the very process of creating knowledge. Not only does this work hope to provide new insight into how we arrived at the information we have today, but it promises to point the way to more effective and efficient methods of generating tomorrow’s discoveries.
In a new feature for the University of Chicago Division of Social Sciences written by William Harms, Evans and his plans for the Knowledge Lab are profiled.
The promise of metaknowledge is its potential to uncover hidden biases, suggest new questions and help define new hypotheses that may have been missed in the conventional, individual process of preparing and publishing research.
“If we are successful, we will improve the quality of science,” Evans said. Not only will new questions get asked, but scientists will be better able to track which ideas and which research proves most productive. That kind of evaluation not only traces what has been studied and how, but models what could have been researched, will help research institutions as well as government and private funders better understand how to invest research funds, Evans said.
You can read the full article here, and watch a companion video interview below.