Digital HPS Initiative Summit
Marine Biological Laboratory, February 25-28, 2010
Description
The Digital HPS workshop follows on several previous workshops and informal discussions about the need to develop a digital infrastructure for History and Philosophy of Science. The goal of this workshop is to map out a detailed plan for a distributed digital infrastructure. It brings together major projects and stakeholder in Digital HPS.
Background
Over the last two decades the life sciences have experienced unprecedented growth and developed a whole new explanatory paradigm of systems biology. These conceptual developments have been based on a shift away from simple causal explanations based on clearly identifiable factors, such as individual genes, and towards an emphasis on multiple factors and their interactions. Technological advances, especially in the area of bioinformatics, have played a central and crucial part in these conceptual changes (NCBI, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/). As a consequence, the life sciences are now to a large degree information-based with the relevant information stored in both centralized and distributed databases. Sophisticated search algorithms and queries based on conceptual models and ontologies (in the computer science designation of the word), standardized annotation practices and new generations of relational databases connecting different kinds of data are the foundation of these new forms of life science research.
Scholars in the Science Studies community (history, philosophy, and sociology of science) have always emphasized complex explanations of historical events, which are mostly presented as historical and richly contextual narratives and are thus always the end result of years of individual scholarship. What the science studies community has not yet embraced are the enormous benefits of the informatics revolution that has transformed the life sciences with respect to the organization of multiple forms of complex data, shared access to these data, searches in distributed relational databases that are organized around standardized practices of database management and the possibilities of digital workbenches for collaborative and distributed research. All these developments have also contributed to robust cyber-infrastructure, which has changed the ways biologists go about their research (Ouzounis 2002). In other words, the science studies community is missing out on new ways to conduct and organize research and to store, distribute and analyze data. One of the main consequences of the bioinformatics revolution has been the possibility of large-scale and comparative analysis of data and the integration of detailed experimental research with readily available points of comparison. This strategy has facilitated a bottom-up approach that allows biologists to find patterns of increasing generality. Insofar as one goal of the science studies community is to better understand both individual sciences as well as science at large in its various contexts (technological, theoretical, historical, social or political), it too will have to move beyond the particular and focus on general patters wherever these do exist, a goal greatly facilitated by the tools of the informatics revolution.
The goal is to prepare a concrete proposal and development plan for a digital infrastructure for the HPS community. At this meeting we will produce a draft of this grant. We will be circulating ideas, relevant literature, and newly developed technologies between now and our workshop. These can be found at the Discussion Forum on this website.