2009 ALISE Conference

i-Create Accelerated Discovery: A 2020 Educational Vision

Glynn Harmon
School of Information D 7000
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712-0390
(512) 471-3972
gharmon@ischool.utexas.edu

i-Create Accelerated Discovery: A 2020 Educational Vision

This paper explores a targeted educational initiative for LIS and i-Schools—that of promoting accelerated discovery throughout the arts, sciences, professions and the general public. A few research and governmental organizations have already adopted the mission of accelerating discovery. Within information science and professionalism, the integrative concept of discovery potentially provides a clear outcome metric for information seekers—the successful culmination of inquiry. Discovery acceleration heuristics can also guide the development and operation of numerous, supportive information infrastructures, including ambient information environments. The mission of accelerated discovery can also serve to bridge long-standing splits within the information professions (e.g., between system and user orientations and between theory and practice advocates).

A requisite approach to accelerating discovery is time compression—a systematic reduction of the time span between a seminal inquiry about a given theme and its successful culmination as a personally or socially acknowledged discovery. Scientific and mathematical discoveries, for example, required about 300 years during ancient times, about 100-200 years during the middle ages, and about 10-60 years in recent times. Concepts that lead to a discovery are distributed in statistically predictable ways along a chronological timeline, and are numerically limited to about seven key elements, in accordance with the limits of human short-term memory (Harmon, 1973). Thus, information retrieval efforts can be directed to scan for key concepts along timeline positions and organize them into patterns most likely to produce a discovery (Harmon, 1978). A discovery may thus be defined as a complete and ordered set of cognitive elements or chunks aligned to produce a breakthrough (Goffman and Harmon, 1971). Through the systematic application of time compression and conceptual ordering, future scientific discovery time spans might be drastically reduced.

Another approach to accelerating discovery includes the use of General Systems Theory templates, which have been used to explain Nobel laureate discovery patterns in medicine and physiology at the cellular, organ and organism levels. Systems ontology could be applied in human-computer interfacing to prompt discovery (Balcom, 2005).

Chapters in recent volumes (36-42) of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology discuss integrative information infrastructure approaches and technologies that potentially support accelerated discovery. Approaches include knowledge mining and discovery; bibliometric and webometric analysis; knowledge mapping and visualization; formal concept analysis; information behavior and activity analysis; semantic web analysis; social and museum informatics; and the mapping of research specialties. Current and evolving technologies include digital libraries; co-laboratories; advanced human-computer interfaces; knowledge-based systems; and machine learning.

An audacious 2020 AD vision for i-Schools involves partially embedding themselves into their respective university’s research administration leadership divisions (Harmon, 2006). I-Schools could lead in accelerating discovery via the development of a meta-science of search and research. This effort would involve the consolidation of key search/research engine heuristics and algorithms and of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies from a multitude of disciplinary and professional domains. Deployments of highly effective multidisciplinary search/research methods could thus accelerate discovery (Harmon, 2005).