May

“Growing our connections to nature will allow us to push past mere intellect to embrace sensory experiences, emotions, intuition. (…) For the first time, a large body of research is illuminating the fact that our world arises from a sprawling, highly dynamic set of rhythms and relationships. (…) An especially intriguing aspect of this scientific shift – of this effort to break science out of the intellectual boxes we built for it – is the effort by some to merge traditional science with indigenous wisdom.” Gary Ferguson, 2019. Eight Master Lessons of Nature. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

May

"In categorical thinking the boundaries are drawn. But mystery is open-ended, messy, full of promise, and lacking in certainty. (...) What if we could free ourselves from the confines of certainty - to learn to dance with the fact that reality zigs and zags across shifting ground? (...) The effect is to create a fresh canvas onto which entirely new, more relational ways of thinking can be painted." Gary Ferguson, 2019. Eight Master Lessons of Nature. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

fair/fear

Milan, after immersing myself in the second Resonances exhibition about Fair/Fear. "How can we build a fair world? Science and art (SciArt) meet to provoke conversation and inspire answers to this question". Exhibition by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), EU. Explanations by Curator Paul Heard very enriching, adding depth, and new layers of meaning. Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

interpreting, changing

7 e 8 de Maio de 2015 | Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

Interpreting the World, Changing the World | Noam Chomsky
Can experiencing art lead to better scientists? Reflections and discussions | Samuel Meyler

silence

"Experience doesn't come raw, but it comes in real time, in wildness, and not in anyone s direct control. Responding to experience means letting generalization and specificity be in dialectic in our writings and in our biographies. And this in turn means resistance – to pressures for conformity and towards the uniform voice (although there are sometimes ethical reasons for presenting a united front )." Star, S. L., Bowker, G., (2007). Enacting silence: Residual categories as a challenge for ethics, information systems, and communication. Ethics and Information Technology, vol.9, pp. 273-280. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

transdisciplinarity is about transgressing boundaries

Helga Nowotny (2009), The Potencial of Transdisciplinarity:

"Here I want to assert that knowledge, as well as expertise, is inherently transgressive. Nobody has anywhere succeeded for very long in containing knowledge. Knowledge seeps through institutions and structures like water through the pores of a membrane. Knowledge seeps in both directions, from science to society as well as from society to science. It seeps through institutions and from academia to and from the outside world. Transdisciplinarity is therefore about transgressing boundaries. Institutions still exist and have a function. Disciplines still exist and new ones arise continuously from interdisciplinary work."

The Petabyte Age

To reflect and provoke! 

In the last Wired News, The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More — More Is Different, they have an entry about «The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete».

So where is the method? The scientific rigour? If what they state was true, than scientist would be obsolete. Scientific method is not only about finding correlations in data. The scientific method allows for a number of triangulations: data, methods & theory. Scientific method starts from choosing what kind of data to look for, how to collect it, how to analyze, how to interpret the data.

Anyhow, it shows that the perception that having access to large amounts of data can suffice to make science :S

ANT and Integration of Knowledge

Akera, A. (2007). Constructing a Representation for an Ecology of Knowledge: Methodological Advances in the Integration of Knowledge and its Various Contexts. Social Studies of Science, vol. 37(3), pp. 413:

"As we move away from studying laboratories, institutions, and sociotechnical networks to the more loosely coordinated technical exchanges that have begun to seem as important to scientific knowledge production and engineering work, an ecological view of knowledge re-emerges as a powerful metaphor for our discipline."