Wüthrich, Adrian (2023) Characterizing a collaboration by its communication structure. Synthese, 202 (5). ISSN 1573-0964

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Abstract

I present first results of my analysis of a collection of about 24,000 email messages from internal mailing lists of the ATLAS collaboration, at CERN, the particle physics laboratory, during the years 2010–2013. I represent the communication on these mailing lists as a network in which the members of the collaboration are connected if they reply to each other’s messages. Such a network allows me to characterize the collaboration from a bird’s eye view of its communication structure in epistemically relevant terms. I propose to interpret established measures such as the density of the network as indicators for the degree of “collaborativeness” of the collaboration and the presence of “communities” as a sign of cognitive division of labor. Similar methods have been used in philosophical and historical studies of collective knowledge generation but mostly at the level of information exchange, cooperation and competition between individual researchers or small groups. The present article aims to take initial steps towards a transfer of these methods and bring them to bear on the processes of collaboration inside a “collective author.”

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Item Type:	Published Article or Volume
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Wüthrich, Adrian 0000-0002-6237-7327
Keywords:	Scientific collaboration; Network analysis; Social epistemology; Digital humanities; High-energy physics; ATLAS collaboration; Born-digital sources
Subjects:	General Issues > History of Science Case Studies Specific Sciences > Physics General Issues > Social Epistemology of Science
Depositing User:	Adrian Wüthrich
Date Deposited:	08 Nov 2023 18:37
Last Modified:	09 Nov 2023 21:39
Item ID:	22748
Journal or Publication Title:	Synthese
Publisher:	Springer Nature
Official URL:	http://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04376-z
DOI or Unique Handle:	10.1007/s11229-023-04376-z
Subjects:	General Issues > History of Science Case Studies Specific Sciences > Physics General Issues > Social Epistemology of Science
Date:	2 November 2023
Volume:	202
Number:	5
ISSN:	1573-0964
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/22748

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