What an entangled Web we weave: An information-centric approach to socio-technical systems
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Data Mining and Machine Learning, Data Science, Network Science and Online Social Networks, Social Computing, World Wide Web and Web Science
- Keywords
- Socio-technical Systems, Information Theory, Networks and Communities, Temporal Data Mining, Collective Intelligence, Augmented Intelligence, Social Machines, Citizen Science, Information Dynamics, Online Communities
- Copyright
- © 2017 Luczak-Roesch et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. What an entangled Web we weave: An information-centric approach to socio-technical systems. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2789v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2789v1
Abstract
Motivated by the increasing amount of voices who ask for careful consideration of what context-rich data analysis methods can tell us about the activities of human collectives, we contribute an argumentation that employs a dialectic of literature on the philosophy of truth and science as well as analytical methods for the study of information diffusion, Web graphs and social networks in order to make a case for changing the current view to the actions of human collectives in the digital. We strengthen our meta argument by a case study about one particular method that breaks with the causality assumption that is inherent in many of today’s methods and allows to capture novel dimensions of complexity of information sharing from a macroscopic cross-system perspective. We discuss whether this kind of analysis may generically suit to underpin the field of socio-technical systems with a novel information-centric theory.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ. This paper has not been published or accepted for publication. It is not under consideration at another journal. It draws upon the conclusions from studies that were undertaken (and published) independently before (Luczak-Roesch et al., 2014; Luczak-Roesch et al., 2015a; Luczak-Roesch et al., 2015b; Luczak-Roesch et al., 2015c; Tinati, R., Luczak-Roesch, M. & Hall, W., 2016; Tinati, R., Luczak-Roesch, M., Hall, W. & Shadbolt, N., 2016). The overall argumentation as presented in this paper is the result of the comprehensive feedback collected from presentations of the Transcendental Information Cascades approach at various scientific events, but has not been presented before in its current form.