A Route Finder for Personal Scientific Progress

Short description:

A map of scientific fields could be created (including areas of different scientific domains and connections/roads/paths between them). You could then locate both your current position and the position of your scientific goal on that map. This would enable you to plot the most efficient "progress route" leading to your goal.


Driving Questions:

1. Is it possible to create a map of scientific disciplines (where individual fields have meaningful relations)?
2. Can you locate your scientific goal on that very same map (i.e. can you somehow integrate the spaces of scientific fields and scientific knowledge into a single picture)?
3. Could such a map be helpful for someone’s personal scientific progress?

Reflection:

The idea, as it is presented here, is a pretty straightforward combination/integration of both my and Natalia’s thoughts that arose out of our individual "woodland experiences". While I perceived the woods and underbrush as a metaphor for some sort of "knowledge space" that becomes navigatable by various kinds of present paths (ranging from broad roads to hardly visible animal paths) and is constrained by barriers and transitions, Natalia understood certain continuous areas (like meadows and clearings) as individual scientific "fields" (which may or may not be identifiable with established disciplines), that are interconnected by roads. That is, one can discover optimal paths to move from one "field" to another.

We realized that we both tried to visualize certain science-related spaces as maps, and that we associated progress with path-like structures traversing these, having a number of attributes (like ease of passage).

Another influential point for our project idea was Natalia’s report (during the earlier Dialog) that there are a number of frustrating factors for people actually working in science, including a dissociation from results (not perceiving them as the creation of scientific knowledge), conducting science just like any other job (being part of a nearly automatic system), being stuck on a "career track", getting "lost" in the details of one scientific field, and not being able to ask the questions that seemed relevant in the beginning.

Bringing together these two inspirations, we then discussed whether it would actually be feasible to create such a combined map of scientific fields and knowledge/questions, and if such a map could have properties that make it useful for the individual scientist, who tries, in a sense, to "naviagte" these spaces, both with his/her career, and his/her curiosity.