Steps Towards an Infrastructure for Scholarly Synthesis (2407.20666v2)

Abstract: Sharing, reusing, and synthesizing knowledge is central to the research process, both individually, and with others. These core functions are not supported by our formal scholarly publishing infrastructure: instead of the smooth functioning of functional infrastructure, researchers resort to laborious "hacks" and workarounds to "mine" publications for what they need, and struggle to efficiently share the resulting information with others. Information scientists have proposed an alternative infrastructure based on the more appropriately granular model of a discourse graph of claims, and evidence, along with key rhetorical relationships between them. However, despite significant technical progress on standards and platforms, the predominant infrastructure remains steadfastly document-based. Drawing from infrastructure studies, we locate the current infrastructural bottlenecks in the lack of local systems that integrate discourse-centric models to augment synthesis work, from which an infrastructure for synthesis can be grown. Through 3 years of research through design and field deployment in a distributed community of hypertext notebook users, we elaborate a design vision of what can and should be built in order to grow a discourse-centric synthesis infrastructure: a thriving "installed base" of researchers authoring local, shareable discourse graphs to improve synthesis work, enhance primary research and research training, and augment collaborative research. We discuss how this design vision -- and our empirical work -- contributes steps towards a new infrastructure for synthesis, and increases HCI's capacity to advance collective intelligence and solve infrastructure-level problems.

• The paper presents a discourse-centric model that maps claims and evidence to enhance the precision of scholarly synthesis.
• It employs incremental formalization and customizable local grammars to seamlessly integrate synthesis with researchers' everyday workflows.
• A three-year field study demonstrates the system’s potential to foster adaptable, cross-domain research infrastructures.

Analysis of "Steps Towards an Infrastructure for Scholarly Synthesis"

The paper "Steps Towards an Infrastructure for Scholarly Synthesis" explores the foundational challenges and design possibilities surrounding the creation of a discourse-centric infrastructure to significantly enhance scholarly knowledge synthesis. This research is rooted in the acknowledgment that current document-based scholarly communication systems fall short in efficiently supporting the core research processes of sharing, reusing, and synthesizing knowledge. Despite advances in discourse graph models among information scientists, these models largely remain underutilized in practice due to infrastructural and sociotechnical bottlenecks.

Core Contributions and Design Approach

The authors present a compelling argument for transitioning towards a discourse-centric paradigm by leveraging a flexible, granular model that maps claims and evidence within a network of key rhetorical relationships. This model holds promise for optimizing synthesis by providing researchers with access to more precise, claim-level information rather than relying on coarse document-centric search and retrieval.

The research adopts a methodological stance characterized by Research through Design (RtD), facilitating the iterative development of infrastructure concepts. The authors conducted a three-year field paper employing a software extension for hypertext notebooks. This extension enabled the creation of local, discourse-centric synthesis systems that align with researchers’ day-to-day practices. The deployment revealed several crucial insights:

• Incremental Formalization: The extension implemented principles of incremental formalization, allowing users to authors discourse nodes and relations seamlessly alongside informal notes. This aligns with the broader goal of making synthesis work naturally fit into existing workflows, thereby reducing overhead and enhancing user engagement.
• Local Node and Relation Grammars: The system was designed to support customizable discourse grammars, thus permitting modification to fit specific research contexts. This flexibility highlights a step towards creating adaptable infrastructures that can accommodate diverse research processes and disciplines.
• Cross-Domain Synthesis Augmentation: Evidence from the deployment indicates that discourse graphs significantly improved researchers' ability to plan and produce research artifacts across various domains, spanning from empirical sciences to legal studies and venture development.

Implications for Infrastructure Growth

The research elucidates a potential pathway for the growth of an overview infrastructure by demonstrating how locally-focused systems can be networked to form larger systems. By fostering environments where discourse graphs are authored and shared more naturally, the community can accrete local systems into broader infrastructures over time. The organic transfer of discourse graphing practices to different technical substrates, such as Obsidian and Logseq, provides a promising signal of technology transfer that could herald future networked synthesis infrastructures.

The paper reinforces the notion that successful infrastructure growth is socio-technical in nature and calls for aligning human collaboration and technical innovation. This approach underlines the necessity of ensuring system usability, local adaptability, and practical utility, all foundational to incentivizing the broader adoption necessary for systemic evolution.

Path Forward and Future Considerations

This research underscores the complexity of forging a coherent research synthesis infrastructure, revealing several research avenues within HCI:

• Enhanced Edge Formalization: Future enhancements might explore integrating AI-driven tools for recognizing discourse relations more fluidly within existing workflows, potentially leveraging natural language processing and machine learning techniques to further reduce the burden on users.
• Standardization Initiatives: As practices evolve, efforts towards the standardization of discourse graphing elements and relations could function to bridge research traditions, fostering interoperability across diverse scientific disciplines.
• Transdisciplinary Collaboration Tools: The versatility of discourse graphs in supporting collaboration could be broadened to exploring new interface designs that further enhance group sensemaking and knowledge co-construction activities.

In summary, this paper provides a thoughtful and reflective account of the challenges and possibilities in architecting a new articulation of scholarly synthesis infrastructure. Through their pragmatic research-through-design approach, the authors offer a profound contribution to envisioning, prototyping, and incrementally refining the scaffolds of a potentially transformative scholarly ecosystem.