What is Web Science? No really, What is the CORE of Web Science? the Web Self

Ok What IS Web Science?

This question was posed at the recent web science conference by some wild and crazy researchers from that wild and crazy town, Paris. The resulting video features Tim Berners-Lee speaking French, among others. french words french words french words french words linked-data french wordsf rench words...

Last year for the Web science workshop at the WWW conference, a few of us also sent in a video asking the question "what is web science" (that alas we had to agree never to show again -something about TBL in the WSRI space station, i think). It featured a series of long pauses and laughter from researchers working in the very area in response to the question. Including with Tim. Now there's this new video. And no pauses, but with long and divergent replies. Except from Wendy Hall with her concise " it's the intersection of these disciplines but more than that. it's everything really" We'll come back to this.

But the Paris Video goes beyond this fundamental What is It question and asks: "what is the core of Web Science" with answers from its four experts supplied in due form.

That's the question that got me thinking. what's the core of web science?

my first thought that 'it's an egg' - i don't know where that came from, but setting that aside, the core of web science now it seems is a leap of faith, a trusting of instinct, and a large excavation project.

It reminds me of the way stephen king describes writing a story - as archaeology - that one is brushing and trowling away the bones in situ - to say "gosh what is that?"

To rif past where King stops, to talk a little more about archaeology, the practice is, as we excavate, we apply theories to what we see. Even if there's only a piece of it. Even when we have the whole thing we don't always know what it is or how it works. we're still making up stories to understand it. we seek models we can test against the discovery.

There's the old story in archaeology that when you don't know what something is, call it a religious artefact. My favorite application of this theory has been to what will happen centuries from now when aliens dig up the 6 ring pop can holders? religious artefact of some dualistic trinity: it's a ubiquitous symbol, it's made of stuff that lasts eternally so must have high value, it's also cheap and portable so used cross culutrally, etc etc etc.

In the case of even defining web science, it strikes me again as this kind of excavation at the present (or perhaps it's like how cosmologists detect a new star). We know something's there, and it's big. We know it's exerting an effect and we know that it operates in several disciplinary dimensions. Part of the challenge at the heart of web science is how do we combine these lenses into an Uber Lens to enable us to see this thing better?

And why would we want to do that anyway?

More than because it's there, it's something new to do, or any other cynical codswallop (there's a word you don't get to use every day), but more i think because, this is something WE made - we contribute to it and use it daily. Tim may be the Big Bang but we're all engaging in the expanding universe's cosmology. There, i have shifted metaphors from archaeology to Big Science. Yodelayheehoo as Laurie Anderson once said.

Big Science?

But it's in that yodel where those of us thinking about the Web and it's effect - and the web and models for webliness may be drawn. Tim has compared the number of web connections with the numbers of neurons in the brain "there the comparison kind of stops" he says, but it's still something of a gee whiz. does that mean something?

It's kind of interesting that we actually struggle to find a succinct definition of what it is we're trying to do. Did computer science have this hard a time when it was breaking away from Math to call itself a Thing? Did the Defense Department? Several Scientific Board meetings have been given over to asking this question "what is web science" - and coming at a reply rather obliquely in "the overlap of a bunch of disciplines" Somehow that just seems dissatisfying.

So we come at it by questions where we don't have answers: what's the predictive model for the web, for instance? but that doesn't really set anyone's hair on fire, does it?

More i think it's that there's a gal who got a bee in her bonnet to trust her gut that there's something there, and then fired up a bunch of other people [ insert link to future novel, large historical archive of letters, photos, etc here] to say "yes, we could do something with this."

Which comes back to the core, and the excavation, and the need to do this.

There was a book in the 80's with the unfortunately gender specific title of Grammatical Man. The argument was very interesting though: that all the things we build are in some ways (if i remember this right) examples of us trying to rebuild ourselves to understand ourselves. Rockets and machines and all such things were part of this case. But these are the products of specialists that are largely only consumed by us (the products, not the specialists). this is the one where we all kick at it - it's such a cool platform; we're working to make it even more malleable.

With the web, we are all webbed up. Increasing numbers of us are adding to it. There have been world wide networks before, and continue to be the same for telecommunications, learning, etc. But they are also service oriented, infrastructure oriented, rather than something whose strings we keep tugging at, keep from going transparent. And while there is great interest to include the social side of the Web in any discussion of Web Science (pdf), what does the fact that that is such a part of this thing mean? Here, with the great ability to post our thoughts for the world to see, and exchange micro bits of information with each other, mediated via this massive IT that is THE WEB we have something we haven't had before in terms of record (though that too is reshaping since pages change so frequently - stability and its value are being replaced with currency perhaps?).

Mirror Mirror

There is something so narcissistic about the web too. In Wim Wender's Until the End of the World,

participants became lost in being able to rewatch recordings of their own dreams. Now, we can rewatch our blog posts, or social network status, or "ego check" our "selves" on google. We are our own favorite commodity. There's nothing new there, but that we have this super new mirror, this social grooming, this status in multiple new dimensions.

What is this? No wonder there's a group of people asking this question. That the first organized cadre happens to be mainly engineers and social scientists is perhaps no surprise. How do we build it? Where are we going with it? What have we done? what are we doing?

Some other questions that may be related - i mean, you have to ask - is, especially with the brain parallel, will it (whatever the web is/has evolved/evolving into) become aware? evolve its own kind of intelligence (it certainly seems to know a lot about us) - with Web Science, will we become aware of it first? and then what?

Even that's a question in the web science agenda: once we get to grips with this discovery of the web's 'ness, what will that let us do that we couldn't do before? predict the next phenomenon before it emerges so we can all develop great IPO's? That's more codswallop, of course. But perhaps, perhaps being able to get a sense of immanent emergence is a good thing. Are there any examples in science fiction where that's the case?

What are we making here in our own image? Consider the early days of the web. People's photos of their cats, and a huge drive to produce credit card security for buying porn. There are anthropologists on the WSRI board? Is the Web our mirror? or just a mirror for some of us? If it reflects all our basic desires (and why wouldn't it), we see there are healers and healing across the web. Has there been the opposite too? It's roots in Arpanet.

And if this web thing is us - our wiring and desires all exposed and writ so vast we need a new science to understand it, will we find ourselves looking back up the microscope, and find we're not at all really who we thought we were? Do we ever transcend our expectations of ourselves?

So what is the core of Web Science? well it's us, isn't it? it is the archaeology and cosmology and engineering of a question that has bridged, it seems, who am i, to who are we? That in itself seems a profound evolution of our identity from i to we. or perhaps its not us that's evolved, but this thing outside us, that is so much about and for us, but may end up not being and being us all at once.

Oh yes, web science, go go go. Lay down, web scientists wanna be's or already are's, the requirements to say "this is what web science is; here's our 20 page manifesto" and hire up some medievalists to go with the anthropologists to help tell the story that web science is about discovery. IT's the tale of the green knight. It's not a quest, but it's the inescapable pull of self, isn't it: there's an entity Out There - that we seem to have created - that escapes our ken, and we want to ken it; we need to ken it. There's really no option: we're gonna ken it, or give it a dam good go. It's too fort - da compelling.   

Yes, it seems so clear and inevitable now: of course there's a web science. somehow we'll get what that learning may be. We may even get to that uber lens of disciplines to uncover this thing, if we realize, despite all the talk of big machines, huge scale and everything else, we are looking for while trying to develop another, a new, model of ourselves, and we are all pouring into that those grains of ourselves we wish others to know, love, desire of ourselves. Including successful research careers. But perhaps something gestaltier, too?

And one more thought - in our projects to enhance the web, if we ask ourselves if they reflect our better selves, our best selves, is this what we'd be doing first?

thanks for reading.

mc

wsri

research "fellow"