From the Social to the Individual and Back: The Cognitive Materialist Interpretation of Boundary Objects and Its Implications for Knowledge Organization Ingbert Floyd Thomas M. Dousa Michael B. Twidale Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Boundary Objects CM: Opening the Black Box of the Social CM View of BOs According to the the canonical interpretation, BOs exist at the boundary between 2+ communities. These communities are intentionally black-boxed to serve as basic units of analysis. But what happens when we open these black boxes? We find a similar situation going on: BOs exist at the boundary between 2+ individuals. The CM approach thus reveals that inter-community BOs also function as intra-community BOs . The Concept of Work as an Example The idea of a “work” is a central concept in cata-loging theory that has been developed for collocating library materials by literary unit. Different communities concerned with the library catalog will view the “work” from different perspectives: e.g. , Cataloging theorists: a “work” is an entity type within the bibliographical universe (BU) requiring rigorous definition within a BU model. Practicing catalogers: a “work” is whatever can be collocated under a single (uniform) title. Even within a single community, “work” is conceptualized in divergent ways: e.g., cf. the ER-based conceptualization of “work” in FRBR with Svenonius’s set-theoretical conceptualization [4]. “Work” thus functions both as an inter-community BO (between “theorists” and “practitioners”) and an intra-community BO (between different members of the community of cataloging theorists). Work Community 2 Community 1 Community 3 Boundary Object Boundary objects (BOs) are an analytic construct used to explain how members of different communities with multiple perspectives can coordinate activities around common objects without ceding their respective understandings of the objects. Objects can be abstract or concrete entities in the world, concepts derived from human interactions with these entities, or linguistic representations of these concepts [1, 2]. What makes something a BO? According to the canonical definitions of BOs [1, p. 297], they: are objects used by different communities of practice that satisfy each community’s informational requirements. are “plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites”. are “weakly structured in common use and become strongly structured in individual-site use”. “have different social meanings in different social worlds” but maintain sufficient structural identity to make them recognizable across these worlds serve as media for translation and negotiation across different communities. BOs are thus typically conceptualized as nodes of both cooperation and contestation among different social groups. Implications for KO Research The CM Model of BOs Allows researchers to model how the meaning of BOs like vocabulary terms, concepts, & classifications is formed at the micro-level of interaction of individuals within a community, at the macro-level of interaction between communities. Reminds researchers that, even when members of a single community appear to share a common perspective on a BO, their individual interpretations of that BO may vary. Some Questions for KO Research and Practice In gathering data for building domain-specific KO systems, is it enough to survey the literature of the domain alone? Or should the researcher also use methods like interviews or surveys to capture individual perspectives on key concepts and terms not available in the reference literature? Can breakdowns in communication about a BO within a community be used to identify sub-communities whose perspectives are important to include in a KO system? Ultimately, a CM approach to BOs can lead KO researchers to a finer-grained understanding of how epistemic communities function and provide new insights into factors to be taken into consideration in KO design. Moby Dick Revenge Hate Obsession Pathos Delirium “Moby Dick” My book my father gave me A book “The set of all documents sharing essentially the same information” [4, p. 35] “A distinct intellectual or artistic creation” [FRBR] “Work” How CM Can be Applied In order to analyze sociotechnical phenomena, we are developing a research program for CM whose main features are as follows: The researcher studies how multiple individuals conceptualize a particular BO candidate phenomenon. They also study how the individuals act in concert and communicate around the BO candidate. These investigations are based on both what the individuals say & write, and how the individuals act. The nature of any physical artifacts associated with the BO candidate are also studied. An analysis of the above data is performed to identify “natural” groupings around similar conceptions, unproblematic coordinated action, etc. Standard BO analysis is then applied to both these groupings and to individuals acting within them. A prototypical case for CM is when two people are communicating, think they are talking about the same thing, and then discover that they are not. CM accounts for “sameness” in belief or concepts: Without reason not to, each individual assumes his/her interlocutors’ understanding of the BO is identical to his/her own understanding. If communication about the object is not perceived as problematic, the assumption stays. If communicative disruption occurs, the understanding of the object must be negotiated between those individuals. Note that these individuals may or may not be members of the same natural grouping/community. Cognitive Materialism We propose cognitive materialism (CM) as a metaphysically conservative model of sociotechnical phenomena representing only things in the world and cognition related to those things. CM maps individual cognition into social collectives, and social collectives into individual cognition. This accords with the Latourian project of assembling social aggregates via the “tracing of associations” [3]. CM takes a bottom-up approach to explaining how knowledge is coordinated, constructed ,and communicated. The CM perspective complements the insights of domain analysis by viewing communities from the ground up (i.e., the individual-in-community) rather than from the top down (i.e., the social group as a single unit). References & Acknowledgements Bowker, G., & Star , S.L. (2000). Sorting things out: classification and its consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Koskinen, K.U. (2005). Metaphoric boundary objects as co-ordinating mechanisms in the knowledge sharing of innovation processes. European Journal of Innovation Management, 8(3), 323-335. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: an introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Svenonius, E. (2000). The intellectual foundation of information organization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. We thank members of the Friday Research Discussion Group and the Conceptual Foundations Discussion Group at GSLIS, University of Iliinois, Urbana-Champaign, for helpful critiques of some of the ideas presented here.