Networks of Knowledge


Book Description

Examines the 'knowledge network' whose primary mandate is to create and disseminate knowledge based on multidisciplinary research that is informed by problem-solving as well as theoretical agendas.




Knowledge Networks


Book Description

Knowledge Networks describes the role of networks in the knowledge economy, explains network structures and behaviors, walks the reader through the design and setup of knowledge network analyses, and offers a step by step methodology for conducting a knowledge network analysis.




Networks in the Knowledge Economy


Book Description

In today's de-layered, knowledge-intensive organizations, most work of importance is heavily reliant on informal networks of employees within organizations. However, most organizations do not know how to effectively analyze this informal structure in ways that can have a positive impact on organizational performance. Networks in the Knowledge Economy is a collection of readings on the application of social network analysis to managerial concerns. Social network analysis (SNA), a set of analytic tools that can be used to map networks of relationships, allows one to conduct very powerful assessments of information sharing within a network with relatively little effort. This approach makes the invisible web of relationships between people visible, helping managers make informed decisions for improving both their own and their group's performance. Networks in the Knowledge Economy is specifically concerned with networks inside of organizations and addresses three critical areas in the study of social networks: Social Networks as Important Individual and Organizational Assets, Social Network Implications for Knowledge Creation and Sharing, and Managerial Implications of Social Networks in Organizations. Professionals and students alike will find this book especially valuable, as it provides readings on the application of social network analysis that reflect managerial concerns.




Ancient Knowledge Networks


Book Description

Ancient Knowledge Networks is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies as well as in writings. It explores the forms knowledge takes and the meanings it accrues, and how these meanings are shaped by the peoples who use it.Addressing the relationships between political power, family ties, religious commitments and literate scholarship in the ancient Middle East of the first millennium BC, Eleanor Robson focuses on two regions where cuneiform script was the predominant writing medium: Assyria in the north of modern-day Syria and Iraq, and Babylonia to the south of modern-day Baghdad. She investigates how networks of knowledge enabled cuneiform intellectual culture to endure and adapt over the course of five world empires until its eventual demise in the mid-first century BC. In doing so, she also studies Assyriological and historical method, both now and over the past two centuries, asking how the field has shaped and been shaped by the academic concerns and fashions of the day. Above all, Ancient Knowledge Networks is an experiment in writing about ‘Mesopotamian science’, as it has often been known, using geographical and social approaches to bring new insights into the intellectual history of the world’s first empires.




Empires of Knowledge


Book Description

Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks – local and long-distance, informal and institutional, religious and secular – as one of the important phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the brokers of this world were. Bringing together an international group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of well-known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship on the many less prominent go-betweens, such as translators and local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and truly global institutions. Empires of Knowledge is the perfect introduction to the global history of early modern science and medicine.




Knowledge Networks


Book Description

Knowledge Networks: Innovation Through Communities of Practice explores the inner workings of an organizational, internationally distributed Community of Practice. The book highlights the weaknesses of the 'traditional' KM approach of 'capture-codify-store' and asserts that communities of practice are recognized as groups where soft (knowledge that cannot be captured) knowledge is created and sustained. Readers will gain insight into a period the life of a distributed international community of practice by following the members as they work, meet, collaborate, interact and socialize.




Curious Minds


Book Description

An exhilarating, genre-bending exploration of curiosity’s powerful capacity to connect ideas and people. Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what’s left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems—the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other. Zurn and Bassett—identical twins who write that their book “represents the thought of one mind and two bodies”—harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Victorian poetry and nature essays, as well as work by writers from a variety of marginalized communities, they trace a multitudinous curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity—the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. And they sketch out a new kind of curiosity-centric and inclusive education that embraces everyone’s curiosity. The book performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting readers to participate—to be curious with the book and not simply about it.




The Origins of Higher Learning


Book Description

Higher education has become a worldwide phenomenon where students now travel internationally to pursue courses and careers, not simply as a global enterprise, but as a network of worldwide interconnections. The Origins of Higher Learning: Knowledge networks and the early development of universities is an account of the first globalisation that has led us to this point, telling of how humankind first developed centres of higher learning across the vast landmass from the Atlantic to the China Sea. This book opens a much-needed debate on the origins of higher learning, exploring how, why and where humankind first began to take a sustained interest in questions that went beyond daily survival. Showing how these concerns became institutionalised and how knowledge came to be transferred from place to place, this book explores important aspects of the forerunners of globalisation. It is a narrative which covers much of Asia, North Africa and Europe, many parts of which were little known beyond their own boundaries. Spanning from the earliest civilisations to the end of the European Middle Ages, around 700 years ago, here the authors set out crucial findings for future research and investigation. This book shows how interconnections across continents are nothing new and that in reality, humankind has been interdependent for a much longer period than is widely recognised. It is a book which challenges existing accounts of the origins of higher learning in Europe and will be of interest to all those who wish to know more about the world of academia.




Network of Knowledge


Book Description

Nagasaki during the Tokugawa (1603–1868) was truly Japan's window on the world with its Chinese residences and Deshima island, where Western foreigners, including representatives of the Dutch East India Company, were confined. In 1785 Ōtsuki Gentaku (1757–1827) journeyed from the capital to Nagasaki to meet Dutch physicians and the Japanese who acted as their interpreters. Gentaku was himself a physician, but he was also a Dutch studies (rangaku) scholar who passionately believed that European science and medicine were critical to Japan's progress. Network of Knowledge examines the development of Dutch studies during the crucial years 1770–1830 as Gentaku, with the help of likeminded colleagues, worked to facilitate its growth, creating a school, participating in and hosting scholarly and social gatherings, and circulating books. In time the modest, informal gatherings of Dutch studies devotees (rangakusha), mostly in Edo and Nagasaki, would grow into a pan-national society. Applying ideas from social network theory and Bourdieu's conceptions of habitus, field, and capital, this volume shows how Dutch studies scholars used networks to grow their numbers and overcome government indifference to create a dynamic community. The social significance of rangakusha, as much as the knowledge they pursued in medicine, astronomy, cartography, and military science, was integral to the creation of a Tokugawa information revolution—one that saw an increase in information gathering among all classes and innovative methods for collecting and storing that information. Although their salons were not as politically charged as those of their European counterparts, rangakusha were subversive in their decision to include scholars from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds. They created a cultural society of civility and play in which members worked toward a common cultural goal. This insightful study reveals the strength of the community's ties as it follows rangakusha into the Meiji era (1868–1912), when a new generation championed values and ambitions similar to those of Gentaku and his peers. Network of Knowledge offers a fresh look at the cultural and intellectual environment of the late Tokugawa that will be welcomed by scholars and students of Japanese intellectual and social history.




Principles of Semantic Networks


Book Description

Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in the Representation of Knowledge provides information pertinent to the theory and applications of semantic networks. This book deals with issues in knowledge representation, which discusses theoretical topics independent of particular implementations. Organized into three parts encompassing 19 chapters, this book begins with an overview of semantic network structure for representing knowledge as a pattern of interconnected nodes and arcs. This text then analyzes the concepts of subsumption and taxonomy and synthesizes a framework that integrates many previous approaches and goes beyond them to provide an account of abstract and partially defines concepts. Other chapters consider formal analyses, which treat the methods of reasoning with semantic networks and their computational complexity. This book discusses as well encoding linguistic knowledge. The final chapter deals with a formal approach to knowledge representation that builds on ideas originating outside the artificial intelligence literature in research on foundations for programming languages. This book is a valuable resource for mathematicians.