230183 SE How do we know? ICT and social knowledge production in academic research and beyond (2010W)

In recent years new applications emerged on the Web which have profoundly changed the way we create, distribute and process knowledge. A diversity of applications, such as search engines, recommender systems, online encyclopaedias, social bookmarking systems, different types of tagging, ranking and ratings tools have left a mark upon epistemic practices in everyday life as well as in academic research. The goal of this seminar is to shed some light on how epistemic practices in research and beyond are changing due to recent developments in information and communication technologies (ICT).
The seminar consists in two conceptual blocks. In the first part, an overview over different lines of thought in STS (e.g. Social Construction of Technology, Social Shaping of Technology, Actor-Network-Theory, Values in Design, feminist STS) is given and their respective utility and relevance for the analysis of different types of ICT will be assessed. A reader with obligatory as well as optional literature will be provided.
In Part 2, we analyze specific examples of ICT based on the insights gained in Part 1. Possible targets for such an analysis can be recommender systems, social tagging systems, search engines, etc., the choice is up to the interests of the students. The goal of these analyses is to apprehend and critically assess the interplay between the social, the technical and the epistemic, i.e. between individual and social epistemic practices, values, technologies and the resulting epistemic products.