Séminaire de Willem Halffman, professeur à l’Institute for Science in Society de l’Université Radboud, aux Pays-Bas, le 28/10/25 (11h-12h30)

Le 28 octobre de 11h à 12h30 salle 101, Willem Halffman donnera un exposé intitulé « The library and the database: two imaginaries for the research literature », dont l’abstract est détaillé ci-dessous. La présentation sera suivie d’un buffet offert par le projet NanoBubbles.

Willem Halffman est professeur à l’Institute for Science in Society de l’Université Radboud, aux Pays-Bas.

Titre de l’exposé :

The library and the database: two imaginaries for the research literature

Abstract:

Two competing imaginaries inform the current wave of innovations in research publishing: one that perceives ‘the literature’ as a library of research accounts, and one that sees it as a gigantic database. While the library portrays acquiring knowledge as an act of reading texts informed by an understanding of its inter-textual setting, the database sees the literature as a collection of verified facts that can be extracted, ‘mined’. Both imaginaries present different understandings of what the research literature is, of which knowledge is valued in that literature, how it should be curated and what it should be usable for. Using basic notions of socio-technical infrastructures and inspired by the work of Ricœur, we analyse how these imaginaries are at work in current publishing innovations, such as new tools for enriching text with tags for uniquely identified research entities, new publication platforms and formats such as micro-publications or mega-journals, or forms of meta-analysis. We highlight how both imaginaries can derail into phantasmagories and explore how reflecting on their premises can inform productive accommodations of both.