Dear FISers,
I have no difficulty in understanding Loet's approach as measuring one form of
interdisciplinarity. However, it requires well-defined quantitative entities -
classes, categories and journal articles to which they apply. I thus do not
think that it exhausts the possibilities of the informational domain with
regard to disciplines.
When John C. talks about "references crossing ecology, management and poltical
science", what is of interest to me and perhaps others is the 'substance' so to
speak of the crossing. To make things difficult (rather than easy for a
change), let us assume that this substance includes, but is not limited to
common assumptions and common attitudes. (My informational exchanges today are
more interdisciplinary because I am paying more attention to the way in which
information is processed in the different disciplines.)
The task then becomes to express the 'substance' in informational terms. What
informational terms are possible that are not numbers or ad hoc Peircean
categories? The first thing I see is that the corresponding logic and category
theory must be non-standard or it will miss the interactions and overlaps
between disciplines. The next thing might be to change to a process
perspective, looking at the way in which the disciplines, considered as
informational entities, influence one another, and find some formal but
non-mathematical language for referring to this. Are there any suggestions for
such a language?
Looking over what I just wrote off the top of my head, I note that I used the
term 'way' twice. Does this suggest a new role for the informational domain?
Cheers,
Joseph
----- Original Message -----
From: Loet Leydesdorff
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2015 9:34 AM
Subject: Re: [Fis] RV: THE FOURTH GREAT DOMAIN OFSCIENCE: INFORMATIONAL?
(R.Capurro)
Dear colleagues,
For the measurement of interdisciplinarity, one can use, for example,
Rao-Stirling diversity which is defined as follows (Rao, 1982; Stirling, 2007):
Δ = Σij pi pj dij (1)
where dij is a disparity measure between two classes i and j-the categories
are in the case below journals-and pi is the proportion of elements assigned to
each class i. As the disparity measure, we use the distances on an aggregated
journal-journal citation map (Leydesdorff, Heimeriks, & Rotolo, in press;
Leydesdorff, Rafols, & Chen, 2013).
For example, 23 publications can be retrieved as of today with the search
string "au=Marijuan P*" at WoS. The journal map is as follows:
and the Rao-Stirling diversity ("interdisciplinarity") of this set is 01282.
If I repeat the analysis with the search string "au=leydesdorff l*", I
retrieve 270 documents; Rao-Stirling diversity is 0.0805.
In other words, Leydesdorff is more prolific than Marijuan in terms of WoS
publications, but Marijuan's portfolio is more interdisciplinary than
Leydesdorff's.
One finds the relevant software at
http://www.leydesdorff.net/portfolio/index.htm
Reference:
Leydesdorff, L., Heimeriks, G., & Rotolo, D. (2015 (in press)). Journal
Portfolio Analysis for Countries, Cities, and Organizations: Maps and
Comparisons. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
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