CfP: Synthese Topical Collection, Digital Studies of Digital Science

Guest Editor(s): Charles H. Pence and Luca Rivelli, Université catholique de Louvain

Following our recent DS² 2021 conference, we are now opening submissions for a Topical Collection at Synthese covering the same subjects, in addition to including the papers presented during the meeting.

We hope to bring together scholars working on two separate trends. First, the products of science themselves have increasingly become digital – from big data produced in laboratory contexts to the increasingly dominant roles of social media and preprints in the dissemination of results. Second, the methods that we use to study those products have also become digitized – scholars including philosophers, historians, linguists, and sociologists have turned to tools like network and citation analysis, textual analysis (and other tools of the digital humanities), and modeling and simulation, in our attempts to understand science and its changes over time. Both of these shifts have made a substantial impact on the epistemic landscape of science, and are in the process of reshaping the philosophy of  science in particular and science studies more generally.

What has been lacking, we think, is the opportunity for dialogue between these two groups of researchers. On the one hand, meta-level claims about digital methods in science should often apply to cases where these methods are used in the humanities. And conversely, those interested in the epistemic characteristics of these digital methods in general should be able to learn from instances of their application in the humanities as well. We thus hope to put these two groups in dialogue, looking for new insights and modes of research enabled by our digital study of digital scientific products.

Appropriate Topics for Submission include, among others: philosophy of digital science and mathematics, philosophy of big data, history of data in science and mathematics, digital humanities, visualization of meta-level studies of science and mathematics, scientometrics and bibliometrics. For more ideas about the scope of the call, you can see
the list of accepted talks from the conference at its website: <https://pencelab.be/events/ds2-2021/>

For further information, please contact the guest editors: Charles Pence and Luca Rivelli.

The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2021