On studying information seeking methodologically: the implications of connecting metatheory to method

Theory constructs its evidence, and values and faith construct what constitute theory. [Maines, D. R. & Molseed, M. J. (1986). The obsessive discoverer's complex and the ‘discovery’ of growth in sociological theory. American Journal of Sociology, 92(1), 158–163.]To admit that knowledge is intrinsically erroneous is not to imply that we should forego it. [McGuire, W. J. (1986). A perspectivist looks at contextualism and the future of behavioral science. In R. L. Rosnow & M. Georgoudi (Eds.), Contextualism and understanding in behavioral science: implications for research and theory. New York: Praeger, 271–301.]It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must… tear itself from all referents and take pride in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality. [Baudrillard, J. (1988). The ecstasy of communication. New York: Semiotext(e).]The purpose I have mandated for this article is to explore the implications of articulating the bridges that are built, usually implicitly, between metatheory and method, and between these and their ultimate interests, the doing of research. The purpose is to articulate the uses of methodology. To chart this as a mandate is to assume, in contradiction to extant wisdom, that: (1) the journey has not yet been fully mapped; and (2) in fact there are multiple and everchanging ways of bridging these gaps with no one agreed upon single set of criteria by which the results can be evaluated. Above these assumptions is a higher level assumption that impels this journey -- that taking an explicitly and self-consciously methodological approach is necessary to the improvement of the enterprise of systematic study.It is the primary purpose of this paper to illustrate by example the statements made above. The argument supporting the statements can be found elsewhere (A longer version of this paper is available which includes arguments regarding inattentions to methodology and a bibliography which includes authors writing on the issue. Readers who wish a copy may contact dervin.1@osu.edu). Suffice it to say here that the statements above rest on the assumption that in the midst of the paradigm battles which mark today's study of humans and their conditions, methodology as a term is highly contested, much abused, and frequently ignored. It is referred to either as method, or as metatheorical critique of the constructing of theory. It is, thus, either collapsed into method or collapsed into metatheory and in either locale it disappears. Rarely, however, is methodology attended to as that branch of metatheory which involves the reflexive analysis and development of methods -- with methods defined broadly as methods of theorizing, observing, data collecting, analyzing, and interpreting. The result is that we lack a vocabulary for talking about methodology, a vocabulary which attends to the philosophic mandate in the term, the way in which it might build a bridge between metatheoy and method, and, thus, make more obvious the impacts of these on research and its theory-constructings.     

New institutional policies for university-industry links in Japan

This paper reports on changes in Japan's national and private universities for promoting university-industry links (UIL). The paper is shaped by the body of literature that has observed factors that may support university ‘entrepreneurialism’. This includes organizational capacity, personnel, policies, incentives and institutional background. Drawing on interview and survey fieldwork, the measures adopted following changes to the governance of the national universities in 2004 are reviewed. Through comparison with private universities it is observed that the reform has had an influential effect on the university system. The policy implications of the paper relate to broadening the range of areas for collaboration with industry, reducing the limitations for personnel transfer and skill development, and expanding the range of incentives at universities.     

What do we know about links and linking? A framework for studying links in academic environments

The Web is an enormous set of documents connected through hypertext links created by authors of Web pages. These links have been studied quantitatively, but little has been done so far in order to understand why these links are created. As a first step towards a better understanding, we propose a classification of link types in academic environments on the Web. The classification is multi-faceted and involves different aspects of the source and the target page, the link area and the relationship between the source and the target. Such classification provides an insight into the diverse uses of hypertext links on the Web, and has implications for browsing and ranking in IR systems by differentiating between different types of links. As a case study we classified a sample of links between sites of Israeli academic institutions.     

Symbolic links in the Open Directory Project

We present a study to develop an improved understanding of symbolic links in web directories. A symbolic link is a hyperlink which makes a directed connection from a webpage along one path through a directory to a page along another path. While symbolic links are ubiquitous in web directories such as Yahoo!, they are under-studied and, as a result, their uses are poorly understood. A cursory analysis of symbolic links reveals multiple uses: to provide navigational shortcuts deeper into a directory, backlinks to more general categories, and multiclassification. We investigated these uses in the Open Directory Project (ODP), the largest, most comprehensive, and most widely distributed human-compiled taxonomy of links to websites, which makes extensive use of symbolic links. The results reveal that while symbolic links in ODP are used primarily for multiclassification, only few multiclassification links actually span top- and second-level categories. This indicates that most symbolic links in ODP are used to create multiclassification between topics which are nested more than two levels deep and suggests that there may be multiple uses of multiclassification links. We also situate symbolic links vis à vis other semantic and structural link types from hypermedia. We anticipate that the results and relationships identified and discussed in this paper will provide a foundation for (1) users for understanding the usages of symbolic links in a directory, (2) designers to employ symbolic links more effectively when building and maintaining directories and for crafting user interfaces to them, and (3) information retrieval researchers for further study of symbolic links in web directories.     

Structure information learning for neutral links in signed network embedding

Nowadays, signed network has become an important research topic because it can reflect more complex relationships in reality than traditional network, especially in social networks. However, most signed network methods that achieve excellent performance through structure information learning always neglect neutral links, which have unique information in social networks. At the same time, previous approach for neutral links cannot utilize the graph structure information, which has been proved to be useful in node embedding field. Thus, in this paper, we proposed the Signed Graph Convolutional Network with Neutral Links (NL-SGCN) to address the structure information learning problem of neutral links in signed network, which shed new insight on signed network embedding. In NL-SGCN, we learn two representations for each node in each layer from both inner character and outward attitude aspects and propagate their information by balance theory. Among these three types of links, information of neutral links will be limited propagated by the learned coefficient matrix. To verify the performance of the proposed model, we choose several classical datasets in this field to perform empirical experiment. The experimental result shows that NL-SGCN significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art baseline methods for link prediction in signed network with neutral links, which supports the efficacy of structure information learning in neutral links.     

Evaluation of the Kirkwood approximation for the diffusivity of channel-confined DNA chains in the de Gennes regime

We use Brownian dynamics with hydrodynamic interactions to calculate both the Kirkwood (short-time) diffusivity and the long-time diffusivity of DNA chains from free solution down to channel confinement in the de Gennes regime. The Kirkwood diffusivity in confinement is always higher than the diffusivity obtained from the mean-squared displacement of the center-of-mass, as is the case in free solution. Moreover, the divergence of the local diffusion tensor, which is non-zero in confinement, makes a negligible contribution to the latter diffusivity in confinement. The maximum error in the Kirkwood approximation in our simulations is about 2% for experimentally relevant simulation times. The error decreases with increasing confinement, consistent with arguments from blob theory and the molecular-weight dependence of the error in free solution. In light of the typical experimental errors in measuring the properties of channel-confined DNA, our results suggest that the Kirkwood approximation is sufficiently accurate to model experimental data.     

覆土地下车库顶板结构受力性能对比

文章结合工程实例某商业地下车库,探讨了不同覆土厚度下车库顶板分别采用主梁＋大板结构、主次梁结构和主梁＋柱帽＋大板结构时顶板和梁的配筋面积。研究结果不仅为覆土车库顶板结构的受力分析提供了必要的理论基础,而且对覆土车库顶板结构形式的选择具有较好的参考价值。