Hyperscholarship and i-Research
Beyond my personal ontological & epistemological tenants, I feel I need to address the broader issues of research which fit into the realm of hyperscholarship. I am borrowing the term hyperscholarship and its content from the study conducted by Patricia Harkin. She uses the term hyperscholarship as a means of providing a mode to connect different disciplines and infusing the knowledge from those disciplines to create a work of research that is both deep & insightful. Harkin was using the term as a mode to show points of connection between the different researchers and different theories to display the level of commonality in the realm of knowledge.
She expands this concept further by adding to the discussion of the theme of the student/teacher dynamic and how there is an immediate point of feedback and analysis thanks to instantaneous two-way communication. Hyperscholarship also refers to the particular constant attention that occurs through the confines of the network that we connect to and the environment we exist in. Constant partial attention refers to the ability of an individual user to be hyperaware of a situation by changing her or his focus depending on what direction information is flowing. The barriers of entry to the network are less and cause the users of the system to filter between the relevant information, irrelevant information and the static. Therefore, it is more important now to make sure knowledge coheres to the appropriate pool of research.
An extension of hyperscholarship is how researchers “hunt and gather” new information through a wide and diverse mediated landscape. As a matter of praxis and pedagogy, it is important to discuss the methodology of how one gathers this information and knowledge. The term that I use to describe this method of research is “i-Research. ” Rheingold describes this process through the concept of “social bookmarking.” Social bookmarking describes a series of websites, applications and online resources designed to create pointers and bookmarks towards websites and share this information through a tagged search process. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others. This creates a pool of resources that can be shared by researchers in the field. It is this ability to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others that allows for a pooling of resources. Social bookmarking acts as a blog to the researcher.
A researcher can find other users that share his or her interests or other users that the researcher would consider his or her peers to develop standard literature for the field. Literature developed from social bookmarking becomes interactive, as researchers must actively participate in the “community of practice” that define the terms of art and allows the information to be integrated into the work already done in the arena of study (e.g., through journals, conference papers).