Book Review

Technologies of Knowing: A Proposal for the Human Sciences

John Willinsky Beacon Press Boston US$25.00 (hard cover) by John Thurston, PhD To test the premises of the book under review, I performed a Web search using one of the major search engines. I searched on the phrase, "causes of child poverty," and got back a manageable 18 matches. If I were a researcher on child poverty, however, the results would not have been very helpful. In the top 10 hits, two were summaries of CBC news coverage in 1993-94, two were statements from churches in the Toronto area, one was a presentation of the 1997 budget speech by Canada's Minister of Finance, one a strategy statement for the 1997 election from the Canadian Auto Workers, and one a bad link. Three links led to the same article, a report on child and family poverty in a specific Canadian community, published by a child welfare research centre. This article would have been useful, and included references to other studies. The remaining eight links presented a similar mix. (Curiously, only three links were to Web pages in the United States, and one to a page in the United Kingdom; the rest were Canadian.)

Anyone who has looked for specific information on the Web can relate a similar experience. If your search terms are too general, however, the number of hits you get back is enormous. (In two other experiments, I got 2,819 hits for "photo radar" and 45,178 hits for "gun control.") Yet many of us believe the Web contains a great deal of useful information. The first problem is finding it. Once found, it is difficult to contextualize, assess, and coordinate.

A Thought Experiment

John Willinsky's Technologies of Knowing presents a "thought experiment" (p. 13) intended to show how, using current technologies, social science research could be made available for better use by the public that is largely responsible for funding it. He works from the assumptions that, on the one hand, we are inundated with information that we cannot process and, on the other, that private corporations have made knowledge a valuable commodity. He states that "both the problems and the solutions to our knowledge troubles are bound to involve information technologies" (p. 11). His solution is the creation of a hyperlinked Web of knowledge within the World Wide Web.

Willinsky summarizes his book:

The method of this social science fiction is to demonstrate both the epistemological and the business purpose of a public corporation that would assume responsibility for bringing greater coherence and coordination, intelligibility and access, to the research and scholarship traditionally associated with the social sciences. (p. 13)

Anyone who has performed research, traditional or on-line, in any of the social sciences would likely acknowledge the need for greater co-ordination of that research. When stress is placed on the requirement for the research to be accessible and intelligible to the general public, the need for co-ordination and coherence becomes paramount.

The Automata Data Corporation

Willinsky's whimsically named Automata Data Corporation would, as "a virtual corporation, with an electronic presence on the Web that covered its full range of activity, … principally network and index resources rather than own or publish them, providing guides and supports for utilizing those resources". Its constituencies would be "those who fund social science research, those who conduct it, and those … who would potentially use the accumulated knowledge" (p. 14), including the general public. He admits that it would represent nothing new, "except for the steps it would take to support public use through additional notes, links, and concern with the overall intelligibility from the data to the topic level" (p. 20). While he elaborates on his description at several points (pp. 137 and 153, among others), he does not really add anything.

Some efforts have already been made in the direction that Willinsky proposes. He writes about an "e-prints" on-line database set up for physicists (pp. 33-34), a regularly issued CD-ROM of clinical studies of value to doctors (pp. 116-18), and the Educational Resources Information Center used by researchers in education (p. 39). Automated archive services also exist for linguists and economists. He admits that his thought experiment "is not so much a stunningly original idea as a gentle push in the direction of a number of existing efforts" (p. 160).

Willinsky is laudably concerned with "the ethical responsibilities of social science research" to its public (p. 20). He places Automata Data in the context of government cuts to research budgets and the need to give the public value for its money. While thus willing to turn social science research into a type of commodity that can be delivered to taxpayers, he somewhat contradictorily suggests the need to counter the increasing commodification of knowledge by the private sector: "Automata Data is but a way of ensuring that the data-intensive cyberspace that encircles the globe … has within it an alternative politics of knowledge to the one that tends to dominate transnational capitalism" (p. 22).

Willinsky is careful to anticipate criticism of his ideas. Many social scientists will claim that such an enterprise is unnecessary. Some will say that it would cost too much, others that it would require too great an effort. The most telling criticism is that which suggests that the public for whom Automata Data is intended would be indifferent to it and few would use it. To all such criticism, Willinsky provides basically the same response:

My initial response is to ask … that the practicality of the whole enterprise not be the sole measure by which this conjectured corporation be judged; suspend disbelief over the enormity of the whole of it and consider what its various strategies have to offer. My second response is to ask what it means not to do something about the degree of disarray within a field of research that is intended to be a public good. (p. 18)

Rather a weak defence of what is still an interesting idea.

What the Book Is Not

Technologies of Knowing is explicitly not about the practicalities of the whole enterprise. While admitting their importance, Willinsky does not deal with the technologies that Automata Data would use, or with organizational or funding issues. As a thought experiment, the book does not descend into the nitty-gritty world. This is unfortunate, because some of those details would have helped to flesh the book out and provide a clearer idea of how Automata Data would work.

Denying himself so much potential subject matter, Willinsky resorts in a number of chapters to what seems like filler. He has a chapter discussing the contradictory results afforded by research on bilingual education (pp. 51-70); one devoted to the high points in the historical progress of thought about the social role of the social sciences (pp. 71-99); one about recent technical and methodological developments in the social sciences (pp. 100-25); and one countering the view of the social sciences as a form of social control (pp. 126-52). It is not that these subjects are not interesting or that they do not relate to the focus of the book, it rather seems that Willinsky merely surveys issues that would require their own books and that he has not adequately integrated these chapters into the book he has written.

Finally, what the book is not, is a book. It is an overextended essay or a series of essays around a central theme. The essays are linked by the constant reiteration of phrases like "public knowledge," "public value of the social sciences," and "accumulation of research," as well as more obvious ones. Whenever Willinsky feels he has strayed for too long from his central theme, he trots out another description of what Automata Data would do. A full description of Automata Data (within the limitations Willinsky has set) and all that it might do could have been provided in a short essay. The book contains useful insights and ideas, but they would have packed more punch if they were in a more compressed space.

John Thurston holds a doctorate in English. He has written The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), as well as numerous published articles on early nineteenth-century Canadian literature.