Abstract:

This case study grows out of a colloquium in April 2011 at the University of Minnesota entitled “Practicing Science, Technology, and Rhetoric: The North-South Divide in an Emerging Global Order.” This colloquium brought together 35 international scholars, both face-to-face and via Skype, to discuss the interdependent and global nature of contemporary science and technology practices, and how those who work within institutions of science and/or employ emerging technologies, like (but not limited to) new information and communication technologies (ICTS), frame political, economic, cultural, and environmental arguments about the impacts of their practices on “others". In particular, we focused on how the diffusion of contemporary science and technology practices plays out in transnational projects that span the divide between countries in the global North and South. (More information on this colloquium is available at https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/practicing-science-colloquium/ )

Discussions at this colloquium were video recorded to provide a basis for a “born digital” collection that is being designed and developed for publication online through the University of Minnesota Libraries in Fall 2011. The production team is designing a collection organized around topics that emerged from the colloquium discussions; each topic will have an editor. Editors will work with collection developers to encourage both scholarly research contributions from academics and personal stories from non-academic contributors. The goal of this multimedia, online publication is to build a virtual common ground where people from around the world can share studies and stories to collectively create a knowledge base about technology development and diffusion between the global North and South.

This collection is designed to be open to comments and contributions, with editors’ moderation, for at least a year. Developers will assess the collection’s functioning mid-year to determine whether it should continue as an ongoing project or be closed and archived to represent a period of time in technology studies.

This conference presentation will address the "open sourced" philosophy underpinning the project and some of its content areas, as well as the technical details of its production. The collection will be online at the time of the conference to be shared with conference participants.

Keywords:

ICTs, technology studies, open access, global north-south, technology diffusion, collective knowledge making.