DR2 Open Peer Review

Exploring Knowledge Dynamics in the Humanities. A Science-Mapping Approach to the History of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy and Human Geography

DR2 Turin Group

February 11, 2019

This post is the second of a series of  contributions to the DR2 Conference.  Comments are welcome! (How to comment)   Eugenio Petrovich (University of Siena) & Emiliano Tolusso (University of milan) In this post, we discuss some of the results we presented at the conference “Distant Reading & Data-Driven Research in the History of Philosophy” (University of Turin, 16-18 January 2017). Our talk aimed to explore the dynamics of knowledge in the humanities with a quantitative approach drawn from scientometrics (the field studying the quantitative aspects of the scientific production). In particular, we wanted to assess the viability of citation network visualization techniques (known as “science mapping”) as a tool for reconstructing the recent history of two fields in the humanities: analytic philosophy and human geography. First, we will provide a short introduction to the idea, aims, and rationale of science mapping. Second, we will focus on our two case studies, describing for each one the dataset used and the main findings. Third, we will briefly discuss several limits of our methodology. Finally, we will sketch some directions for further research. We want to point out that the results presented in this paper are still provisional and our claims should be taken more as hypotheses than as assertions. Our work is still in progress, and we will greatly appreciate any suggestion or comment the readers of this post would like to share with us. Fig. 1. Example of a citation network. The circles represent publications and the arrows the citations.   At the core of science mapping lies the idea that a set of scientific publications (papers, monographs, collections, and the like) can be represented as a network, where publications are the nodes of the network and citations among publications are the links. The resulting network represents the citational structure of the set of publications. From this basic idea, more refined types of analysis can be derived. For example, it can be assigned to each couple of publications a co-citation score, i.e., the number of times the two publications are cited together in the set. The resulting matrix (co-citation matrix) can in turn be visualized spatially, arranging the nodes of the network proportionally to their relatedness (i.e., the number of co-citations they share), so that the closer two dots appear in the maps, the more frequently they are cited together. The resulting science map is called “co-citation map”. Other kinds of science maps can be produced using authors, journals or institution as nodes of the network. A special kind of maps are those derived from text analysis of titles and abstracts of papers (term maps). In this case, the nodes of the network are noun-phrases (i.e., sequences of nouns plus adjectives), and their reciprocal distance represents their co-occurrence (i.e., the number of times they appear in the same title or abstract). Any network analysis software can generate science maps, but recently several dedicated tools have been developed specifically for science mapping purposes. In our research, we used VOSviewer, the science mapping tool developed by Nees Jan Van Eck and Ludo Waltman at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) in Leiden University (Netherlands) (van Eck and Waltman 2010). Science maps are used for a variety of applications in different contexts. First, they can be used to determine the structure of a scientific field as it results from the citational relations of publications in journals (field delineation). Second, they find application in the science policy, where they can be used to assess strengths and weaknesses in the research performance of institutions such as universities or research centers (research assessment). Finally, they can be used to reconstruct the very recent history of science, individuating the emerging paradigms of a field (historical reconstruction). The last one is the purpose we pursue in our two case studies.   FIRST CASE STUDY: Analytic philosophy[1] DATASET In this study, we retrieved from Web of Science Core Collection all documents (articles and reviews) published in five journals publishing high-quality generalist[2] analytic philosophy (The Philosophical Review, Noûs, The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research). These five journals were ranked in the top 5 generalist analytic philosophy journals in two recent polls conducted at the blog Leiter Reports: in both polls each of them received over 500 votes. In order to track the evolution of the field, documents were retrieved for three different ten-year timespans: 1985-1994, 1995-2004 and 2005-2015. The total number of record was 11 167 (see table 1). Ranking (Leiter’s blog) Source Timespan Records 1 PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW 1985-1994 821 1 PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW 1995-2004 722 1 PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW 2005-2015 440 2 NOÛS 1985-1994 755 2 NOÛS 1995-2004 606 2 NOÛS 2005-2015 554 3 JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 1985-1994 593 3 JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 1995-2004 416 3 JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 2005-2015 387 4 MIND 1985-1994 750 4 MIND 1995-2004 1064 4 MIND 2005-2015 1268 5 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH 1985-1994 752 5 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH 1995-2004 1062 5 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH 2005-2015 977 1-5 TOP FIVE 1985-2015 11 167 Table 1: the dataset.   OVERALL MAP (1985-2015) The aggregated data (1985-2015) were used to generate a first map (overall map). This map is based on co-citation analysis, where documents (comprehending both articles and books with more than 20 citations) are the nodes of the network, the links represent co-citation connections among items, and the links’ thickness represents the number of co-citations between two items. VOSviewer also provides clustering of the documents, picturing documents belonging to different clusters in different colors[3]. Documents appearing closer in the map have high co-citation values, i.e., they are frequently cited together in bibliographies. Fig. 2. Overall map (1985-2015). We believe that it is possible to recognize the sub-disciplinary structure of analytic philosophy in the clustered structure of the co-citation network. In particular, the red cluster in the northern part of the map includes many documents related to “philosophy of mind”; the yellow eastern cluster could be attributed to “moral and political philosophy”. The southern green cluster could be labeled “metaphysics”. The western light blue one “epistemology”. At the center of the map, several works in the “philosophy of language” can be recognized. Even if these labels should be used cautiously, the overall structure of the map seems patent. An interesting feature of the map is the center-periphery relation, which seems to be meaningful. In the center of the map, it seems that one can find the “paradigms” of analytical tradition (Levy 2003), whereas in the periphery we find the specialized sub-disciplines. It seems that the farther one document is located in the map, the more specialized its content is. However, we believe that a richer interpretation of the core and periphery of the map is still needed. In particular, we believe it is desirable to connect more properly these findings with substantial meta-philosophical conceptions and theories about the structure of contemporary philosophy. Considering the documents shown in the map (i.e., the cited references with more than 20 citations), it seems clear that no “continental” author is present (see Table 2). We can conclude that the so-called analytic-continental divide is still present, at least in the contributions to the journals considered. Ranking Author Year Title Cluster Label Links Co-citations Citations 1 lewis d. 1986  plurality worlds 2 Metaphysics 80 595 260 2 kripke saul 1980  naming necessity 5 Philosophy of language 89 552 223 3 evans g. 1982  varieties reference 1 Philosophy of mind 82 558 176 4 quine willard van orman 1960  word object 2 Metaphysics 84 472 172 5 williamson t 2000  knowledge its limits 3 Epistemology 82 467 163 6 lewis d. 1973  Counterfactuals 4 Political and moral philosophy 78 327 156 7 parfit derek 1984  reasons persons 4 Political and moral philosophy 64 293 151 8 nozick r. 1981  philos explanations 3 Epistemology 86 463 150 9 rawls j. 1971  theory justice 4 Political and moral philosophy 61 179 128 10 davidson donald 1980  essays actions event 4 Political and moral philosophy 82 308 110  Table 2: most cited documents (1985-2015).   HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION In this section, we present three science maps, each one based on documents published in the three subsequent timespans we considered. All the maps are co-citation network (see above). Fig. 3: Map 1985-1994   Fig. 4: Map 1995-2004.   Fig. 5: Map 2005-2015. These maps show the morphological evolution of the networks. There is a clear pattern of clusterization of the network over time, with the gradual definition of subclusters. We suggest that this pattern mirrors the increasing specialization of analytic philosophy in the last thirty years, a feature of the field that is perceived by many of its practitioners (Marconi 2014).   SECOND CASE STUDY: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY DATASET Once again, we based our analysis on Web of Science Core Collection. In order to reduce the sample to a manageable size, we selected five generalist[4] journals indicated by Scimago Journal & Country Rank as the highest-quality for the year 2015 (Progress in Human Geography, Global Environmental Change: Human and Policy Dimensions, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Journal of Economic Geography, Economic Geography). Documents were again divided in the same three different ten-year timespans (see table 3) Ranking Source Timespan Records 1 PROGRESS IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY 1985-1994 1136 1 PROGRESS IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY 1995-2004 1332 1 PROGRESS IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY 2005-2015 1080 2 GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE – HUMAN AND POLICY DIMENSIONS 1985-1994 154 2 GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE – HUMAN AND POLICY DIMENSIONS 1995-2004 361 2 GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE – HUMAN AND POLICY DIMENSIONS 2005-2015 1028 3 TRANSACTIONS OF THE INSTITUTE OF BRITISH GEOGRAPHERS 1985-1994 667 3 TRANSACTIONS OF THE INSTITUTE OF BRITISH GEOGRAPHERS 1995-2004 538 3 TRANSACTIONS OF THE INSTITUTE OF BRITISH GEOGRAPHERS 2005-2015 480 4 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 1985-1994 0 4 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 1995-2004 99 4 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 2005-2015 523 5 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 1985-1994 518 5 E ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 1995-2004 443 5 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 2005-2015 428            1-5 TOP FIVE 1985-2015 8787  Table 3: the dataset.   OVERALL MAP The whole dataset (1985-2015) was converted into the first map (overall map). In this second case study, we tested a slightly different approach, analyzing the recent evolution of the main research themes in the discipline of human geography via term maps. Terms (noun-phrases) serve as the node of the network, while the distance between the two terms represents the number of their co-occurrences. Terms appearing closer in the map have high co-occurrence values, meaning that they are frequently coupled in titles and abstracts of target documents.   Fig 6: overall map. The thematic structure of contemporary research in geography is easily readable in the map. Specifically, four main clusters are recognizable. The yellow cluster in the northern part of the map represents the sub-discipline of “economic geography”, the red cluster in the western part stands out as “social geography”, while the eastern cluster colored in green is representative of the “environmental geography” field. The last one, colored in blue, represents the field of the geography of climate change. A compelling feature of the map is the absence of a real center. The four clusters gravitate around autonomous centroids, with different levels of integration with each other: the resultant structure is donut-shaped, showing, therefore, the lack of a real thematic center in the broad discipline. item cluster Label Links Citations Avg. pub. Year change 2 145 1591 2005 climate change 3 143 1307 2008 space 1 143 1063 2005 impact 2 145 1032 2007 city 1 143 1009 2004 practice 1 145 975 2007 region 4 145 954 2006 economy 4 145 926 2004 model 2 145 922 2005 country 2 145 902 2006 Table 4: Most cited items.   HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION In this section, we turn again to the historical reconstruction, presenting three maps, each of them based on documents published in the three timespans we considered. All the maps are term-networks.   Fig 7: Map 1985-1994. Fig 8: Map 1995-2004. Fig 9: Map 2005-2015.   The main aim of these maps is – once again – […]

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