Soccer science and the Bayes community: exploring the cognitive implications of modern scientific communication

Abstract

Science is a form of distributed analysis involving both individual work that produces new knowledge, and collaborative work to exchange information with the larger community. There are many particular ways in which individual and community can interact in science, and it is difficult to assess how efficient these are, and what the best way might be to support them. This paper reports on a series of experiments in this area, and a prototype implementation using a research platform called CACHE. CACHE both supports experimentation with different structures of interaction between individual and community cognition, and serves as a prototype for computational support for those structures. We particularly focus on CACHE-BC, the Bayes Community version of CACHE, within which the community can break up analytical tasks into mind-sized units, and use provenance tracking to keep track of the relationship between these units.