Participation Literacy

I have always had a conceptual approach to intellectual material, which might be seen as a background for this text. I often think of language as a multidimensional map of concepts with material-semiotic relations connecting them in various ways. Concepts are constantly in the process of construction. A concept’s denotation is embedded in a multitude of connotations. I believe this tension between denotation and connotations is very productive. My approach to the Web 2.0 concept starts from this point of view. Another researcher with a preference for concepts is Robert Young.

Looking at the value laden aspect of scientific concepts has become a fruitful line of enquiry among critical historians of ideas. This opens the door to looking at the ways ideology — value systems representing power relations — constitute research agendas and valorise key concepts. Functionalism in the human sciences is an excellent example, as a number of scholars have shown. Donna Haraway has done so with great force and eloquence in her magisterial Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science and her essays, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. She is, in my opinion, the foremost practitioner of the analysis of scientific concepts which touch on our humanity, and her writings show the integration of science, society and ideology. They are conceptual research at its best. (Young, 1995)

Reading Young’s article was some sort of confirmation for me. Here I met another researcher who used the concept approach explicitly and saw Donna Haraway as one of the great in conceptual research. This is a mirror of my thoughts when I read Haraway the first time. A large part of her approach is to create concepts like the Cyborg, Situated knowledge and the Coyote and discuss them in the context of application. I view concept research as an application of semiotics.

Since I am an information professional the concept approach is closely linked with information searching. The constant search for information is a substantial part of my research process. Information searching is a conceptual process. Search terms are conceptual doors to the information and knowledge. Advanced (i.e. Boolean) information searching is a simplistic mimic of our rational thinking process. We identify the concepts, the relation between them and the context they belong to.