Attendees:
Ilan Chabay, Heinz Gutscher, David De Roure, Sarah Wolf, Armin Haas, Achim Maas, Vittorio Loreto, Filippo Addarii, Steven Bishop, Trista Patterson, David Chavalarias, Patrik Jansson, Ralph Dum, Kurt Dopfer, David Tuckett, Jason Greenlaw, Zhangang Han, Ralph Dum, Laszlo Pinter, Merijn Terheggen, Joan David Tabara.

Attendees:
Steven Bishop, David Tuckett, Peter Baudains, David Chavalarias, Wanglin Yan, Gertjan Storm, Diana Mangalagiu, Jason Greenlaw, Ilan Chabay, Armin Haas, Ricardo Herranz, Jon Reades, Kurt Dobfer, Paul Ormerod, Andrzej Nowak, Nils Ferrand, Achim Maas, Armin Leopold, Sarah Wolf, Hannes Kutza, Heinz Gutscher, Laszlo Pinter

The focus of our discussion in the Global Systems Science “narratives” workshop has been on the narrative as a lens onto a model, for consumption by decision-maker and citizen. I’d like to make a connection with a related discussion in scholarly communication – where the narrative is instead for the scholar, but some of the issues are pertinent, particularly to do with the narrative as a social object and digital object.

There is much discussion in the scholarly communications (and future of research communication) community just now about “Beyond the PDF”. One approach is to ask how the academic paper (a mechanism about 350 years old) evolves with modern digital practice. Another – and this is my provocation – is to ask what will be the shared digital artefact that scholars will be exchanging in the future?

There is already evidence of new practice and new objects – for example, aggregations of data and procedural knowledge which may be executable. These research objects are compound digital objects but also social objects around which discourse occurs and social networks form, and they are produced and consumed by humans and machines: they typically contain narratives.

What does this mean for us?  I suggest four points:

1. We should consider if narratives are also to be consumed and produced by machine, and if this is achieved through text processing or bundling with machine-processable forms.  Even if not machine-generated, the lifecycle of narratives might surely be machine-assisted;
2. The social life of narratives is an interesting thing to instrument and analyse; e.g. their provenance, usage, evolution. If nothing else this helps us use narratives more effectively, but also it enables analysis of collaboration in the complex sociotechnical ecosystem that is Global Systems Science;
3. As we think of narratives throughout their lifecycle we can think also of their inter-relationships and associations with the other digital artefacts of Global Systems Science, such as the models, the experiments, the dataflows, …;
4. Research Objects themselves may be of interest, as they are a mechanism for sharing methods, for reproducible science, for automation to handle scale and assistive systems to enable human creativity – all things we need for Global Systems Science.

A closing thought re (3). One criticism of papers is that they enforce exchange of “human sized chunks of knowledge” and are only targetted  at specific audiences, so might actually act to constrain our science.  A model that is bundled with multiple narratives might serve better, behaving as a boundary object which can be exchanged between communities – with a common core and multiple interpretations for different users.

I shall mention some of this in my talk Knowledge Infrastructure for Global Systems Science in the Information Society, Models and Narratives session on Saturday morning.  For more on the Future of Research Communication check out FORCE11, and there is an emerging literature on research objects.

— Dave

david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk

Professor David De Roure
Director, Oxford e-Research Centre
UK National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research
University of Oxford 

Models and Narratives for Policy in the Digital Age

Conveners: Steven Bishop, Peter Baudains, Ilan Chabay

Raison d’etre

Models are increasingly being used to address problems over different scales, hierarchies, and policy domains to develop a so-called ‘global systems science’. Such models—whether heuristic, analytical, or computational—are approximations tailored to specific contexts and questions. To be useful they must be understood, particularly by decision-makers, but also by society at large and this typically only takes place through the lens of a narrative. Indeed decision-makers often require narratives of policy issues to be prepared for them within a short time-scale.

Model outputs can provide the backbone of a narrative for a particular scenario or policy option. This is then clothed in different forms of expression, argument and storytelling. There is currently insufficient understanding into how such narratives can be constructed in such a way as to also clearly communicate the limitations and assumptions built into that model. We need to explore how to couple models of globally connected systems with narratives in culturally appropriate forms in order to offer insight and options that are generated by the models themselves.

To achieve this coupling, we need a better understanding of the emergence of narratives through social interactions, particularly in the face of a changing media landscape, facilitated by new and ubiquitous digital communication. This is because, as well as being formed directly from a scientific model, narratives can emerge through social interaction. The scientific backbone of a narrative can often be entirely overwhelmed or suppressed by narratives based on social and cultural identity. How can stories, games and art, perhaps embedded in digital communication, be used to bridge the gap between scientific models, policy-makers and citizens? Detecting socially emerging narratives from social media data may lead to the prediction of social trends and enable decision-makers to gauge responses to different policy options on short time-scales.

This workshop will consider how narratives fit into the developing research agenda focused on the use of ICT and models for global policy decisions, with the aim being to identify the crucial research questions for narratives in global systems science from the perspective of both global policy challenges and also ICT.

Workshop format

The first session will begin with an introduction to the workshop. This introduction will comprise of some framing talks by Steven Bishop, Julian Hunt (via video recording) and Ilan Chabay. During these introductory comments, a series of questions (see below) will be introduced, which aim to address the research area to be discussed during the workshop at a relatively high conceptual level. These will be circulated among participants beforehand. The workshop participants will be invited to respond to these questions.

The workshop will firstly discuss whether these questions are appropriate or whether they need to be re-framed. It will be considered whether or not these questions are sufficient, necessary, and specific for the research topic in the context of a science of global systems.

The workshops will then proceed with an open discussion to be chaired by Ilan and Steven, during which each question will be addressed in turn, and specific research challenges that fall under each of the questions will be determined. A list of these research challenges will be recorded during the discussions and displayed on the projector. These will form the basis of the subsequent scientific report.

A provisional agenda is shown below:

Thursday 8^th November 17.00 – 19.00

17.00 Introductory talks and questions (Steven Bishop, Julian Hunt, Ilan Chabay)

17.30 Response by participants

18.00 Discussion on suitability of proposed questions

18.50 Agreement on questions

Friday 9^th November 14.30 – 16.30

Discussion of each question in turn, specifying specific research challenges.

Proposed Research Questions

The questions we initially pose are outlined below:

• What are the links between models and scenarios of Global Systems Science and the narratives derived from them, as expressed in different forms, cultures and communities? How can ICT help express such narratives?

• How might a useful public understanding, including by policy-makers and corporate leaders, of Global Systems Science, via associated narratives, be developed to more effectively support decision-making?

• How can ICT be used to assess the impact of a narrative on attitudes and collective behaviour change in diverse communities and across spatial and temporal scales?

• How might digital methods (models, ICT) and their users and analogue methods (performance, non-digital 2 and 3 dimensional art) and their users interact and collaborate in creating narratives in order to initiate positive social change?