I gave this talk at the Society of the Query #SoQ conference in Amsterdam

1. Finding Knowledge:
The epistemic context of
search & assessment
Simon Knight
@sjgknight

2. Denmark
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/834158
9.stm

3. Danish exams with internet access
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8341589.stm
• Allows testing of problem-solving and analysis - sifting
information
• Currently, no communication sites allowed
• Fundamentally epistemological claims

4. Why does epistemology matter?
“…assessment is one area where notions
of truth, accuracy and fairness have a
very practical purchase in everyday life”
(Williams, 1998, p. 221).

5. Why does epistemology matter?
Denmark:
Evaluation & understanding connected
knowledge matters
Personal testimony (e.g. a teacher or
friend) is forbidden
Web/search informants are ok
•
•
•

6. Exam Questions
• What is Clepsydra?
• What do we know?

7. Example: Do
you know the
year of the
first moon
walk?

8. This problem?
•
Figure 2 – xkcd comic illustrating one of the concerns regarding access to the internet, and an agent’s individual intelligence (xkcd, 2011).

9. Task Matters…
• Analogue with exams?
• http://lmgtfy.com/?q=jfgi

10. Task Matters
What were the main causes of….
Compare and contrast poet ‘a’ and poet ‘b’…
Evaluate the evidence for…
•
Figure 2 – xkcd comic illustrating one of the concerns regarding access to the internet, and an agent’s individual intelligence (xkcd, 2011).

11. Two sides of the coin
• What we ask students to do (tasks,
assessment, tools)
• What they do

12. Epistemology: In action
• What the tools and assessment assume
• What students do
• Perception doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it is
action oriented

13. Communication and Testimony
Bing: For every search, there is someone who
can help
Google: “know what you want before you
know it”

14. Filter Bubbles

15. Risks: Injustice
• testimonial injustice – marginalisation of some
knowledge by specific users (personalisation
based on user’s search history) (prejudice)
• hermeneutical injustice – marginalisation of
some knowledge by system-level assumptions
(e.g. personalisation on a country level); users
may not realise they are being marginalised

16. Risks: Content holes
• Gender & language bias
in Wikipedia articles
• Social search has same
problem
• Perspective

17. But testimony is fundamental
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/bridge.png

18. Good
informants
personalise

19. Reconciling users and tools
• User & tool responsibilities in the giving and
receiving of information

20. Diversity Aware Search
Balancer analyses your
web browsing to show you
the political slant of your
reading history. If you get
way out of balance, we
may even give you reading
suggestions.
NewsCube: Delivering
Multiple Aspects of News to
Mitigate Media Bias
‘liquid publications’: Scholar search to
avoid homophily in one’s academic
network by down-ranking papers with
authors whom the searcher has coauthored with in the past
http://project.liquidpub.org/tools.

21. Information Literacy
• But in many cases news articles don’t give
opposing views, they just don’t give a view.
• This ‘testimony of silence’ is harder to deal
with
• Good indicator of why info literacy still v
important

22. Epistemology: In action
• What the tools provide
• What students do
• Perception doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it is
action oriented

23. Epistemology: In action
• Multiple Perspectives
• Some people might be
standing in different
positions/have different
information
• Tools should foreground
assumptions & users should
be aware

24. Thank you
You are asked to draw a comparison of the
perspectives in the sources, using your
knowledge of the time. “Right”, you think, as
you open up a popular search engine, “what
do I need to know…”.
Simon Knight
@sjgknight