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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Library and Information Science

University of Kentucky

2021

Open science

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Tacit Knowledge Dilemma In Open Science, C. Sean Burns Apr 2021

The Tacit Knowledge Dilemma In Open Science, C. Sean Burns

Information Science Presentations

A talk about the role that knowledge management (and sub areas) might play in open science. The open science movement has the goal of making transparent as much of the scientific process as is possible. This entails making publicly available (open source, access, etc.) the parts of the scientific workflow, such as the data, the software code, the manuscripts, that are used or generated in the process of doing research. However, Michael Polanyi's theory of tacit knowledge raises a dilemma that knowledge management researchers might be able to address. Specifically, if we accept the theory of tacit knowledge, the idea …


What Documents Cannot Do: Revisiting Michael Polanyi And The Tacit Knowledge Dilemma, C. Sean Burns Mar 2021

What Documents Cannot Do: Revisiting Michael Polanyi And The Tacit Knowledge Dilemma, C. Sean Burns

Information Science Faculty Publications

Our culture is dominated by digital documents in ways that are easy to overlook. These documents have changed our worldviews about science and have raised our expectations of them as tools for knowledge justification. This article explores the complexities surrounding the digital document by revisiting Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge—the idea that “we can know more than we can tell.” The theory presents to us a dilemma: if we can know more than we can tell, then this means that the communication of science via the document as a primary form of telling will always be incomplete. This dilemma …