Thomas J. Marlowe is Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Seton Hall University, where he was the coordinator of the computer science program until beginning phased retirement this summer. His research spans many areas, with publications in software engineering, collaboration (including risk analysis, intellectual property issues, and development structures and processes) and information science, language support for real-time systems, program optimization and analysis, and computer science pedagogy (including problem-solving and critical thinking), as well as topics in mathematics, information science, and interdisciplinary studies. He holds a B.S and M.S in Mathematics from Seton Hall University, and an M.S. in Computer Science, a Ph.D. Computer Science, and a Ph.D. Mathematics, all from Rutgers University. He has been a regular at these conferences since 2008.
The internet and social media, tools for collaboration and sharing and for project and data management, and an enormous and ever-increasing collection of computer-implemented techniques and algorithms have been instrumental in accelerating both research and its dissemination, as well as facilitating deeper and more sophisticated analyses of qualitative and quantitative data, although not unmixed with negative effects including plagiarism, low-quality electronic journals, and all-too-frequent credulous consumption of on-line information.
But there remain other issues, at least equally basic, to consider, affecting collaboration; the changes to the humanities, social sciences, and other fields; interdisciplinary studies; and the fundamental nature of academia, research, and pedagogy themselves. Informatics, itself a mix of science, technology and engineering, and mathematics and logic, flavored at times with economics, business, and social science, has developed terminology, idioms, concepts, patterns of use and communication, practices and approaches, theory, and philosophy of its own—a language or set of languages often incomprehensible to most outside, other than at times to some mathematicians and systems engineers.
Has informatics, perhaps in conjunction with modern mathematics, really become a third castle in CP Snow’s intellectual landscape, determined to be pristinely separated from the humanities and social sciences on the one hand, and the sciences and engineering on the other? If so, is this a result primarily of siloing, turf protection, and lack of interest in crossing the ground between them? Or is it true allopatric speciation—the birth of a new intellectual genus as a result of separation and evolution, and inherently structural and conceptual?
Regardless, large, complex and long-lived ventures are increasingly likely to be able to benefit from approaches common to informatics, including but not limited to modern, agile versions of requirements, specification, and design. Communication between technical personnel and the (in the broad sense) clients using their services is likely to require mapping and translation. Interdisciplinary teams, which increasingly require or are even dominated by an informatics component, may require not only specialists in each area, but collaborators who are comfortable with exploration, mapping, translation, integration, and the presentation of multiple views and narrations. Interdisciplinary projects and enterprises will no longer be able to rely on luck, polymaths and those fortunate to have a matching education.
For this reason, consider the informatics component of interdisciplinary education, or for that matter, of education in general. Is it sufficient to concentrate on discipline- or purpose-specific useful approaches, tools and techniques? Or should one seek to convey the informatics mindset(s), worldview(s), and conceptual understanding(s)? Can the proposed workforce of intermediaries and their managers be created without such understanding?
And to what extent does this fit with a broad-based integrative perspective in the education of all academics and researchers, including informaticians, computer scientists, and software engineers? What do systemics, second-order cybernetics, or similar integrative disciplines have to contribute? And how can we incorporate the perspectives of populations with different demographic, academic, and experiential backgrounds and focus both at the table and in the field?
