The Cultural Shaping of ICTs within Academic Fields: Corpus-based Linguistics as a Case Study

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show that the appropriation of ICTs is determined by a field's specific cultural identity. Knowledge is not a homogenous whole, but a patchwork of heterogeneous fields. These fields are most visible as embodied in academic disciplines, which have distinct cultural identities shaped by intellectual and social considerations. Scholarly communication systems evolve over time within the Communication is central to the academic enterprise… [it] is the force that binds together the sociological and epistemological, giving shape and substance to the links between knowledge forms and knowledge communities. (Becher, 1989, p. 77) 1 Introduction The past two decades have been host to an explosion in information communication technologies (ICTs). This has created a cornucopia of digital networks and resources connected on a global scale. Scholars are no longer limited to the annual meetings of scholarly associations and societies to communicate informally with their national and international peers. The opportunity is there for them to stay in touch with their colleagues and fields through a plenitude of email networks. Availability of channels for the formal communication of scholarly work has expanded far beyond the local collections of academic libraries. Scholars no longer have to travel to the information source, as the information source can be delivered digitally to their desktop. There has been a great deal of speculation about the impact of digital communication media, such as the Web, on the work practices of scholars. We are told that with the arrival of the Internet there has been an 'information revolution' that will potentially alter scholarly communication and knowledge production in radical ways. However, there is a need to develop a grounded understanding of how scholars are actually using ICTs in their work. Studies investigating scholarly communication and the use of ICTs have tended to focus on the physical and applied sciences to the neglect of humanities fields. There are exceptions in the research literature to this preoccupation, including Stone (1982), Brockman et al (2001), Palmer and Neumann (2002), and (Talja, 2002) who have studied information seeking behaviours of humanities scholars in the digital library realm. This paper helps to address this lacuna in research into scholarly communication by drawing on earlier comparative research spanning the humanities, social sciences and physical sciences (Fry, 2003), and current research focusing particularly on specialist fields within linguistics. Development of broad reaching ICT policy initiatives, such as the e-science programme in the UK that has invested millions of pounds into the promotion of digital network projects in science, means that it is more important than ever to have an empirical understanding of how intellectual fields outside of the physical sciences use networked digital resources. Failure to develop ICT policy that is informed by systematic comparative research could seriously disadvantage fields that ...

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