"Perspectives of automated knowledge generation in scholarly contexts", a workshop for PhD candidates at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, December 19 and 20, 2024
Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri (University of Lyon / Information Studies) and Christoph Bläsi (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz / Book Studies) had acquired funding from the German-French University to carry through a series of workshops for invited international German and French PhD candidates. The overall topic of these workshops is “Scholarly reading and writing in the age of AI and the need for visibility and impact: issues and challenges".
In the first workshop in Lyon on 24 and 24 November 2022, we tried to cover the field systematically, as an introduction as it were. The second workshop in Mainz on 23 and 24 March 2023 focused on the use of AI tools to write scholarly texts - in fact the PhD candidates did a few very early experiments in writing texts with the help of ChatGPT. It were these experiments that gave rise to a project in the winter semester 2023/24 in which Mainz book studies students wrote a non-fiction book with the help of ChatGPT that now actually can be purchased: https://www.beck-shop.de/guertler-zinganell-rietl-young-professionals-publishing-nachwuchskraefte-verlagswesen/product/37701696.
An important aspect of the workshops are their interdisciplinarity (think publishing and media studies, information studies, information science, theory of science, etc.); the workshops are meant to represents a unique space for young researchers to examine and debate a possible redefinition of the status of the academic book, in particular, and the role of the scholarly author. They also allows to consider issues of the legitimacy of academic content at a time when academic communication is undergoing an unprecedented transformation.
Moreover, we are highlighting differences in the academic cultures in France on the one and Germany on the other hand in these workshops: the typical German (academic discipline: Buchwissenschaft / publishing studies) and French (discipline: Industries culturelles et creatives / cultural and creative industries) approaches to the analysis of the book as a medium are different as well as complementary. We are making use of both of them to address the fundamental issues of the significance, legitimacy and value of new forms of knowledge production in academia resulting from their (partial) automation. Not least, the analytical frameworks proposed by both of the the two traditions will be mobilized to account for the relationship between these new forms of creation and production and their circulation, notably on digital platforms.
The third and last workshop will take place again in Mainz on 19 and 20 December 2024 and will focus on the next step of the use of AI in academia, beyond scholarly publishing: the use of AI for actual knowledge generation, particularly in the natural sciences ("robo science") and for social studies research, under the title "Perspectives of automated knowledge generation in scholarly contexts". Stefan Kramer (Datamining Group, Information Science, Johannes Gutenberg University) will discus possible AI applications in natural sciences research with the PhD students and Henning Schoenenberger (Springer Nature) will talk about applications in social sciences research. Moreover, we will try to summarise the insights into the future of scholarly publishing we gained overthe course of the last 2 years of this workshop.