Computational center will study the past and future of knowledge

Templeton Foundation awards $5.2 million for Computation Institute's Metaknowledge Network The march of science is stumbling and easily sidetracked, fraught with bias, fads and dead ends. A new research initiative based at the University of Chicago and the Computation Institute will use the latest computational tools to scrutinize this imperfect path and better understand how knowledge was and is created. Such understanding could transform the process of research, calling out past missteps while revealing unanticipated new directions for the future. With a $5.2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the new Metaknowledge Network brings together social scientists, computer scientists and domain experts from several disciplines to explore how knowledge emerges, thrives, evolves and dies out. The lessons learned can be used to accelerate discovery across fields, as scientists develop a deeper understanding of why we have the knowledge we have—and why certain promising questions were left unasked or unanswered. "We have an opportunity to create a really rich science of science, one that builds on novel computational tools to exploit the increasingly widespread digital traces of the research process," said James Evans, director of the center, associate professor of sociology, and Computation Institute Fellow. Metaknowledge means "knowledge about knowledge"—the study of how different scientific questions and ideas appear, mature and potentially take root.