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DATA VISUALIZATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION ON ACADEMIC DIGITAL PLATFORMS: THE SUCCEEDED ISSUES OF KNOWLEDGE STORAGE AND THE NEW CHALLENGES // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2022. Issue 2 (32). P. 30-45

Digital platforms present revolutionary phenomena that fundamentally change the way both scientific research and its metadata are stored and organized. Platforms inherit features of classical libraries, at the same time seen as revolutionary, implementing algorithms and interactive methods of systematization and analytics. Adequate access to research data and metadata is perceived as the result of a high-quality storage organization. The latter is aimed to provide an adequate picture of research fields’ conditions and interactions, as well as the prospects of their development. While data is related to researches themselves, metadata demonstrate social aspects of scientific work: researches, institutions and projects they conduct. The lack of a universal workflow of entering data leads to multiple misrepresentations, among others, about the platforms themselves. Understanding of platforms as autonomous structures, “black boxes” with “mysterious” algorithms, significantly limits intellectual access to issues required to be resolved in relation to them. The workflow of entering and processing data and metadata is dependent on the competences of the actors, mentioned above. Should a scientist, focused on actual research, be well equipped technically to avoid misrepresentation of scientific results on their part? Should a data scientist be universally educated so they can comply with the standards of historical indexers? Indexing itself is one of the main focuses of the article. It is analyzed in two respects: as an instrument of textual search (on the example of early medieval practices) and as an instrument of navigation in multiple fields of research on a platform. The index is construed here in accordance with its initial function of a pointer, on the one hand, and as a “map-reading”, which not only reads, but also creates the maps of communications in disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields, on the other. This observation highlights the necessity to overcome a number of difficulties. The first one is correspondence between the conceptual and technical levels of the platform organization. Another issue is the way classical methods optimize and visualize data within the realm of digital storage. Indexing, science mapping and complex systems engaged cannot be unambiguously evaluated. They all are methods used to simultaneously optimize and politicize data (as it is demonstrated in the “politics of the list”). The given analysis shows the need for constant work on the correspondence of the conceptual, visual and technical levels of academic platforms: technical issues could not be perceived independently from the conceptual ones, whether they are related to the data or metadata of research. The progress of knowledge and communication of scientific communities demonstrate themselves as dependent on the strategies related to the methodological apparatus that determines the quality of research data and metadata representation.

Keywords: academic platforms, digital platforms, data, metadata, indexing, science mapping, network science