Re: last Wednesday

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Klaus, 

Thank you so much for the slides. Indeed, I was absent last Wednesday for health reasons. I'll send you a letter explaining this in a separate mail.

we - you - always start with Hmax as the overall measure, which evolution expands by allowing positive feedback within consensually acceptable limits. Decomposing Hmax does not capture this growth, in fact, it promotes a status quo if not rendering innovation increasingly undesirable.

I completely agree with this point. On p. 76 of the book, for example, I try to explain this point to the readers using the following figure:

H obs ). b Hitherto impossible options aremade possible because of cultural and technological evolution. Adapted from: Brooks&Wiley( 1986 ,at p.43) 

Alexander Petersen and I further worked on this (that is, your formula) in par. 4.7 (pp. 79 ff.). This leads us to Eq. 4.14 (p. 81) as a generalization.

You will remember that you guided me in 2010 in writing the software for reproducing your Q, and the ternary interaction terms. I extensively tested this in:

Leydesdorff, L. (2011). “Structuration” by Intellectual Organization: The Configuration of Knowledge in Relations among Scientific Texts. Scientometrics 88(2), 499-520. 

Let me attach the paper for your convenience. I highlighted some relevant paragraphs. 

 

I am attaching a few slides that I presented on Wednesday to which I added one with making my critique of your calculus more clear. I thought your quantifying cross references in publications differentiated in these three areas was a great idea to test collaboration. However, there is a methodological bias in tabulating the literature cited by any one publication about others. If you simply quantify which work cites which other work, you have essentially binary relations or links. To test whether there is collaboration among three or more sectors, your would have to tabulate triples, quadruples, quintuples, etc.

My routine is available for this at https://www.leydesdorff.net/software/krippendorff/index.htm . We tested this together at the time (2010). The routine and the interface are user-friendly.

Interestingly. Many of the triple interaction terms you reported, which I call Q-values, turned out to be negative. You interpret these values as evidence for your triple helix model. Please have a look at my slides. From my perspective negative Q-values are evidence of the absence of 3rd-order relation and the presence of redundancy in the sum of the three 2nd-order relations. See the artificial data provided in Figure 7. Here, any two binary relation implies, that third 2nd order relation is in Shannon's conception redundant and turns up as a negative Q-value.

I may be one of the few of your colleagues who follow you here; but I leave it to you to elaborate your methodology.

Best, Loet

PS. I hope to attend next Wednesday.  L.

_______________

Loet Leydesdorff

"The Evolutionary Dynamics of Discusive Knowledge"(Open Access)

Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam 

Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

lo...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7835-3098;    

 

I think your conceptions are fine but not supported by your calculus of redundancy.

 

Best wishes

Klaus