HISTORY

The "crisis of scientific information" so often evoked is attributed to a misunderstood fact expressed by P. Joliot: "while the communication and information technology develops, the capacities of our brain to acquire, store, assimilate and produce information remain unchanged". The number and length of published texts in the human sciences makes this imbalance particularly striking. Today one tends to combat this situation by replacing the reading of texts with strategies of personal consultation.

The objective of ARKEOTEK is to offer a new mode of publication adapted to these strategies, which has its origins in the research of the logicist program.

In intellectual terms, the aim is to rewrite the scientific reasonings scattered in the traditional discursive thread of printed media, through a computational architecture reducible to two basic components: one component is the data bases upon which reasoning is founded (observations, analogies, background knowledge, common sense); the second component is the set of inferential operations, or rewrite formulas, which establish a bridge between the data bases and the hypotheses or conclusions put forward by the author. In material terms, those rewritten texts are recorded in a format adapted to electronic media (CD-ROM, websites). The proposed format, SCD (Scientific Constructs and Data), permits a rapid reading of the publication as well as an easy exploration of its constitutive elements -- data bases and inferential operations -- without any loss of information.

Référence :

Joliot P. 2001. La recherche passionnément, Paris, Editions Odile Jacob, p. 85.