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Tacit knowledge and the Journal of Visualized Experiments
31 July 2012
By Sarah Davies
I was recently doing some writing about ‘tacit knowledge’ in science – the taken-for-granted, invisible skills and expertise which are vital in the laboratory but which are rarely written about in the methods sections of journal articles. The sociologist of science Harry Collins describes tacit knowledge as “knowledge or skills that can be passed between scientists by personal contact but cannot be, or have not been, set out or passed on in formulae, diagrams, or verbal descriptions and instructions for action”. Tacit knowledge is thus often responsible for difficulties in reproducing experimental results or measurements between different lab groups and scientists.
Coincidentally, I then came across the Journal of Visualized Experiments, which exists precisely to try and get around this problem and which does what it says on the tin: it is a peer reviewed online journal which uses videos to show life sciences methods and findings. Its ‘About’ page says that:
Visualization greatly facilitates the understanding and efficient reproduction of both basic and complex experimental techniques, thereby addressing two of the biggest challenges faced by today's life science research community: i) low transparency and poor reproducibility of biological experiments and ii) time and labor-intensive nature of learning new experimental techniques.
Its founder, Dr Moshe Pritsker, says something similar in an interview with the Epoch Times – that he was “suffering from the low reproducibility of experimental studies published in science journals” and started the video journal in response.
So…sounds great to me. But I’m not a life scientist, and don’t have much sense of how useful the videos actually are. Anyone have any thoughts?
Blanka Sengerová09 August 2012 at 09:57 AM
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I heard about this before, one of my colleagues was actually asked to contribute.
In principle it's a very good idea because from experience, having a protocol for an experiment is one thing, but actually being able to do the experiment is another matter altogether. It helps having someone to show you how to do little things that are not written down (immensely so!) and that is why, when I learn new techniques, I always make myself really detailed notes. The advantage of a video is that you can repeat it to yourself ad infinitum without annoying it for asking again and again. The downside, of course, is that you can't ask it specific questions on things that it hasn't already covered.
I've not watched videos of experimental techniques much but I expect I would if there weren't people in my lab to ask as a first point of call. So overall it is a very good idea, I think.
Simon Smith19 August 2012 at 09:20 PM
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Strictly speaking, a video's still an inscription - a codification - and therefore the knowledge is no longer tacit. Blanka points out how it's already reduced communicational richness compared with a face-to-face encounter in one important respect. It may be a multi-media text, but it's more like a protocol than the personal contact Collins writes of.