Home Struttura Produzioni Pubblicazioni Corsi Aggiornamento Seminari Ricerca Progetti Materiale

Il Centro Linguistico I seminari COMUNITA' VIRTUALI THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY AND NEW FORMS OF TELEMATIC COMMUNICATIONS Fabio CIOTTI The scientific community is an example of a community based on informational communications rather than on territoriality and physical contact. It is essentially founded on sharing a series of institutions and communications tools among the members of that community. By modifying the structure, function and ways of exploiting these tools, new technology in telematic communications can thus change the idea of the scientific community. In this paper, I intend to analyze the characteristics and present limits of, and future developments in online scientific communications, both from a technical and functional point of view. The new tools for the communication of knowledge that telematic technology, and in particular the Internet, have made available to the scientific community can be divided into three categories: systems for sharing primary resources; sytems for interpersonal communications through individual and collective computers and systems for the diffusion of scientific communications. Systems for retrieving bibliographical information and archives of texts in digital form belong to the first category; systems of electronic mail, various forms of telematic conferences and synchronic interaction environments belong to the second; various means of online scientific editing in its different forms (from the digital scientific journal, heir of the classical scientific publication, to experiments with the telematic publications of underground scientific literature) make up the third. I will focus my attention on this last group of tools, which represents the digital form of traditional form of traditional scientific publications. First of all, I will analyze the main characteristics of the present situation through various examples. Secondly, I will go on identify a few technological problems which still limit the diffusion of telematic computer publications in the sector of scientific editing by trying to point out possible solutions among the list of recent technological innovations on the Internet. The last part of the paper will try to outline several cultural and institutional problems which get in the way of or hinder the diffusion of online scientific communications and the transformation of the scientific community into a virtual community. Torna al programma