Our stock of scientific knowledge is now accumulating in digital form. Our DNA is now encoded as genome sequence data, scans of brain activity exist in functional magnetic resonance image datasets, and records of our climate are stored in myriad time series datasets—to name a few examples. Equally as important, our reasoning about these data is recorded in software, in the scripts and code that analyze the digitally recorded world. The result is a deep digitization of scientific knowledge, spreading across fields and generating new ways of understanding our surroundings. With the parallel development of the Internet as a pervasive communication mechanism for digital data, an unprecedented opportunity for access to society’s scientific understanding is at hand.


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Authors: Victoria Stodden
Publication year: 2011
Language: English (EN)
Level of knowledge: Introductory: aware of
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