Intellectual Property in Synthetic Biology - Enacted Issues of Sharing and Owning |
2.0 STUDYING THE SYNBIO-IP-ISSUE-SPACES WITH INTERNET RESEARCH METHODS
What is a "synthetic biology-intellectual-property-issue space"? The concept of a "synthetic biology-IP-issue space", is wholly practical, as it only serves to denote the public we uncovered surrounding the issue space. The controversy about open source (sharing) and patent-pro (ownership) approaches to synthetic biology, is imbued with moral, legal, and economic concerns that complicates and blurs the unfolding and enacted info-scape (books, magazines, websites, databases etc.) where we seek out clues about what is at stake in the open source vs. ownership IP debate. What is at stake in synbio-IP-issues?
Questions about what is at stake involve some degree of demarcation and reduction (Rogers & Marres 2008:255) of the dense, and flourishing info-scapes articulated by a heterogenous public of experts, professionals, bio-curios citizens and institutions concerned about synbio-IP-issues.
The assumption behind studying the issue-spaces is that the hyperlinking behaviour is not random but can actually tell us something about who is acknowledging who on the web, and thereby disclosing their normative affiliations. Analysis of Internet-cultures are relevant as they represent real relations and policies, but have different characteristics, why they need to be studied through different (digital) methods - the Internet is no longer a realm apart, so to speak (Rogers 2009:5;Rogers & Marres 2000; Venturini 2011). In following the web linking culture we analyze the 'socio-epistemic issue networks' in the ownership and sharing regime and compare each linking culture. Furthermore we seek to answer our research question through analysis of selected key words that we have found dominant in the articulation of a synbio-IP-issue space.
Issue Crawler provides a mapping software with which it is possible to map hyperlinking networks on the web. The software "crawls" the web for links and reveals a map of 'socio-epistemic networks'. As input the program needs a list of URLs. We have gathered our list of source set URLs through readings of different types of litterature and queries on www.google.com, for ”synthetic biology”+”intellectual property” and ”synthetic biology”+”intellectual property”site:.org. The final URL source sets feeding the co-link network make up what we believe to be a synbio-IP-issue defining public.
Questions about what is at stake involve some degree of demarcation and reduction (Rogers & Marres 2008:255) of the dense, and flourishing info-scapes articulated by a heterogenous public of experts, professionals, bio-curios citizens and institutions concerned about synbio-IP-issues.
The assumption behind studying the issue-spaces is that the hyperlinking behaviour is not random but can actually tell us something about who is acknowledging who on the web, and thereby disclosing their normative affiliations. Analysis of Internet-cultures are relevant as they represent real relations and policies, but have different characteristics, why they need to be studied through different (digital) methods - the Internet is no longer a realm apart, so to speak (Rogers 2009:5;Rogers & Marres 2000; Venturini 2011). In following the web linking culture we analyze the 'socio-epistemic issue networks' in the ownership and sharing regime and compare each linking culture. Furthermore we seek to answer our research question through analysis of selected key words that we have found dominant in the articulation of a synbio-IP-issue space.
Issue Crawler provides a mapping software with which it is possible to map hyperlinking networks on the web. The software "crawls" the web for links and reveals a map of 'socio-epistemic networks'. As input the program needs a list of URLs. We have gathered our list of source set URLs through readings of different types of litterature and queries on www.google.com, for ”synthetic biology”+”intellectual property” and ”synthetic biology”+”intellectual property”site:.org. The final URL source sets feeding the co-link network make up what we believe to be a synbio-IP-issue defining public.