In this casually recorded podcast from the Personal Science Research Group, we start with an introduction from Steven Jonas on the essays of Michel de Montaigne, and then move on to a discussion of our upcoming paper about “epistemic agency” as a missing dimension in research on citizen science for health.
Joining me: Sara Riggare, Uppsala University; Steven Jonas; Thomas Blomseth Christiansen, cofounder of TOTTI Labs; and Jakob Eg Larsen, Technical University of Denmark.
A few highlights
Steven Jonas: “By limiting the scope of conveying experience, the power to resonate with people is actually much stronger and wider than if you strove to make your observations apply universally.”
Sara Riggare: “Epistemic agency is the capacity of an individual to act as a producer of knowledge, rather than only a source of data — to pose questions, gather and interpret evidence, reach conclusions, and be recognized by others as a credible knower.”
Jakob Eg Larsen: “We are not talking about people just using these kinds of devices for tracking physical activity, or your step counts. It’s papers where the individual is asking his own question and doing his or her own analysis of the data.”
Thomas Blomseth Christiansen: “Epistemic agency has been an emergent phenomenon. People have just been doing it. It’s not something that was a top-down mandate or an explicit policy.”
For more on personal science and the Quantified Self community, visit the Personal Science Research Group, the QS Show & Tell archive. Also, you can now pre-order the Quantified Self: Learning to Observe. Although the official release date is Oct. 6, pre-orders are super-important for convincing booksellers that this topic matters, so if you think you will want to own a copy, please help us spread the message by ordering early.
