Patrick Love

Circulation Theory Impact on DIKW Empiricism

Circulation theory and ecological critique offer valuable insight into the rhetoricity of DIKW, starting with how lived experience is the implied foundation of the pyramid. More complex renderings of the DIKW pyramid (figure 2) explicitly make the “world” (lived, material reality) the basis of data.

Figure 2: Expanded DIKW Pyramid from Kitchin (2014) adding the World as the expanded base of the pyramid and offering verbs and descriptions at each level to fleshy out the relationships.

The rest of this expanded pyramid model (figure 2) labels the work between levels, using words an algorithm or human could jointly perform. Figure 2 also invokes the temporal dimension of knowledge-work in this framework: wisdom is the ability to apply knowledge in the present to affect and shape the future. Specifically, each of these terms are defined in Data Science roughly as follows:

  • Data: abstractions or measurements taken from the world
  • Information: data structured or organized to be meaningful to humans
  • Knowledge: structured information humans can understand and apply
  • Wisdom: knowledge applied appropriately (Kelleher and Tierney 2018 p. 56).

In a macro view, the DIKW model codifies that we know what we know based on observing and organizing data into communicable and compelling patterns for others. This codification aligns with cybernetics, implying that human knowledge has building blocks (metaphysical bits/data) constituting information, knowledge, and/or wisdom in the mind like a computer (Gleick 2011 pp. 242, 262). In other words, what we know is based on mental configurations of our observations and experiences, and knowledge flourishes based on how well we are able to establish shared experience of these configurations with others. Information theory, however, primarily deals with transferring information, so it apolitically withdraws from considering meaning of texts as they progress from data to shared experience, focusing on their integrity as signals (Glieck 2011 p. 246). Because Information Theory focuses on form, circulation value becomes a de facto indicator of information’s usefulness or reliability (i.e. high circulation presumes information will be validated or quickly disproven). Combined with the DIKW model, this view of knowledge-production validates a foundational claim of circulation studies: meaning is rhetorical run-off of circulation rather than an artifact’s exact content itself (Ahmed 2004, Edbauer 2005, Seas 2012, Gries 2013). Circulation studies, therefore, is a fitting lens for understanding the rhetorical role DIKW plays in social information ecologies because it argues that information has immutable spatiotemporality (Gries 2015), acknowledges distributed agency, and implies knowledge arises from shared experience (Ahmed 2004, Edbauer 2005).