System designers, notably in France, are working actively to capture the impact of Network Densification on strategic planning. Using statistical techniques to model information flows, communication patterns, and change in symbolic notation systems, they hope to make visible the background conditions needed to fully understand the limits of collective cognitive actions in a context of rapid network densification.
The French group uses the notion of *hybrid intelligence networks* to position its work in the perspective of a new sociology of collaboratories (Turner, de Guchteneire, & van Meter, 1994): Knowledge hybridization makes the development of what is now generally known as knowledge discovery methods in databases (KDD), an integral part of observation practices in the sociology of science field. These techniques are needed to identify the cognitive attractors structuring the information flows that characterize life in collaboratories, and enable the study of how these attractors serve as boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star & King, forthcoming) to articulate a wide variety of individual, and largely independent, knowledge production strategies.
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BOWKER, Geoffrey C., STAR, Susan Leigh, WILLIAM, Turner and LES, Gasser (eds.), 2014. Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide. New York: Psychology Press. ISBN 978-1-315-80584-9, p. xvii