James Evans - Cultural observatories, knowledge communities, and a life resplendent with ideas

James Evans' life is one resplendent with ideas. His trajectory into research and learning in areas as wide as network science, collective intelligence, computational social science, and even how knowledge is created, is as irreducible as it is exhilarating, and is a beacon in disorienting times marked by seemingly accelerating paces of change.

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James Evans is the Max Palevsky Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the director of the unexampled 'Knowledge Lab' there, where his research explores the emergence of ideas, shared patterns of reasoning, and processes of attention, communication, agreement, and certainty.

Because thinking and knowing collectives like science, Wikipedia or the Web involve complex networks of diverse human and machine intelligences, collaborating and competing to achieve overlapping aims, he is also an external Professor at the world's premier complex systems institution - the Santa Fe Institute. Evans’ work connects the interaction of agents in a system with the knowledge they produce and its value for themselves and the system.

At the University of Chicago he is also the Faculty Director of the Computational Social Science program and member of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science.

His work appears across several disciplines, unites improbable groups of individuals, groups, and institutions, and his extensive publications in Science and Nature form a constellation of breakthrough science and create a curriculum of literacies anyone living in the world today needs. He teaches courses in augmented intelligence, the history of modern science, science studies, computational content analysis, and Internet and Society and is Founding Editor-in-Chief (with Jar-der Luo & Xiaoming Fu) of the Journal of Social Computing (jOsOcO).

James received his doctorate in sociology from Stanford University and completed a B. A. in Anthropology at Brigham Young University.

So, this is a conversation about making sense in a dizzying world, about both the experience of a life made in in-between places and the science of making new knowledge in them.