Revelator’s Complex Adaptive Reasoning Methodology for Resource Infrastructure Evolution

Countless archives around the world, including C.S. Peirce’s manuscripts at Harvard, wait for an infrastructure that makes possible the collaborative work to re-create them as "e-resources." Meanwhile, the U.S. National Science Foundation’s new Cyberinfrastructure Initiative, calls for deeper understanding of

infrastructure

, enabling the engagement of researchers as participants in sustained e-resource development. Revelator is a game conceived as a methodology for that collaborative participation, in an evolving infrastructure of Conceptual Structures technology. Our conception of Revelator’s game context derives from C. S. Peirce’s theory of knowledge evolution in semeosis and his pragmatic methodology for inquiry, and incorporates J.H. Holland’s complex adaptive systems modeling. Revelator’s role is to engage participants in “the game of inquiry,” which reveals significant patterns and paths structured by complex logical relations among the conditional propositions that represent players’ conjectures as plays in the game. Revelator offers a general methodology for building trustworthy collaborative research, in an evolving infrastructure of knowledge technology and e-resources.