LaFrance's metaphors for knowledge acquisition

Excavation

Mining

Jewels

Difficult

  • Expertise is extracted from an expert and transferred to a computer program.

  • Scarce and valuable resource of commercial value

  • Requires refinement, but can be engineered - 4 basic processes: mining, molding, assembling, refining

  • Expertise is stable and independent

  • Expertise is solid and secure rather than transient and mercurial

  • Expertise is a thing, and does not lose value

  • Elicitation is labourious, possibly crude

  • Analyst needs to be in control of the expert

  • Personalities and context are irrelevant

Capture

Wild

Struggle

Escape

Taming

  • Expertise needs to be secured and made durable

  • Can be organized and consolidated

  • Can be made rigorous and systematic

  • Can be owned, dispensed and commodified

  • May be the property of others

  • Expertise (or experts) may be expected to resist capture

  • Expert needs to be made cooperative and compliant

  • Expertise is often tacit, ineffable and hidden, rather than public and verbalizable

Courtship

Elusive

Relationships

Courtesy

  • The most important expert is the busiest

  • Expertise is socially sanctioned

  • Experts may be willing

  • Acquisition requires partnership

  • Acquisition is deliberate, artful and skilful, but painstaking

  • Requires personal relationships

  • Expertise is highly personable and idiosyncratic

Creation

Composition

Sculpting

Imaginative

  • Information (knowledge) is not transferred, but mediated

  • Knowledge can be good or bad, rather than right or wrong

  • No replication of mentally represented knowledge

  • Knowledge and expertise emerge from 'knowing in action'

  • Analyst has important contribution