The Fluidity of an Individual’s Core-Periphery Position in Digital Knowledge Fields

Abstract

The literature on digital knowledge fields suggests that knowledge coproducers are embedded in a core-periphery social structure. This structure engenders an individual-level tension: be in the core where there is support for successful knowledge integration, or be in the periphery where one can work outside of peer pressure. In this paper, we focus on the fluidity of core-periphery structures in digital knowledge fields. We study the case of nanoHUB, a digital, interdisciplinary knowledge field of nanoscience and engineering. We analyze 17,821 contributions made by 251 knowledge producers who coproduce 609 scientific simulation tools over a nearly ten-year period, encompassing over six million lines of code. We find that knowledge producers seek to resolve the core-periphery tension by moving towards and then away from the temporal core. Additionally, we find that proximity to the temporal core at the point of the knowledge production has a curvilinear relationship with code produced