Highlighting the Duality of the ICT and Development Research Agenda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Central to this paper is the argument that existing classifications of the information and communication technology and development literature fail to explicitly acknowledge a fundamental duality between two distinct problem domains found within the research body. Through an extensive review of 184 journal articles and conference proceedings, a framework is proposed that suggests a partitioning of the existing literature into two distinct streams of research: (1) those studies that focus on understanding technology “for development” and (2) those studies that focus on understanding technology “in developing” countries. More than an exercise in semantics, the authors argue that the two streams represent separate sets of research objectives that are currently being conflated and addressed interchangeably within the same research environment. At present, there appears to be little recognition or explicit acknowledgement of this branching of research domains, as well as little reflexive discussion on the epistemological, methodological and theoretical implications of this delineation. A discussion related to the efficacy and relevance of the two separate research agendas is provided, along with recommendations for future research directions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.050 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.022 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.035 | 0.053 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.023 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".