The Structure and Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 168

detailed account of the background and key issues in the study of mass extinction.
The main reason we skip the explanation here is because of its involvement
with theories and examples of competing paradigms, a unique characteristic of a
scientific frontier.

5.2.3 The Ontogeny of RISC

Steve Steinberg ( 1994 ) addressed several questions regarding the use of a quanti-
tative approach to identify paradigm shifts in the real world. He chose to examine
Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC). The idea behind RISC was that a pro-
cessor with only a minimal set of simple instructions could outperform a processor
that included instructions for complex high-level tasks. In part, RISC marked a
clear shift in computer architecture and had reached some degree of consensus.
Steinberg searched for quantitative techniques that could help his investigation.
Eventually he found the co-word analysis technique that could produce a map of
the field, a visualization of the mechanisms, and a battle chart of the debate. He
wrote (Steinberg 1994 ): “If I could see the dynamics of a technical debate, I thought,
perhaps I could understand them.”
He collected all abstracts with the keyword RISC for the years 1980-1993 from
the INSPEC database, filtered out the 200 most common English words, and ranked
the remaining words by frequency. The top 300 most frequently occurred words
were given to three RISC experts to choose those words central to the field. Finally,
words chosen by the experts were aggregated by synonyms into 45 keyword clusters.
The inclusion index was used to construct a similarity matrix. This matrix was
mapped by MDS with ALSCAL. The font size of a keyword was proportional to
the word's frequency. Strongly linked keywords were connected by straight lines.
Figure 5.2 shows the co-word map of the period of 1980-1985. The first papers
to explicitly examine and define RISC appeared within this period. The design
philosophy of RISC was so opposed to the traditional computing architecture
paradigm, every paper in this period was written to defend and justify RISC. The
map shows two main clusters. One is on the left, surrounding keywords such
as register, memory, simple, and pipeline. These are the architectural terms that
uniquely define RISC. The other cluster is on the right, centered on keywords such as
language and CISC. These are the words that identify the debate between the RISC
and CISC camps. Language is the most frequent keyword on the map. According
to Steinberg, the term language most clearly captures the key to the debate between
RISC and CISC. While CISC proponents believed that a processor's instruction
set should closely correspond to high-level languages such as FORTRAN and
COBOL, RISC proponents argue that simple instructions were better than high-
level instructions. This debate is shown in the co-word map with the connections
between language, CISC, compiler, and programming.
To illustrate the paradigm shift, we also include the co-word map of another
period: 1986-1987 (Fig. 5.3 ). During this period, Sun introduced the first