e research chapter 1
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Prepared for 2010 Graduate seminarInformetrics and e-research (prof. Han Woo Park),at Yeungnam Univ. in S. Korea
The Contours and Challenges of e-Research
Nicholas W. Jankowski
Presented by Kim Kyoung [email protected]. March 2010
Introduction
▶ Every so often major shifts emerge in the way so-ciety is imagined. Historical periods have ac-quired labels, albeit debated and disputed, that reflect such shift: Reformation, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, Information age.
: This latest shift is attributed to the widespread availability and incorporation of high-speed com-puters and electronic networks, particularly the internet, into the research enterprise, making very large volumes of data available that provide opportunity for addressing new questions in new ways.
Introduction
▶In this chapter deals with the following thing. ① This introductory chapter sketches the develop-
ment of this transformation and begins with ex-amination of competing terms currently in vogue that are meant to describe the change.
② The organizational structure of the book is elabo-rated with short introductions to the chapters in each section of the book.
③ A few remarks on further research directions are made in concluding note.
Conceptualizing scholarly transformation
▶ A small coterie of terms reflects current changes in the conduct of science and, more generally, of scholarship.
The most prevalent of these are : e-science, cyberinfrastructure, e-research.
▶ Big Science : Manhattan project, cold-war, weapons development and na-
tional security: non-military project - high energy physics laboratories like CERN / Human Genome
Project -> These project require a need for large scale instrumentation,
budgets running in the billion, and personnel numbering in the thousands.
So these project require a collaboration between nations and scholarship.
Conceptualizing scholarly transformation
◈ Michael Nentwich(2003) - 「 Research in the age of the Internet」 “cyberscience”: ‘…all scholarly and scientific research activities in the
virtual space generated by the networked computers and by advanced information and communication tech-nologies in general’
▶ The term ‘cyberscience’ appears in the title of a recent study Christine Hine(2008), Systematics as cyber-science.
Conceptualizing scholarly transformation
▶ The term e-science is basically a European ver-sion of the American term ‘cyberinfrastructure’.
In 1999 : the launch of a major funding initiative. The focus of e-science was on the natural and bio-
logical sciences and was designed to facilitate the processing of very large volumes of data with the aid of Grid computer networks.
In 2001 : establishment of the National e-Science Centre(NeSC). Funding for e-science project in U.K.
Conceptualizing scholarly transformation
In December 2004 : the National Centre for e-Social Sci-ence (NeSSC).
Most of the projects emphasize incorporation of Grid computer architecture into the infrastructure of social science.
▶ Another term ‘cyberinfrastructure’ refers to an infra-structure of distributed computer, information, and communication technologies.
: In the words of the Atkins Report, “ If infrastructure is required for an industrial economy, then… cyberinfras-tructure is required for a knowledge economy”
Conceptualizing scholarly transformation
▶ The first waves of cyberinfrastructure initiatives were situated in the natural and biological sci-ences where large volume of data are involved in research endeavors requiring high-speed com-puter processing: particle physics, astronomy, meteorology, and DNA research.
-> These initiatives have not remained restricted to the natural and biological science. The American Council of Learned Society(ACLS, 2006) issued a report on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences.
Conceptualizing scholarly transformation
▶ A different approach has been taken where the term e-research is seen as more reflective of the work of both social scientists and scholars in the humanities, a terminological development also observed by Borgman.
: The term e-research acknowledges forms of schol-arship that do not primarily emphasize use of high-speed computers for processing large datasets, but that place weight on incorporation of a wide variety of new media and electronic networks in the research process
; see chapter 3.
Conceptualizing scholarly transformation
▶ The following list can be construed as the seeds for web 2.0 ‘cloud’ of e-research features.
: computerization : virtual organizational structures, distant collaboration : development of internet-based tools : visualization : publication, distribution and preservation of scholar-
ship
Conceptualizing scholarly transformation
▶ Figure 1.1 (8p) illustrates the interrelatedness of these features of e-research, situated within three clusters of activities associated with many forms of scholarship.
① Research Organization : management / collaboration / monitoring & assessment
② Research process : problem formulation / research design / data collection & analysis, visualization / data preservation
③ Scholarly communication : informal communication / formal communication – publication, conference sub-missions, working papers, journal articles, chapters in edited books and single-authored monographs.
Scholarly communication
▶ In this chapter, scholarly communication is viewed as the presentation of research findings to an audi-ence external to the research project, home de-partment or institution of the researcher, for the purpose of sharing and contributing to knowledge.
- Such communication may be informal or formal in character.
- Traditionally, emphasis rested with, and impor-tance was attributed to, formal communication as reflected in journal and book publication. Such tra-dition is still prominent across the social sciences and humanities, but changes are appearing with the emergence of e-research.
Scholarly communication1) Informal Scholarly communication
▶ Depending on the academic environment in question, use of informal Web-based communication seems to be exploding : wikis; Web sites for sharing photos, videos and slides; blogs; social network sites; Web meeting tools and platforms allowing variants of instant messag-ing.
: Web sites, wikis, and blogs are becoming prominent, and
initiatives are being undertaken to incorporate student familiarity and acceptance of social network sites in classroom activities. Considerable and substantive change may be forthcoming in the arena of informal scholarly communication as the education setting adopts social media.
Scholarly communication2) Formal Scholarly communication
▶ Formal scholarly communication, sometimes termed traditional academic publishing, is undergoing intense debate among the core groups involved -authors, editors, publishers, librarians- and much of this debate relates to the convergence of four factors:
• Escalating costs of periodicals, particularly in the fields of sci-ence, technology and medicine;
• Decreasing university resources for library acquisitions and for publication of scholarly monographs by university presses;
• Mounting revolt by coalitions of research librarians, journal ed-itors, board members, and authors against the pricing prac-tices of commercial publishers;
• Expanding opportunities for publishing through digitalization, especially through tools for authoring, processing, and dis-tributing scholarship via the Internet.
2) Formal Scholarly communication Journals
▶ Scholarly journals have been proliferating at an astounding rate.
Still on-going and highly relevant to e-research, are peer re-view procedure, and online access to and repositories for ar-ticles.
Peer review
▶ ‘Peer review’ : assessment of the colleague
▶ Formal scholarly communication is about contributing new knowledge and subjecting contributions to peer review and public debate. Various mechanisms have been established to assess the quality of contributions, of which peer review is the most prevalent.
2) Formal Scholarly communication Peer review
▶ Peer review of journal article is almost universally accepted as the necessary procedure for scholarly work to be admit-ted to the formal record of scientifically-based knowledge.
· Publishing Research Consortium : Based on responses from 3101 journal authors, reviewers,
and editors, the study reflects the opinions of scholars in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences.
· British Medical Journal (BMJ) : BMJ have a long history with open access and open peer re-
view procedures. · Scientific American : an article in development on its web-site and invited com-
mentary from readers.
2) Formal Scholarly communication Online access & repositories
▶ The most significant issue related to online journal publishing is the kind and degree of open access provided to journal titles and articles.
· Public Library of Science (PLoS) : PLoS journals are the prototype of this kind of publishing. At
present there are seven PLoS journals in the biology, medicine, and genetics.
· Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) : BRII is designed to help support open access to scholarship by
establishing a fund to assist scholars in paying any necessary fees.
· arXiv : arXiv was launched a decade ago and has archived more than
a half million documents in the fields of physics, computer sci-ence, quantitative biology, and statistics.
2) Formal Scholarly communication Online access & repositories
▶ Perhaps the greatest incentive encouraging access to scholarship has occurred outside the domain of publishing: funding agencies, universities and associations of scholars have contributed to development of digital repositories for scholarship.
· National Institutes of Health (NIH) : Some funding agencies such as the NIH in the U.S., require
that publication, and in some cases data, be deposited in publically available repositories.
· the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) : The number of repositories across disciplines, countries,
and institutions is multiplying rapidly; OpenDOAR notes more than 1200 at the time of this writing.
Organization of book1) conceptualization
▶ Two chapters concentrate on issues directly related to the con-ceptualization of –research.
Chapter 2 : Ralph Schroeder and Jennifer Fry construct a map of social science approaches and e-research. The authors discuss the relations identified and illustrate them through attention to a range of projects in the U.K.
Chapter 3 : Anne Beaulieu and Paul Wouters approach the concep-tualization of e-research from a perspective emphasizing inter-vention, and they take as their starting point the Virtual Knowl-edge Studio for the Humanities and Social Science(VKS) in the Netherlands. The authors discuss the tensions involved in com-bining reflexive analysis with the practical design of scholarly practices.
2) Development
▶ The next section, development, consist of three chapters, each addressing aspects of policy and its implementation as related to the emergence of e-science and e-research in different geographic re-gions.
Chapter 4 : prepared by Peter Halfpenny, Rob Proc-ter, Yu-Wei Lin and Alex Voss, focuses on develop-ments in the U.K. related to what has come to be known as e-social science. The authors reflect on the development of the research program of the National Centre for e-science(NCeSS) and delin-eate its achievement and the challenges faced.
2) Development
Chapter 5 : focuses on e-research as a reflection of the scholarly community in the humanity in Australia.
The chapter authors, Paul Genoni, Helen Merrick, and Michele Wilson, describe e-research practice in the humanities, based on a survey exploring how scholars use the Internet for teaching and research purposes.
Chapter 6 : prepared by Carol Soon and Han Woo Park, explores the emergence of e-social science policy in South Korea and Singapore.
This chapter contribute to re-addressing a Western bias by focusing primarily on issues related to scholarly practice in e-research within the context of two Asian countries.
3) Collaboration
▶ The third section is concerned with collaboration among researchers, often at a distance, and includes two chap-ters.
Chapter 7 : prepared by Petra Sonderegger, addresses the planning and management of globally distributed re-search teams. Sonderegger, drawing on an ethnographic study conducted in Bangalore, India, explores how corpo-rations and researchers deal with the challenge of collab-orating across geographic distance and organizational boundaries using technology-mediated communication.
Chapter 8 : Eric Meyer discusses issues that arise when small scientific projects become part of larger scientific collaborations, seen from a social informatics perspective.
4) Visualization
Chapter 9 : authored by Mike Thelwall, draws upon experiences in the field of Webometrics to de-scribe the problems and techniques involves when collecting and visualizing data about the In-ternet.
Chapter 10 : by Howard Welser, Thomas Lento, Marc Smith, Eric Gleave, and Itai Himelboim, presents initiatives to enhance data visualization developed at Microsoft Research.
5) Data preservation & reuse
Chapter 11 : prepared by Steven Schnetder, Kirsten Foot, and Paul Wousters, is concerned with one of the enigmas of e-research: preserving Web sites in a manner allowing scientific study.
Chapter 12 : by Ann Zimmeramn, Nathan Bos, Judy Olsen, and Gary Olsen, provides a panorama of the problems en-countered in sharing data.
Chapter 13 : Samuelle Carlson and Ben Anderson present four case studies: Skyproject, Survey Project, CurationPro-ject, and AuthroProject. These projects provide the empiri-cal basis through which the authors consider the extent data can be extracted from its original context and made available for other researchers operating in other contexts.
6) Access & intellectual property
Chapter 14 : Robert Lucas and John Willinsky, the au-thors of Chapter 14, consider the idea of open ac-cess as related to e-research. They present an ethi-cal and epistemological argument for open access to scholarly publications and review recent devel-opments in access to data and published work.
Chapter 15 : by Dan Burk, is concerned with intellec-tual property in the arena of e-science.
Burk argues for awareness not only of the technical structure, but also of the social and communicative structures of e-science in order to adopt licensing solutions to scholarly practice.
7) Case studies
▶ The final section of the book presents two studies that include a broad range of the features of e-re-search, which could not easily be included in one of the earlier sections.
Chapter 16 : prepared by Bridgette Wessels and Max Graglia, discusses a co-construction project involv-ing social scientists and computer scientists.
Chapter 17 : by Clifford Tatum and Michele LaFrance,
explores the collaborative process used in the de-velopment of Wikipedia content.
Concluding note
▶ This book is not the place to repeat the suggestions for further investigation the authors provide, but it is op-portunity to mention a few overarching issues.
① Two kinds of chronicling seem to be required to under-stand possible transformations in scholarship.
② Much insight is to be gained from exploring the non-adopters and ‘laggards’-an observation frequently made about the introduction of new media more generally.
③ It is important to emphasize the contextualization of change reflected in scholarly cultures, disciplines, and associations as situated in broader social, economic, and political factors at work in crafting the course of science and, more generally, of scholarship.
