Information and Data in e-Science: Making Seamless Access a Reality

Merry Bullock, Ph.D.Senior Director, Office of International Affairs, American Psychological Association

Deputy Secretary-General, IUPsyS

e- SOCIAL SCIENCES

E-Social Science

How have the social sciences embraced e-science?

What are the challenges to achieving access and to making it work?

The Social Sciences

•Anthropology•Archeology•Demography•Economics•Geography•Linguistics•Political science•Psychology•Sociology•Statistics•Interdisciplinary fields (cognitive neuroscience, learning sciences.

Some characteristics of the Social Sciences relevant to e-science

•Social Science data and methodologies are enormously heterogeneous

•Social Scientists study human individuals and organizations

•E-science is changing how social scientists store, share and access data AND how they generate data

•E-science is an object of social science research

Data infrastructure

•History and practice of data sharing

•Stong traditions in some (economics, political science, sociology)

•Weak traditions in others (psychology, anthropology)

Data infrastructure•Large scale cooperative cross-disciplinary studies: on income, political involvement, education, child and adolescent health, aging…

•Federal statistical information (census, national surveys, indicators)

•Data repositories at the national level

•Large scale cooperative studies

Data collection

•Computer assisted interviewing (CAI)

•Web-based experiments

•Survey tools (TESS, Survey Monkey)

•Derived data bases

•Remote virtual laboratories

Is there a problem?

•Despite vast data resources, researchers are not getting the data they need….

Why not?

E-Social Sciences : Challenges

Technical: need for common standards, common catalogues, rapid search, secure access

Ethical: privacy, confidentiality assurances

Cultural: incentives and reward structure for data sharing; national data sharing policies

E-Social Sciences

Technical Challenges

Comparability

operationalization, metrics

translations

data types

Common standards: Metadata – or meta methods?

E-Social Sciences

Ethical challenges

Protecting privacy, confidentiality

Past strategies – restrict access, introduce error, aggregate

De-identification and re-identification threats

Video and audio data

Lack of informed consent

E-Social Sciences

Cultural challenges

•culture of sharing

•reward and incentive structure

•“culture of trust”

•Cross-national approaches to personal information

E-Social Sciences data infrastructure : – changes to the research landscape

•Allow broader, deeper questions, models

•Promote a global perspective

•Change the norms of replication

•Promote a change from theory-based to data-driven science

E-Social Sciences

Vision for the future

Social Sciences as Data Producers and Consumers:

Applying Social Sciences to meet general e-science challenges

E-Social Sciences

Vision for the future

Social Sciences as Data Producers and Consumers:

“One-stop discovery”: Global data catalogue (precursors are in place)

International mechanisms for data identification and data quality assurance

International consensus on access policies

Culture of sharing – publications/citation incentives change to sharing incentives; part of basic scientific training

E-Social Sciences

Vision for the future

Applying Social Sciences to meet general e-science challenges

•Studies of how cybertools affect the processes of scientific discovery and the nature of work•Understand and control threats to access

“Increased operability and data integration will give us the capacity to remove the disciplinary blinders of the 19th Century and to ask new questions with new lenses. The ability to integrate information, to obtain information at no cost, will open many doors intellectually and scientifically. The explosion in knowledge will go far beyond the structure that traditional disciplines and the limits of traditional data have imposed”(Roberta Miller, CIESIN)

E-Social Sciences

Vision for the future

With thanks to:

ICPSR: M. Gutmann, E. AustinCIESIN: R. Miller, R. ChenNSF: W. Ward, M. BarrattONR: S. ChipmanU Chicago: B. Bertenthal, S. PorgesStanford: D. Laitin