1

What’s so special about the social sciences?

Peter Burnhill

Director, EDINA national academic data centre, University of Edinburgh, Scotland UK

Bloomsbury Conference on e-publishing and e-publications

University College London, 24/25 June 2010

short answer: Some things but not everything

Overview for a longer answer

1. Autobiographic Apologia– Yesterday and Yesteryears

2. Research publication and data for research in the social sciences– some evidence (some old and re-used) – all that is digital are not data

3. Societal Big Challenges– a sense of place

4. Our shared task– ease and continuity of access– citation and linking

* Linked Data: Semantic Web anyone?

5. Socio-Informatics & the Internet

Will not take the full two hours ….

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1. Social Science Research Council [now ESRC]– ‘Scientific Officer’ for Economic & Social History and Statistics

(left to do MSc Statistics at London School of Economics)

2. Scottish Education Data Archive, until mid ‘80s– Survey statistician: school leavers, YTS, 16-19 cohort surveys; demand for HE

3. Graduate School, Faculty of Social Science, 1987 – 1997– Senior Lecturer, teaching quantitative/survey methods

4. Edinburgh University Data Library, mid- 1980s & on– Manager: set-up and development– President of IASSIST, 1997 – 2001: social science data professionals

5. ESRC Regional Research Laboratory for Scotland 1986/90– Co-director: early days of Geographical Information Systems (GIS)

6. EDINA national data centre, mid-1990s to present: my day job– Director: set-up and continuous development

• Digital Curation Centre, 2004/05 as Interim Director 1. set-up & definition of ‘data curation + digital preservation’

autobiography as commentary

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digital curation: ... digital objects and data, over their life-cycle, for current & future generations of use ...

= f(data curation & digital preservation)• data curation [when high current/ongoing interest]

– actions needed to maintain and utilise digital data & research results over entire life-cycle

– data creation & management; adding value; generating new sources of information & knowledge, for use

• digital preservation [for longevity;fall off in interest]– long-run technological/legal accessibility & usability– storage, maintenance & accessibility of information content in digital

material over the long-term, for use– OAIS concept of designated community

What is this digital curation anyway?

Taken from a PPT to JISC in July 2004 …

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Taken from a PPT to JISC in July 2004 …

The term Digital Curation is a rather recent invention.

• The Digital Data Curation Task Force - Report of the Task Force Strategy Discussion Day (2002) states – Tony Hey took up the term which had been used by Dr John Taylor,

Director General of the Research Councils, to distinguish the actions involved in caring for digital data beyond its original use, from digital preservation. The concept’s reach extends beyond libraries.

• The e-Science Curation Report (2003) proposed the following distinctions: – Curation: The activity of, managing and promoting the use of data from

its point of creation, to ensure it is fit for contemporary purpose, and available for discovery and re-use. For dynamic datasets this may mean continuous enrichment or updating to keep it fit for purpose. Higher levels of curation will also involve maintaining links with annotation and with other published materials.

– Archiving: A curation activity which ensures that data is properly selected, stored, can be accessed and that its logical and physical integrity is maintained over time, including security and authenticity.

– Preservation: An activity within archiving in which specific items of data are maintained over time so that they can still be accessed and understood through changes in technology.

UK funding councils

JISC Sub-CommitteesJISC Collections

acting as platform for network-level services & helping to build the JISC Integrated Information Environment

research, learning & teaching in UK universities & colleges

Research Councils

UK

National Data Centres

EDINA Management Board met yesterday to review its 3-year Strategy and its Budget from JISC for the coming year

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Reading & Reference Room: supporting scholarly communication

the Depot

international Open Access facility to support self deposit of peer-reviewed papers

SUNCAT

UK serials union catalogue: what’s held where

No longer host specialist Abstract & Index databases …

EDINA Strategy in this area just reviewed following:•RLUK/JISC Resource Discovery Task Force•SCONUL Shared Services Business Case•EDINA Focus Groups on

i. ‘ease and continuity of access’ii. Arts, Humanities & Social Sciencesiii. new technologies

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Reading & Reference Room: supporting scholarly communication

the Depot

international Open Access facility to support self deposit of peer-reviewed papers

SUNCAT

UK serials union catalogue: what’s held where

No longer host specialist Abstract & Index databases …

EDINA Strategy in this area just reviewed following:•RLUK/JISC Resource Discovery Task Force•SCONUL Shared Services Business Case•EDINA Focus Groups on

i. ‘ease and continuity of access’ii. Arts, Humanities & Social Sciencesiii. new technologies

authorisation

licence to use

Ensuring researchers, students and their teachers have

ease and continuity of accessto online scholarly resources

‘ease’ ‘continuity’

P.Burnhill, Edinburgh 2009

open

restricted

access to content & services

usability post-cancellationback content

preservation

Creative Commons licensing

discoverability

Search (Re-)Use Modify/CombineShare (Issue/Publish)

additional considerations

Should apply to different types of resource: typically journal articles, but also now OER learning materials, data etc

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Finds the agencies looking after e-journal, and the volumes being preserved

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Geo-spatial resources: Map & Data Place

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Multimedia resources: Sound & Pictures Show• platform for search and download of film, video and audio

– wide range of subject coverage, including documentary film– Llicensed for use in learning, teaching and research

• Being re-worked as the Digital Media Hub, combining– Film & Sound Online

* initial 600 hours of film, digitised for downloading

– NewsFilm Online

* 3000 hours of material from ITN & Reuters

* Over 4TBs of clips to download

– Release of product from JISC Digitisation programmes * Plus Education Image Gallery of still photography

– Visual and Sound Materials Portal project

* Discovering all sorts of audio-visual material

• Special interest for social science as record on non-print record of 20th Century: the first A-V century– With new forms of research material to use and to master

Defining the Social Sciences

a collection of disciplines that variously apply theorising and systematic method to the study of human society

from family to politics, from law/religion to economy: of what it is to be human and our interaction among ourselves and with our environment, whether on land, sea or the Internet

Teaching draws upon schooling: social arithmetic of Qualified Empirical Statements

1. We make provisional statements about the world * in the language of our theory and the context of time & place

2. on basis of evidence derived from the [real] world* conditioned by our theory and choice of systematic method

3. seeking to qualify our statements* with imperative to express our measures of uncertainty

Pattern of research publication in the social sciences

‘The Four Literatures of Social Science’ (Diana Hicks, 2004) Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Studies, Henk Moed

(Ed)• All more trans-disciplinary than comparable scientific literatures

1. international journal articles the SSCI indexed currency of evaluation

2. books can have a high citation/impact

1. national knowledge developed in contextembedded in their society; influenced by national trends & policy concerns

– non-scholarly publications knowledge into applicationenlightenment or knowledge transfer to the non-scholarly public

Hicks states Burnhill and Tubby-Hille (1994) “investigated this issue in some depth [with] publications database from [ESRC] grant reports [and] survey .... Assigning non peer reviewed journals to .. enlightenment .. suggests that psychologists, statisticians and geographers do not publish much in non-scholarly literature. Other fields do. Even economics, normally quite scientific in its publication patterns, exhibits a healthy percentage of articles in non-scholarly venues. Linguistics, education and sociology lead in share of non-scholarly publications.”

‘On measuring the relation between social science research activity and research publication’ Research Evaluation 4 (3) December 1994

Pattern of research publication in the social sciences

‘The Four Literatures of Social Science’ (Diana Hicks, 2004) Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Studies, Henk Moed

(Ed)

1. international journal articles2. books

1. national embedded in their society

– non-scholarly publications enlightenment or knowledge transfer to the non-scholarly public

Hicks states Burnhill and Tubby-Hille (1994) “investigated this issue in some depth [with] publications database from [ESRC] grant reports [and] survey .... Assigning non peer reviewed journals to .. enlightenment .. suggests that psychologists, statisticians and geographers do not publish much in non-scholarly literature. Other fields do. Even economics, normally quite scientific in its publication patterns, exhibits a healthy percentage of articles in non-scholarly venues. Linguistics, education and sociology lead in share of non-scholarly publications.”

‘On measuring the relation between social science research activity and research publication’ Research Evaluation 4 (3) December 1994

Pattern of research publication in the social sciences

Table from Burnhill and Tubby-Hille (1994) reproduced in Vasilakos et al (2007) ‘Evaluating the Performance of UK Research in Economics’, [sponsored by the Royal Economic Society] Keele Economics Research Papers, ISSN1740-231x www.keele.ac.uk/depts/ec/kerp

Pattern of research publication in the social sciences

from Burnhill and Tubby-Hille (1994), not yet reproduced by anyone

Pattern of research publication in the social sciences Following the trace to

Keele Economics Research Papers, ISSN1740-231x www.keele.ac.uk/depts/ec/kerp

led me to:

What’s special about social sciences: policy & action

“philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it”

Karl Marx (1845), Thesis 11 published in 1924 in German & Russian translation; in English in 1938 appeared in Engels’ edited version in 1888, as ‘Theses on Feurbach’

Not the moment to debate origins of social science: of Hume, Ferguson, Smith, Hegal, Marx, Kant, Jung, Parsons, Durkheim, Popper etc – even Jeremy Bentham (UCL), nor of modern theorists,

but along with development and shifts in theory …

what is key is that …

the practice of social science, and the modality of peer communication

and publication in the discipline, has much to do its connection to the urgency of interaction with agencies of civil society

Six Strategic Challenges:

1. Global Economic Performance, Policy & Management

2. Health & Well-being

3. Environment, Energy & Resilience

4. Security, Conflict & Justice

5. Social Diversity & Population Dynamics

6. New Technology, Innovation & Skills

UK: ESRC Strategic Plan & Societal Big Challenges

Six Strategic Challenges:

1. Global Economic Performance, Policy & Management

2. Health & Well-being

3. Environment, Energy & Resilience

4. Security, Conflict & Justice

5. Social Diversity & Population Dynamics

6. New Technology, Innovation & Skills

UK: ESRC Strategic Plan & Societal Big Challenges

7. Public Debt & the ConDem Government

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Data as scholarship: a cultural shift?

Preserve or Perish

“You are not finished until you have done the research, published the results, and published the data, receiving formal credit for everything.”

Mark A. Parsons (2006)International Polar Year

“A scholar’s positive contribution is measured by the sum of the original data that he contributes. Hypotheses come and go but data remain.”

in Advice to a Young Investigator (1897) Santiago Ramón y Cajal (Nobel Prize winner, 1906)

What’s special about social sciences: third party data

• Demand for data to carry out secondary data analysis

– Social sciences do not generate all the data they need to address their research questions

* Do not command the resources (funding/expertise) – few research groups and Government could get funding to manufacture original data

• ESRC-led National Data Strategy, 14 Actions:• potential research value of new types of data (transactions data and tracking records) • new data infrastructures via EU and Euro Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures• improved access to Census of Population data• a geo-spatial resources advisory service (JISC/ESRC) • collaborative agreements with agencies within and outside UK• sharing of data resources across ‘North/South’ global networks

• Explains why data libraries and archives have been around so long

– IASSIST International Association for Social Science Information Service & Technology

– annual conference since 1974; www.iassistdata.org

– DISC-UK a group of data libraries in UK universities (including EUDL)

– Providing ease of access to data held elsewhere (including UKDA)– Datashare project to support institutional responsibilities for data

» alongside Institutional Repositories

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Note: Not all that is digital are data (& vice versa)

a) Data derive importance from their evidential value– the empirical base for (scholarly) statement & decision-making

– Provenance (how data are derived) is very important

b) Differences in ways that disciplines in Humanities & Social Sciences assess scholarship and evidence

– in what they regard as data, as value for their subject

– mix of approach to epistemology, inc document tradition

c) Data represented (encoded) as numbers or words - often derived from observation (with issues of phenomenology!)

– or as pictures or sounds (not encoded - pre-data?)* access to (now digitally/digitised) record of experience

– or algorithmic models (as with physical & life sciences)* modelling is widespread in economics, psychology, social

statistics, geography etc

Our shared task:

To ensure ease & continuing access to record of scholarship– research publications and research data

Consider at least three types of (research) data:

A. Supplementary data [enhanced publication]– multimedia files: part of the published article that presents

research argument and conclusions* more than linear text, limited tabular and graphical display* enhances user experience with various multimedia objects

B. Research dataset(s) upon which conclusions based

– check analysis of those data to support statements made

C. Database(s) from which datasets were assembled

– for reproducibility (exposure to refutation) and new work via alternative analysis and updates to the database(s)

– these are curated in situ – by data centres / originators

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Citation and linking• Citation of the datasets used (Type B data)

– verification of analysis, that the figures and conclusions accurately reflect those data

• Citation of database(s) (Type C data)

– for reproducibility (exposure to refutation) – to prompt new work via alternative analysis and updates to

the database(s)

– to credit those who curate the data needed for scholarship

Plus hyperlink to the database from the published article

… and back again from the database to the published article

Links to presentations, blogs, websites, funders etc related to the same research activity and same researcher(s) (Type D data?)

Obtaining the citation at source1. CIESIN

“Most of our datasets and products contain a suggested citation on the Web site as to where the data was obtained”

“Whenever possible, we urge you to cite the use of data and web resources in the reference section”

– http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/citations/

2. How to Cite Statistics Canada Products:

“This guide has been developed for authors, editors, researchers, academics, students, librarians and data librarians.

“It describes, in three steps, how to build your reference when citing Statistics Canada products”

– http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/12-591-x/12-591-x2006001-eng.htm

Get it from those who make the data available: the data publishers

cf Cataloguing in Publication!

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Link remains the key verb

But need to shift attention from

• Linking resolver (unidirectional)– From metadata reference to full text of article

* SICI-Citation | Z39.50

* DOI | OpenURL | http

to

• Linked Data (relational, bi-directional) – Between resources in the weave of the Web

* Using URIs as names for things

– Not just URLs (the addresses on the web) but the URIs

* Using RDF/XML to define the relationships between the resources

– RDF triples: subject / relationship / object

Resource Description Framework (RDF)

Resource Description Framework (RDF), and URIs• framework for representing information in Web; identifiers

• http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/

• http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/

RDF graph: Article & Supplementary Data http://www.emeraldinsight.com/fig/0350570303002.png

1. Build and publish as metadata in XML format to be found on the web

2. Publishing text and data/multimedia content in XML will delight researchers

• Researchers want to access ‘article as data’, via computational algorithm

uses Linked Data

uses Linked Data

Parse to ‘mark up’ archaeological site record (metadata)

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Overcoming sparse metadata problem that inhibits discoverability– using ancillary information in the metadata– evoking ‘has Event’ relation

Initial focus on (digitised) 20th Century newsfilm footage

Enriching resources with contextual metadata

Sparse Metadata

The only data we have:•1st October 1995•Cyprus•Disturbance (street disturbance) •British soldiers•Broadcast on TV News

finding related text for mining and so auto-creating metadatato improve discoverability and provide/enhance context

Digital Library as applied Information ScienceMichael Buckland, Presidential Address, American

Society for Information Science, JASIS’s 50th (1998)

2 traditions/mentalities co-exist in Information Science– Document tradition: signifying record-ness– Computational tradition: various uses of formal

techniques

* non-convergent mentalities working to build the ‘digital library’1.modernisation of library services 2.infrastructure to access complex databases

Aside: first met Clifford Lynch when visiting Professor Buckland in UC Berkley on occasion of IASSIST Conference in 1994

p.burnhill@ed.ac.uk

http://edina.ac.uk

Tel.: +44 (0)131 650 3302

Fax: +44 (0)131 650 3308

Time for me to stop …

Hoping that I have left some space/place for questions

Thank you

Acknowledgements

Pattern of research publication in the social sciences

from Burnhill and Tubby-Hille (1994), not yet reproduced by anyone

ISSN Register

E-J Preservation Registry Service

E-Journal Preservation

Registry

SERVICES: user requirements

(a)

(b)

Data dependency

Piloting an E-journals PreservationRegistry Service

METADATAon extant e-journals

METADATA on preservation action

Abstract Data Model: Figure 1 in reference paper in Serials, March 2009

Digital Preservation Agencies e.g. CLOCKSS, Portico; BL, KB;

UK LOCKSS Alliance etc.

InstitutionalRepositories

free to web access

E-printsSubject

Repositories

Author(article)

Reader(article)

Publisherarticle serial

issue

Library(serial)

Licence

Challenge to Ensure Continuing Access

peer review

peer exchange

Informal: ‘invisible college’ and the ‘gift economy’

Institutional arrangement

Licensed Online Access

Forma£

Economy

ILL/docdel

Continuity of access

learned

society

Long term digital preservation

E-prints

Author(article)

Reader(article)

Publisherarticle serial

issue

Library(serial)

Licence

Increasing dominance of The Web

peer to peer exchange

Informal: ‘invisible college’ and the ‘gift economy’

Institutional arrangement

Forma£

Economyfree to web access

Role of Institutional

Repositories?

Web 2.0/3.0: Semantic web

mash-ups, Blogs. RSS feeds, Wikis

Research Data

Creator

Researcher

Generates (curates) data for own purpose, or as part of team

… wants/has to ‘put’ it somewhere for use by others

(perhaps to be recognised by a peer community)

Key User (Researcher) Verbs:

Discover data of interestLocate service on that data with documentation on provenance etc

Request permission to use serviceAccess to service/data,

Evidential value of data in analysis as

object of desire’

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……..• The term “curation” builds on our understanding of the word

“curator”, somebody who keeps something for the public good, whose value often needs to be brought out by the curator.

• Firstly, this open context implies more support for explicit policies with regard to data sharing, and it has major implications for structuring and tools.

• Secondly, the digital curator is store-keeper but he is also closely linked to promoting new science, making sure that his user-base is solid, sufficient, and looking forward to identify new ways to serve present and future researchers. The digital curator should take an active role in promoting and adding value to his holdings, hold exhibitions, run joint events; he should manage the value of his collection.

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More definitionsThere does seem to be a lack of clarity. Some terms worth distinguishing are:

• data preservation : a general term probably equivalent to digital preservation in this context

• digital preservation : could be, and probably is, interpreted as simply ensuring the original bits and bytes are accessible

• digital information preservation : this is what is referred to in the OAIS standard - what is important is not the original "bits and bytes" but the content. An OAIS ensures that the content is accessible, understandable and usable.

• curation : general term - taking care of things – if someone currently calls themselves a “curator” – do we accept their definition?

• data curation : looking after and adding value to data • digital curation : looking after and somehow "adding value" to digital

data. This probably implies creating some new data from the existing, in order to make the latter more useful and "fit for purpose".

• information curation : not seen in the wild• evidence : bit preservation plus authenticity and trust?

licence to use

‘ease’

P.Burnhill, Edinburgh 2009

usability

open

preservationpost-cancellationback contentrestricted

access to content & services

who/WAYFauthentication

licence registry entitlement history

location registry/discovery

content registry

archiving registry

UKAMF registry

Suncat & Zetoc

OpenURL Router

[Curation is additional but has relation to ease and continuing access.]

Use case: article–length work published in e-journalsISSN Register as a key content registry; need registry of ToC

‘continuity’

Ensuring researchers, students and their teachers have

ease and continuity of accessto online scholarly resources