e-Nabling Data: Potential impacts on data, methods and expertise
Dr Samuelle Carlson, Dr Ben Anderson
Chimera, University of Essex
Email address of corresponding author: benander@essex.ac.uk
Partly as a result of financial inducement (research funds) but also for sound methodological and substantive reasons social scientists in the UK are beginning to engage with the wider programme of `e-Science'. The greater computing capacity and larger sets of data to compare enabled by computing, service and data grids also give the prospect that new scientific questions can be asked those questions which can only be addressed through massive analysis or the federation of disparate datasets. Partly in response to these initiatives we have been studying the nature of scientific collaboration and knowledge building in three case studies. This paper presents preliminary findings from these studies and focuses in particular on the potential impact of `e-enabling' on social science data, methods and expertise.
