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Measuring the Impact of e-Research: How to Account for Disciplinary Differences
Dr. Jenny Fry (Loughborough University), Mike Thelwall (University of Manchester)
A core characteristic of social science approaches to e-research has been a concern with research methods. This is reflected not only in the projects and nodes funded by the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) , but also in broadly defined initiatives such as the ESRC Research Methods Network , the ESRC's annual Methods Festival , and the NCeSS Agenda Setting workshops . This is in contrast with the direction in which e-Research has evolved in the natural, biomedical and engineering sciences where there has been an emphasis on solving computational issues relating to the high-performance processing of data (Hey and Trefethen, 2003). At the same time there is a burgeoning interest in the development of innovative methods for mapping and evaluating the technologies, resources and scholarly communities that constitute e-research (Cummings and Kiesler, 2007; Ackland, Fry and Schroeder, 2007; Ackland and Antony, 2007). This trend has been accompanied by an intensifying debate on what the different disciplines can bring to bear to e-research as an object of research (Schroeder and Fry, 2007).
In recent times the term 'e-Infrastructure' has started to dominate the language of e-social science governance . Early in the UK e-social science programme it was recognized that sustainability would be a crucial factor in the success of an e-Infrastructure for the social sciences. Sustainability in this context includes being sufficiently embedded both in the research practices of social scientists and in the research policies of institutions such as funding bodies and universities as to ensure a renewable source of resources. Not merely financial resources, but also in terms of the availability of appropriately trained researchers to develop and use an e-Infrastructure together with its related tools and services. In short, appropriation of e-research technologies across a broad range of social science disciplines will be crucial for the success of an e-Infrastructure. Efforts have been made by the NCeSS to generate support for e-social science and encourage users through an intensive focus on education, training and usability issues. But, how will subsequent appropriation be evaluated: what criteria will be used and how will disciplinary differential in the use of innovative technologies be accounted for? These are central questions that any social science method being developed to study the impact of e-social science needs to take into account.
When the uptake of computer-mediated communication technologies for scientific research started to reach a critical mass in the late 1980s early 1990s a number of influential studies emphasized field differences in shaping uptake and use (Kling and McKim, 2000; Walsh and Bayma, 1996; Hesse et al, 1993). Whilst it has been acknowledged that disciplinary differential is an important non-technological factor in the appropriation of e-Research technologies it is not a social/cultural factor that has received the same degree of attention as other factors such as usability, institutional, legal and ethical aspects.
This paper will present preliminary results from a case-study scoping the appropriation of e-Research tools and resources across research communities within the tradition of linguistics. A focus of the case-study is the extent to which observable patterns of appropriation indicate that linguistics-based research communities are organizing their work around a centralized e-Infrastructure. Furthermore, results from the case-study will be interpreted taking disciplinary factors into account such as size of intellectual field e.g. density of the population; maturity e.g. extent to which the field is established in the wider scientific system; degree of interdependency between inhabitants of the field e.g. modes of collaboration; degree of certainty in producing and evaluating outcomes e.g. what elements are necessary in order for research outputs to be considered a valid contribution to the body of knowledge.
The methodology for the case-study is taken from the relatively new field of 'webometrics', whereby selected web pages and the hyperlinks that connect them are taken to represent intellectual or social dynamics between actors within specific intellectual fields or disciplines (Thelwall, 2006). The case-study follows a European-based collaboration to develop an e-Infrastructure for linguistic and language resources. A sample of URLs has been selected by asking participants in the collaboration to provide the URLs that represent the tools and resources that they are developing as part of the European e-Research collaboration. In the first instance the sample of URLs will be crawled using the SocSciBot and LexiURL suite of tools to produce a map of their hyperlinking patterns e.g. inlinking URLs to the sample URLs and outlinking URLs from the sample URLs. Subsequent periodic crawls will iteratively include any additional URLs identified in the hyperlinking patterns and thus trace changes within these patterns over time. The crawls will produce hyperlinking maps covering a twelve month period from which it should be possible to identify patterns of appropriation of the tools and resources being developed.
Whilst the object of the case-study straddles the intellectual boundary between the social sciences and the humanities, by highlighting disciplinary factors that shape the direction and scope of appropriation it has the potential to contribute to the emerging body of knowledge concerned with the sociology of e-Research.
References
Ackland, R., Fry, J., and Schroeder, R. (2007) Scoping the Online Visibility of e-Research by Means of e-Research Tools. E-Social Science 2007, October 7-9 Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Ackland, R., and Antony, R. (2007) Developing e-Research Tools for the Analysis of Large-Scale Web Crawl Data. E-Social Science 2007, October 7-9 Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Cummings, J. and Kiesler, S. (2007) Who Works with Whom? Collaborative Tie Strength in Distributed Interdisciplinary Projects. E-Social Science 2007, October 7-9 Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Hesse, B.W., Sproull L.S., Kiesler, S.B., et al. (1993). Returns to science: computer networks in Oceanography. Communications of the ACM. 36(8); 90-101.
Hey, T. and Trefethen, A. (2003) "The Data Deluge: An e-Science Perspective"
In: F. Berman, A. Hey, and G. Fox, editors, Grid Computing - Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality. John Wiley & Sons. Chapter 36; 809-824.
Fry, J. (2006) Coordination and control across scientific fields: implications for a differentiated e-science. In: Hine, C. (Ed.) New infrastructures for knowledge production: Understanding e-science. Hershey PA, USA, IDEA GROUP INC. Chapter 8.
Kling, R. and McKim, G. (2000). Not just a matter of time: Field differences and the shaping of electronic media in supporting scientific communication. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 51(14);1306-1320.
Schroeder, R., & Fry, J. (2007) Social science approaches to e-Science: Framing an agenda. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(2), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue2/schroeder.html.
Thelwall, M. (2006) Interpreting Social Science Link Analysis Research: A Theoretical Framework. JASIST, 57(1); 60-68.
Walsh, J.P. and Bayma, T. (1996). Computer networks and scientific work. Social Studies of Science. 26; 661-703.
