Oxford Internet Institute - The Oxford e-Social Science Project (OeSS)

Welcome to the Oxford eSocial Science (OeSS) Project

Scientific collaboration is increasingly coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to shared digital research data and the advanced information tools that enable data storage, search, retrieval, visualization, and higher level analysis. The increasing role that advanced ICTs play in the practice of scientific research promises the potential to transform the way facts about the physical and social world are acquired, shared, analyzed, and translated into useful knowledge.

The terms 'e-Research', 'cyberinfrastructure', 'Grid computing', 'e-Science',' e-Social Science' and 'e-Humanities' all refer to distributed, collaborative, data- and information-intensive research activities. Building large, collaborative systems is not just a technical challenge: by looking at e-Research from a social shaping perspective, we are able to understand how researchers shape the technologies they use, and how they in turn have their behaviour shaped by the technologies and by social, ethical, legal and organizational forces.

By understanding how e-Research projects negotiate various constraints, we hope that our work can help researchers avoid the problems others have faced as they build these scientific collaborations.

NCeSS 5th International Conference on e-Social Science

OeSS researchers are on the Programme Committee of the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) 5th International Conference on e-Social Science to be held at Maternushaus, Cologne (24-26 June 2009). Keynote Speakers include: Mario Campolargo (Director of the Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures directorate within the EC DG Information Society and Media), Ian Foster (a pioneer in developing advanced distributed computer technologies) and Dr David Theo Goldberg (Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Conference: eResearch 2008

We are one of the partners of the eResearch08 Conference: a multi-disciplinary, international conference on eResearch to be held at the University of Oxford from 11-13 September 2008. View the conference programme and the accepted conference papers.

ICTs in Social Research: Survey Results Now Available!

Are social scientists aware of e-research initiatives? What are the characteristics of early adopters of e-social science practices and technologies? Our survey was designed to gain an understanding of the centrality of a variety of tools to social research.

Press

Times Higher Education 10 July 2008
MySpace and your research: will red tape hit web data use?

"The internet offers tremendous potential for social science research, but scholars fear that growing ethical concerns about the collection of data could lead to restrictions that damage the web's usefulness as a vast laboratory for social science. Bill Dutton, professor of internet studies and director of the Oxford Internet Institute, said the new world of e-research offered all sorts of novel and inexpensive ways of exploring social behaviour, but it also created a whole set of new ethical issues where the "correct norms were still yet to be decided".

Partners and funding

This project is a cross-disciplinary collaboration between the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and the Oxford eResearch Centre (OeRC), drawing on connections with the humanities, social and computer sciences and engineering across the University of Oxford. It is a node of the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS), funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).