Oxford Internet Institute

This lecture will examine how scholarship is changing in the digital age. Many researchers routinely use search engines as their main tool to find information or locate publications, but there are myriad of other digital tools that scholars use daily, including Wikis, databases, and blogs. There are also tools that support collaboration, which allow distributed teams to work across distance, access instruments remotely, and use novel visualization and simulation techniques.

How are these transforming knowledge work? Do they enable new research questions to be asked, make teams more collaborative and interdisciplinary, or simply complicate work and raise new issues of data security and privacy?

Many argue that current research challenges require larger datasets, more distributed collaboration, and more global approaches. Will these tools enable these challenges to be addressed in new and more effective ways? This lecture will review a range of cases from across the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities to answer these questions.