e-Research, Virtual Witnessing and the Quality of Scholarship

The ‘data deluge’ started in the sciences, with highly instrumented research in physics, astronomy, chemistry, and molecular biology, and has spread to most other fields. Embedded sensor networks are now essential technologies for the environmental sciences. Internet communication provides rich traces of human activity for social scientists to study. Educators are logging interactions with simulated experiments, collaborative tools, and embedded assessments. Scholars in the humanities, not to be outdone, are among those mining texts and modeling cities.

Christine L. Borgman is Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA. Her research clusters in two areas. One is empirical research on the creation, use, and management of scientific data and its implications for science policy. This research is associated with the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (based at UCLA). Her second area of interest is analytical work on the changing nature of scholarship in an environment of ubiquitous computer networks and digital information. She is the author of more than 180 publications in the fields of information studies, computer science, and communication. Both of her sole-authored monographs, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (MIT Press, 2007) and From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2000), have won the Best Information Science book of the year award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

This is a recording of a keynote panel on ‘e-Research, Virtual Witnessing and the Quality of Scholarship’ from the eResearch Conference 2008, University of Oxford. The conference sought to stimulate and inform multi-disciplinary research on the development, use and implications of ICTs such as the Internet in shaping research across the disciplines. It brought together research from key e-Research projects from around the world that are examining the role of the Internet, Web and the Grid in research.