e-Research is a collective term for the various initiatives on e-Science, e-Social Science, e-Humanities, and cyberinfrastructure. e-Research refers to distributed, collaborative, information-intensive forms of inquiry. The overall aim is ‘to do faster, better, and different interdisciplinary research (and scholarship) across the university,’ as summed up by Tony Hey, head of the UK e-Science programs. e-Social Science research currently is organized into two themes:
e-Research in all disciplines will depend upon the generation, analysis, visualization, management, and curation of data and documents, and upon access to those resources. Interdisciplinary research will depend upon sharing data within and between communities. Decades of research in information studies and in socio-technical systems has shown that disciplines vary greatly in their use of data and documents, in their local or distributed access to information resources, and in their degree of collaboration. Understanding more about the use of information is essential to the construction of an information infrastructure to facilitate research.
The talk will survey behavioural, social, political, economic, technical, and institutional information issues that vary between disciplines and suggest research that is needed to inform e-Social Science.
