Week 7: Towards a sociology of e-Research

Fry, J. & Schroeder, R. (2009)

In e-Research, as with many other technology-led initiatives, there is an imbalance that has meant technologies have been developed without taking social aspects into account. The social issues to emerge from e-Research are now moving to the policy and funding foreground, but they also relate to wider changes in scientific and scholarly communication and collaboration such as electronic publishing, open science, distributed interdisciplinary collaboration, and the availability of networked digital resources.

• Collaborative research across institutions is more difficult than collaborative research across disciplines in terms of project coordination and project outcomes
• Communication in distributed projects tends to drop off over time 
• There may be a trade-off in the advantages that these [collaborative] projects can bring between "innovation opportunities versus coordination costs" (Cummings and Kiesler, 2005)

Critical/reflexive or prospective approach: will be mainly concerned with the extent to which the vision lives up to or reifies the realities of the sciences. A useful way of gauging whether e-research becomes translated into effective scientific practice is how e-researchers cope, for example, with the challenges of uncertainty that accompany novelty (Whitley, 2000).

Advocacy/steering and aligning structures approaches: are concerned with whether e-research is enhancing research efforts more broadly, and so will focus on whether e-research is providing a basis for more powerful ways of organising research

Value free/attempted neutrality approach: will need to establish which sociological concepts are adequate to the task of describing this new form of science and how well they fit different e-research developments

All e-research projects seem to make visible or explicit many processes that were previously invisible or implicit, including workflow organisation, intellectual property issues, and inter-institutional commitments. e-Research projects do this partly because computerisation necessitates, for example that data are put into a certain format or stored in a certain way or made accessible across a network. These e-research developments all require standardisation of rules and procedures that may previously have been unstated or unformalised or do not apply to non-digital material. At the same time, e-research may also hide or marginalis other research efforts that are not amenable to the process of rendering research into digital formats.

The shift of resources and collaboration within online networks represents an entwining of an emerging large technological system for online research within the social environment of research institutions and settings.

• Can such a socio-technical system be reshaped by social scientists who analyse research in diverse ways, or will the social sciences themselves rather become engulfed by the new system of tools that are reconfiguring research across different arenas and institutions of knowledge production?
• How is the object of research (e-research) coupled to the different social science perspectives that have been discussed?