Jankowski Text For Yeungnam Presentation, 21sept2009, Draft2, 20 Sept 2009

Nicholas W. Jankowski Visiting Fellow Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities & Social Sciences www.virtualknowledgestudio.nl [email protected] Social Science Research Practice in the Digital Age Changes, Illustrations, Challenges World Class University (WCU) Project YeungNam University, Republic of Korea WCU Webometrics Institute 21 September 2009 Text Accompanying PowerPoint Slides

Slide 1: cover sheet •

Word of thanks for invitation to join the WCU project team here at YeungNam University.

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Thanks especially to those involved in making this visit possible: Han Woo Park and the staff of the WCU project.

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Perhaps it is worth emphasizing that this week is something of a festival of scholarship related to the WCU project and I encourage those interested to consult the schedule of events at the WCU Webometrics Institute website, shown on this slide and available elsewhere.

Slide 2: Introduction •

The initial invitation extended by Professor Han Woo Park called for a traditional lecture, but we thought a venue with opportunity for additional voices would be more interesting.

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With this change in mind, I will provide a panoramic overview of the topic of the session, and this will be followed by short statements from the four respondents, and then there will be opportunity for open exchange and debate.

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Allow me now to note the four persons who have kindly agreed to be part of this event: o

Greg Elmer is Professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada and director of the Infoscape New Media Laboratory there.

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Maurice Vergeer is Professor at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands at the Department of Communications. Both Greg and Maurice are also affiliated with the WCU Yeungnam University Project.

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Dr Dong Sung is with the Department of Humanities and Social Research of the National Research Foundation of Korea.

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Dr Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki is affiliated with the Center for International and Comparative Approaches to Japan Studies Graduate School.

Even though you have been able to read the short biographical sketch provided in the overview of the program for today, I think it valuable to share a bit more information so that you know ‘where I am coming from’ and can place my comments in some contextual framework. First, it is important to emphasize that I am a ‘product’ of Western academia, although I have been part of a number of university communities:

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• Oregon State University, where I began my university education in electrical engineering; • the University of California at Berkeley where I took an undergraduate degree in philosophy and worked at the particle accelerator division known as Lawrence Radiation Laboratory; • the University of Oregon where I later took a master’s degree in journalism • the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands where I earned my doctorate in the social sciences, specializing in communications. Throughout this academic training I have had a strong interest in the philosophy of science and methodological questions. •

One of my edited volumes was even translated into Korean, the Handbook of Qualitative Methods for Mass Communication Research.

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I have had a long-term interest in facets of scholarly publishing and launched the journal New Media & Society and the book monograph series with Hampton Press, New Media & Democracy.

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A recent publication is the book e-Research: Transformations in Scholarly Practice, which is probably the main reason I am standing before you today, and from which I will be drawing during the course of my presentation.

Slide 3: Overview •

Let me now sketch an overview of my presentation and begin by revealing the ‘secret intent’ today: to critically examine the claim frequently being made that we are living 3

in revolutionary times, with regard to science and scholarship more generally. • I will begin to elaborate that objective by flashing a wide range of terms and formulations used to express that revolutionary claim. • I will then share some illustrations of the ‘new ways’ scholarship is being undertaken, and I hope this part of the presentation will be the most interesting and enticing. • I will then sum up with a list of a few of the challenges of doing scholarship in the digital age. • And finally, I will pose a few broad questions that span concerns, particularly in the social sciences and humanities.

Slide 3: Claims to Revolutionary Change • Sometimes I fear what I present may be stale, out of date, and no longer reflective of current trends. A quick Google search this past weekend, however, convinced me that the claim to revolutionary change is ‘alive and kicking’ and is as recent as the yet-to-be-released issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. In the October 2009 issue is a series of articles, which is already available online, about what is happening in environmental science. Although I haven’t read the material yet, the editorial accompanying the series is very clear: “environmental science is undergoing a revolution.” •

This has been an oft-repeated mantra, and a senior scientist at Microsoft Research entitled one of his relatively recent presentations “eScience – the revolution is starting.” A video of this presentation is, incidentally, available on one of the 4

Microsoft websites and, in spite of the title, it is well worth the 45-minute viewing. •

Perhaps the granddaddy of such claims is the path-breaking U. S. National Science Foundation report Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure by a panel of experts under the chairmanship of Chris [check] Atkins and released eons ago in 2003. That report triggered a chain of events in the United States, one of which resulted in establishment of a special division of the NSF, the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, which allocates research grants across the sciences and engineering, with a dabble of attention to the social sciences and humanities.

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The final bullet on this screen is in a smaller type font because it does not really belong to the category of revolutionary claims, but does reflect the scholarly curiosity and excitement many of us feel who are engaged in studying the Internet. Susan Herring began a paper for a conference in Spain some years ago with the phrase: “we are living in exciting times”. Although I disagreed with her that Internet studies was a special kind of fish in the social sciences, I certainly shared with her that the times in which we are working as scholars are exciting because of the multitude of apparent changes ongoing. Whether such apparent change is revolutionary is very much the question as far as I am concerned.

Slide 5: Conceptual Formulations

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This is an appropriate moment to present the many and diverse conceptual formulations related to this alleged revolution.

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The list of alternative terms is substantial and here I mention only the major contenders: Cyberinfrastructure, cyberscience, e-Science and its sister term e-Social Science, e-Research, Internet science or studies, depending on your position on the debate between those who favor ‘science’ as label versus those with a leaning toward ‘studies’, escholarship, online research.

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This list is hardly complete but does reflect the potpourri of terms. I do not recommend that we dissect or organize all of these terms, a task that has been astutely undertaken by others elsewhere, and on the slide I recommend for those interested the work of Ralph Schroeder in this regard.

• What I do wish to do is touch on a couple of the terms and end up with a bit more elaboration and preference for the term in the middle of this list, highlighted in red, e-research.

Slide6: Cyberinfrastructure •

‘Cyberinfrastructure’ is clearly the market leader of the contending terms, at least in the United States. In fact, this term is all but institutionalized as the key descriptor in that country, evidenced by the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure established in June 2005.

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One of the many descriptions of the term is provided on the Indiana University website for its supercomputer facilities, which is important enough to read aloud: “Cyberinfrastructure consists of computing systems,

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data storage systems, advanced instruments and data repositories, visualization environments, and people, all linked together by software and high performance networks to improve research productivity and enable breakthroughs not otherwise possible. “

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Here, as in other descriptions, the emphasis is on the hardware – the advanced computers and their software, and the networks connecting them – designed to provide a transparent basis for scientific work.

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Cyberinfrastructure is often compared to the infrastructures we all take for granted in society, like the electrical net allowing us to light our homes at the flick of a switch.

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Cyberinfrastructure emerged from concern about ensuring such facilities for the ‘hard’ sciences and for engineering, and only later did concern surface that the humanities and social sciences might also be able to benefit from such infrastructures.

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Much of the literature about Cyberinfrastructure is, consequently, concerned with computer network architecture and the marvels this can bring to science.

• A deviant and theoretically exciting study is by Paul Edwards and colleagues, who unravel the notion of infrastructure in a far more sophisticated manner than evident in most of the literature and definitional statements. The full bibliographic details for this and other works are noted in the final slide of this presentation, and the slides will be made available on the WCU Project website.

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Slide 7: e-Science & Big Science •

The image on this slide is of a particle accelerator being built as part of the facilities at CERN in Geneva. These accelerators are the ‘tools’ of nuclear physicists and are the kind of popular images we associate with this field, which sometimes approach ‘science fiction’ through the enormity of the enterprises. The scientific endeavors are enormous in whatever terms we might want to consider – in terms of budgets, in terms of the thousands of technicians and scientists involved, in terms of the awesome size of the machines and laboratories.

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Big Science predates concern for e-Science by at least a halfcentury, however, emerging out of World War II and the Cold War, whereas e-Science is a variant of the last half-decade or so and is intimately associated with computer networks. In all other respects, there is much commonality between the terms.

Slide 8: e-Science •

All of which leads to a description of e-Science.

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Like for Cyberinfrastructure, there are many descriptions available from which to choose, and I have excerpted text from the website of the National e-Science Centre in the United Kingdom, which provides a good shot at clarity and which I will quote: “In the future, e-Science will refer to the large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through 8

distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation back to the individual user scientists.” •

We could spend some time on this text, but instead I’d like to mention several features of e-Science not directly reflected in the passage.

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First, like its sister term Cyberinfrastructure, it is a science and engineering oriented concept, and, at best, there is a ‘Johnny come lately’ concern for the social sciences, largely reflected in the initiative in the UK known as the National Centre for e-Social Science based in Manchester. The humanities are pretty much ‘out in the cold’ regarding these terms and their focus.

• Second, Grid computing is central to the conceptualization, and involves an alliance with the specialists in such matters, computer scientists. •

Third, I sense a top-down mandate at play in these developments, which has been incorporated into science policy, at least in the United Kingdom and in the United States, all reflected in the calls for project funding being issued.

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And finally, reading the basic literature about e-Science requires a fondness for the uncritical, for a sense of the inevitable in the way things are progressing, and in the technologically determined nature of it all.

Slide 9: e-Research 9

• Several of the implicit criticisms of the e-Science ‘movement’ may suggest why I personally give preference to a term distant from that grounding and rhetoric. •

In the first place, this term – e-Research – embraces the social sciences and humanities in a more kindly fashion than those lodged in the structure of the natural sciences and engineering.

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Several features can be discerned, many of which have already been mentioned with regard to Cyberinfrastructure and e-Science, but the order and weight of the features is different. o I suggest that distant, international collaboration among scholars is primary, o

which is coupled to archiving and providing access to ‘data’ in the widest interpretation of that term;

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that electronic networks like the Internet are important for all of this, for both tools and for new in-roads in how such ‘data’ can be displayed.

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And all of this does require the use of networked computers, particularly those that are very fast and capable of large storage capacity, especially when the ‘data’ include large numbers of still images and video.

Slide 10: Illustrations: capita selecta •

Now we are approaching the interesting part of this panorama: a capita selecta of illustrations

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I have one to share from the heart of e-Science, and a few from the social sciences and humanities.

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Slide 11: e-Science: instrumentation & distant collaboration •

The image on this slide represents the ‘instrument’ a specialized group of engineers use to simulate earthquakes. As we can imagine, these building-high ‘shakers and movers’ are not cheap. This one is located in Reno, Nevada, in the United States, and attracts the designers of large structures – skyscrapers and bridges – to try out their ideas and materials before being tested in nature.

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The scientists who conduct experiments with these instruments cannot all come to the laboratory in Nevada, which means some are compelled to witness the experiments at a distance via remote cameras and other sensors.

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One of the questions posed by the two ethnographers who studied these scientists was whether there is a legitimate and a valued ‘place’ for collaborators at a distance. Essentially they found that everyone preferred to be on-site even though observations often transpired through the same remote sensing instrumentation available to scientists on the other side of the country.

• Please note the reference to the article publication of this ethnography, which is available in an online-only free access title, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. I highly recommend this fascinating story of the difficulty of distant collaboration among scientists engaged in e-science.

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Slide 12: Social Sciences: data visualization 1 •

Here is a rather common illustration of data visualization: a conventional table, albeit reflecting a relatively sophisticated form of multivariate analysis.

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Although sophisticated, it remains primitive with regard to the kinds of visualization of both data and its analysis that are now coming to the foreground in the natural sciences and, to a much smaller degree, in the social sciences.

Slide 13: Social Sciences: data visualization 2 •

At an IBM research facility in California a team is working on a project called ManyEyes, which is a facility where users can upload data and visualize it in ways most of us operating in the ‘mind set’ of tabular data like that shown on the previous slide just never think of.

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Because of time, I will **not** show the multitude of visualizations available on this site, but I do recommend going to the URL on this slide for an entertaining introduction to the pioneering ways data are coming to be presented, visualized.

Slide 14: Social Sciences: data visualization 3 •

Some of you are familiar with social network analysis and may have made use of the various software packages available for visualizing the links between Web sites.

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Here, I want to quickly share a form of visualization, designed by two former graduate students at Berkeley, for analyzing social networking sites. Jeff Heer and danah boyd

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devised a way to visualize the kinds of relations signaled among persons who sign onto the Friendster site. •

There is a video demonstration of this program, located at the URL on this slide. Again, I recommend going to the URL and enjoying this brief introduction into what is possible regarding the visualization of patterns of association between persons back to it later to get an idea of what is possible with regard to social network analysis of such sites.

Slide 15: Humanities: data preservation & access 1a •

Now, to the humanities and to the institution in Amsterdam to which I am affiliated, the International Institute for Social History.

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When I joined a tour of the Institute some time ago, we were led into the catacombs of the building and gathered in front of a glass case covered with a black cloth. At the appropriate moment, the case was uncovered and the crown jewel was unveiled: the last remaining hand-written page of the Communist Manifesto.

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For scholars unable to visit the distant depositories of the materials they wish to study, digital images such as this one are a blessing.

Slide 16: Humanities: data preservation & access 1b •

A frequent question arising about these images is whether the digital version compares to the ‘original’. Christine Hine addresses this issue in her study of biologists that make use of the specimen cabinets in the Museum of Natural History in London, versus those who prefer the online, digital version. 13

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There is no clear-cut answer to this issue, and the concern crosses over to depositories of art. Some of us will never settle for less than a personal sojourn to, say, the sculpture garden at the Musée Rodin in Paris; anything else is less than the ‘real’. Still, not all of us can make the trip and some details will probably not be evident even during the on-site visit, where viewers are kept at a safe distance from the treasures, as for example with the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris or various Van Gogh paintings in Amsterdam.

Slide 17: Humanities: data visualization 1 •

This and the next illustration go beyond pure preservation and access, and provide a degree of interpretation through visualization, here is a site that suggests how the place where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found might have looked when the scrolls were initially penned.

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The site is something of an artist’s imagination and it is not always easy to tell when that image extends beyond knowledge based on archeological evidence.

Slide 18: Humanities: data visualization 2 •

This is the final illustration I want to share with you and I mainly want to say that it is a masterpiece of website design which tantalizes our idea as to what the Eternal City, Rome, may have looked like during its heyday.

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As mentioned with the previous example, it is not entirely clear where scholarly rigor stops and artistic liberty begins.

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Slide 19: Challenges for Social Science Research in the Digital Age •

Now I would like to suggest a few of the many challenges awaiting those of us who venture beyond the confines of traditional social science and humanities scholarship, characterized by the labor of an individual scholar working in a non-networked environment. Here, for brevity, I will mention but four of the many challenges involved.

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First, on this list is collaboration, and the central question here is how distant collaboration can be achieved across scholarly ‘divides’ & cultural divisions? By these divides I am referring to those related to cross-national and crossdisciplinary research.

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Second, is the matter of data preservation and access to that data, once data have been preserved. This challenge is sometimes known as data archiving, but leave the terminology aside for the moment because the central challenge remains as formulated in this query: How can quantitative & qualitative data be archived, preserved & made accessible to other researchers?

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Third, is the matter of conducting empirical study in an Internet environment, what I term Internet-based research designs on this slide. One of the many concerns regarding such designs is formulated here: How can representative samples be studied using online instrumentation for data collection & analysis?

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Fourth and finally, is the matter of visualizing data and its analysis. In question form the challenge is: How can social scientists utilize the potential of high-speed networked computers in visualizing social & political relations?

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• Please note that I have conveniently avoided providing answers to these challenges, mainly because there are no easy answers. There are, in fact, many more concerns and challenges, and we are only beginning to scrape the surface in finding answers to such questions. That, very succinctly, is the real challenge: finding ways to conduct qualitative scholarship in the social sciences and humanities in a manner that takes into account the potentials of an Internet environment.

Slide 20: Broader Discussion • Now, as very last effort at synthesizing the challenges of eresearch for the social sciences and humanities, I have posed these two questions, which I would like to leave with you and the respondents to this presentation. •

First, how are the features & concerns of e-Research relevant to ‘ordinary’ scholars in the humanities & social science? I would welcome hearing from those of you present, both in the audience and here at the table, the respondents, as to whether the characteristics of e-research are of relevance. Skeptics are most welcome in this discussion!

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And finally, I am suggesting a research question admittedly in need of refinement, but nevertheless meriting consideration: In what manner and to what extent are features of e-Research adopted / adapted (social sciences & humanities) across disciplines, scholarly cultures and political climates? I am sure y respondents will have ‘words of wisdom’ as to how this research question should be refined and what might be the outcomes of a serious scholarly investigation.

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Slide 19: Selected resources •

Here are a few core references, all of which can be found in a copy of these slides available on the wiki address noted on the next slide.

Slide 20: Thank You! • Thanks you very much for your attention and please find on this slide various ‘points of entry’ for further enquiry.

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