Information and Data in e-Science: Making Seamless Access a Reality
Merry Bullock, Ph.D.Senior Director, Office of International Affairs, American Psychological Association
Deputy Secretary-General, IUPsyS
e- SOCIAL SCIENCES
E-Social Science
How have the social sciences embraced e-science?
What are the challenges to achieving access and to making it work?
The Social Sciences
•Anthropology•Archeology•Demography•Economics•Geography•Linguistics•Political science•Psychology•Sociology•Statistics•Interdisciplinary fields (cognitive neuroscience, learning sciences.
Some characteristics of the Social Sciences relevant to e-science
•Social Science data and methodologies are enormously heterogeneous
•Social Scientists study human individuals and organizations
•E-science is changing how social scientists store, share and access data AND how they generate data
•E-science is an object of social science research
Data infrastructure
•History and practice of data sharing
•Stong traditions in some (economics, political science, sociology)
•Weak traditions in others (psychology, anthropology)
Data infrastructure•Large scale cooperative cross-disciplinary studies: on income, political involvement, education, child and adolescent health, aging…
•Federal statistical information (census, national surveys, indicators)
•Data repositories at the national level
•Large scale cooperative studies
Data collection
•Computer assisted interviewing (CAI)
•Web-based experiments
•Survey tools (TESS, Survey Monkey)
•Derived data bases
•Remote virtual laboratories
Is there a problem?
•Despite vast data resources, researchers are not getting the data they need….
Why not?
E-Social Sciences : Challenges
Technical: need for common standards, common catalogues, rapid search, secure access
Ethical: privacy, confidentiality assurances
Cultural: incentives and reward structure for data sharing; national data sharing policies
E-Social Sciences
Technical Challenges
Comparability
operationalization, metrics
translations
data types
Common standards: Metadata – or meta methods?
E-Social Sciences
Ethical challenges
Protecting privacy, confidentiality
Past strategies – restrict access, introduce error, aggregate
De-identification and re-identification threats
Video and audio data
Lack of informed consent
E-Social Sciences
Cultural challenges
•culture of sharing
•reward and incentive structure
•“culture of trust”
•Cross-national approaches to personal information
E-Social Sciences data infrastructure : – changes to the research landscape
•Allow broader, deeper questions, models
•Promote a global perspective
•Change the norms of replication
•Promote a change from theory-based to data-driven science
E-Social Sciences
Vision for the future
Social Sciences as Data Producers and Consumers:
Applying Social Sciences to meet general e-science challenges
E-Social Sciences
Vision for the future
Social Sciences as Data Producers and Consumers:
“One-stop discovery”: Global data catalogue (precursors are in place)
International mechanisms for data identification and data quality assurance
International consensus on access policies
Culture of sharing – publications/citation incentives change to sharing incentives; part of basic scientific training
E-Social Sciences
Vision for the future
Applying Social Sciences to meet general e-science challenges
•Studies of how cybertools affect the processes of scientific discovery and the nature of work•Understand and control threats to access
“Increased operability and data integration will give us the capacity to remove the disciplinary blinders of the 19th Century and to ask new questions with new lenses. The ability to integrate information, to obtain information at no cost, will open many doors intellectually and scientifically. The explosion in knowledge will go far beyond the structure that traditional disciplines and the limits of traditional data have imposed”(Roberta Miller, CIESIN)
E-Social Sciences
Vision for the future
Top Related