1 / 7

Bottom-up, Top-Down, and other social and technological dynamics of e-Research

Bottom-up, Top-Down, and other social and technological dynamics of e-Research. Kathryn Eccles, Eric Meyer, Ralph Schroeder Oxford e-Social Science Project ( OeSS ) Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford. Presented at the UK All Hands Conference, Oxford, December 2009.

gunda
Download Presentation

Bottom-up, Top-Down, and other social and technological dynamics of e-Research

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Bottom-up, Top-Down, and other social and technological dynamics of e-Research Kathryn Eccles, Eric Meyer, Ralph Schroeder Oxford e-Social Science Project (OeSS) Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford Presented at the UK All Hands Conference, Oxford, December 2009

  2. Top-Down and Bottom-Up • Two predominant ways of thinking about e-Research • Both are misleading… • Top-down because • It suggests supporting a ‘society’ of researchers (in fact, niches) • It suggests supporting structure (in fact, provisional efforts only) • Bottom-up because • It includes individual ‘garage’ efforts that are not sustained and/or cumulative • It includes individual efforts that are not shared - technically, socially, or in terms of goals • A definition of e-Research: distributed, shared digital tools or data for knowledge production

  3. Beyond Top-Down and Bottom-Up • Social movements around technological systems or artifactual cores • The conditions for stabilizing these new technologies…(not necessarily technological superiority) • Coalitions • Compatibility • Task uncertainty • Specific to e-Research is that these are distributed and shared, so commitment is an added condition • Diffusion, ‘community’, sustainability are also necessary

  4. Top-down and bottom-up again… • The two may not be mutually exclusive, but one or other may depend on the outcome of certain conditions (community creation, resources, etc.) • Resources, data, and tools have different conditions (as ideal types, even if they overlap)… • Resources (not part of knowledge production) depend mainly on maintenance and user support • Data depends on user contributions, standards, and competition with other data sets • Tools depend on user-friendliness or robustness, usefulness and critical mass

  5. Some examples • Swiss BioGrid: a set of tools and data without an ‘infrastructural’ home • Swedish National Data Service: an infrastructure with a community of users in the making • Genetic Association Identification Network: a shared data infrastructure with still-emerging standards • Pynchon Wiki: a rapidly forming community with indefinite task finalization • EGEE: a polymorphous large organization in organizational transition to another(s?) (EGI) • VOSON: a popular social science tool in search of resources for robustness

  6. Implications • Adoption cannot be conceived of in individual terms for e-Research technologies • Conditions for resources are different (also in underpinning natural science, social science and humanities) from tools and data • A fourth category is the ‘accidental e-Researcher’ – example: Web 2.0 tools (though the same conditions as for tools, data and resources apply) • The stabilization of socio-technical systems at different scales, functionality levels, and stages…

  7. Oxford Internet InstituteUniversity of OxfordRalph SchroederSenior Research Fellowralph.schroeder@oii.ox.ac.uk http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/schroeder Kathryn EcclesResearch Fellowkathryn.eccles@oii.ox.ac.ukhttp://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/faculty.cfm?id=138 Eric T. MeyerResearch Felloweric.meyer@oii.ox.ac.ukhttp://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/meyer Oxford e-Social Science Project

More Related