Research topics - Jenny Fry

The creation, use and re-use of born digital data across disciplinary research cultures

Visualization, modelling and digital representation of the natural world, the human body, cultural artefacts, and the social networks that underpin modern culture has been playing an increasingly important role in the creation of knowledge across the physical sciences, social sciences and humanities disciplines. The resulting born digital data, and their associated technologies, are highly mobile and mutable challenging notions of provenance, authenticity and quality, which are concepts at the core of digital libraries and the new generation of data archives. A further challenge is that different disciplinary communities develop different relations with their object of research and have different approaches for creating, evaluating and sharing data. This scenario is further complicated when the data is not only heterogeneous, but is also produced across different sectors e.g. private, public and academic. For example, the growing emergence of mash-ups as primary data resources in the social sciences has generated issues around ownership and IPR.

One way in which the gap in current understanding could be addressed would be to focus on how born digital data are being created, used, disseminated, and re-used within and across disciplinary research cultures.

Diffusion of Internet-based technologies within and across disciplinary research cultures

When the uptake of computer-mediated communication technologies started to reach a critical mass in the late 1980s and early 1990s a number of influential studies emphasized disciplinary differences in patterns of uptake and use. The emergence of innovative Internet-based technologies, such as internet archives, social networking sites, virtual worlds and three-dimensional mapping tools have the potential to revolutionise the way that scholarly and scientific knowledge is created, used and disseminated. In some disciplinary fields the Internet is being carved out as a virtual research laboratory, whereas in others it remains on the periphery of research activities. Whilst there has been much interest in disciplinary differences amongst information scientists, sociologists of science, funding agencies and research policy makers little is understood of how the fundamental cultural characteristics of research cultures shape the diffusion of technologies. This is a methodologically challenging problem that lends itself to a mixed-methods approach.

The role of technology in supporting collaborative lifecycles in the social sciences and humanities

Traditionally research in the social sciences and humanities has been perceived as an individual endeavour conjuring images of the ‘lone’ scholar working within a sparsely populated research area requiring minimal financial or technological resources. This image is changing given the rapid expansion of increasingly sophisticated information communication technologies coupled with policy changes in the allocation of research funds on a national level. In the UK, for example, the e-Science Programme has aimed to promote the use of advanced computing technologies to support collaboration in the social sciences and humanities. Conversely, as technology and current understanding of the social and cultural phenomena addressed by social scientists and humanists co-evolve the need for interdisciplinary approaches to research becomes more apparent. Despite current efforts in e-Science and a broadening of the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work to include scientific research understanding of collaborative practices across the social sciences and humanities and how they might best be enhanced through technologies is limited.

In order to develop ‘culturally-sensitive’ technologies for the research communities that constitute the social sciences and humanities similarities and differences in collaborative lifecycles need to be identified and the social and institutional factors that shape these lifecycles explored.