Open Repositories 2008, and Web Science
Having missed most of the presentations at the Open Repositories conference in Southampton this week, my reflections on the event have been prompted more by the Southampton-MIT collaboration described by Wendy Hall and Nigel Shadbolt before the conference dinner, the Web Science research centre. Initiatives such as this (see also, for example, the Oxford Internet Institute), with their focus on an interdisciplinary understanding of the web as a ‘first class’ research object, are particularly timely. I was struck by a potential parallel: an Australian colleague had earlier told me how researchers and technologists there are working to create an interdisciplinary research data resource on breast cancer; on the one hand there are similarities (the alliance of researchers and technologists brought to bear on a research topic), but there are differences. It could be argued (though not all would agree) that the web is a product of social interaction in a way that breast cancer is not. That is, technology (including the infrastructure underpinning science) is ‘social relations made concrete’. Incidentally, those social relations include interventions by those studying or evaluating science practice, so that ‘web science’ is a reflexive undertaking in a way that the study of breast cancer is not (again, not all would agree, see the ‘Science Wars’ entry on Wikipedia).
Some examples from the conference: Johan Bollen presented the outstanding and topical LANL MESUR work on metrics. Fifteen years ago, Steve Woolgar* alerted us to the social, as well as the academic, reasons for the persistence of citation metrics as a tool in research evaluation. This mash-up of social and academic relations is likely now to be embedded in a technical infrastructure for research, so that it is important that the social aspects are well understood before that infrastructure is ‘fixed’. For example, should we be concerned about the potential of this infrastructure for surveillance?
One of the most successful parts of the conference was the ‘Repository Challenge’ (and I don’t just say that because JISC sponsored it!). Some 19 teams of developers competed in building potentially useful tools from existing services and components. It’s perhaps telling that many of those shortlisted focused on ingest, getting material more easily into repositories. In particular, the aim seemed to be to make ingest invisible. What does this say about the relations between the repository community and scientists?
Finally, I was struck by the number of times within a single evening that the conversation turned to the key role played by seemingly rather prosaic aspects of university organisation. Two examples: (i) Talking with a developer who wanted to use Amazon’s S3 storage services, the almost insurmountable obstacle was the difficulty in getting access to an institutional credit card (the only means of payment). (ii) Talking with a scientist-informatician, it became clear that the move in the UK to a single pay spine for all those working in a university does not mean that the boundaries around traditional academic disciplines are any less rigid – he wants to employ people with both science and informatics skills, but they have no comfortable home within the set of university roles as currently defined.
The range of these concerns, from research evaluation policy to whether or not a developer can use the departmental credit card, shows that ‘web science’ (as a practice and a topic for research) operates on a broad front, not all of which is especially elevated. If we’re to appreciate the ways these interconnect, then the need for some insight from disciplines such as anthropology seems obvious.
*Woolgar, S. (1991) Beyond the citation debate: towards a sociology of measurement technologies and their use in science policy. Science and Public Policy, 18(5), 319-326.
Posted by: Neil Jacobs
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