World Wide Research – Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities in the Century of Information (The MIT Press) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262513730 ISBN 13: 9780262513739

Publisher: MIT Press, 2010

Synopsis

Experts examine ways in which the use of increasingly powerful and versatile digital information and communication technologies are transforming research activities across all disciplines. Advances in information and communication technology are transforming the way scholarly research is conducted across all disciplines. The use of increasingly powerful and versatile computer-based and networked systems promises to change research activity as profoundly as the mobile phone, the Internet, and email have changed everyday life. This book offers a comprehensive and accessible view of the use of these new approaches-called "e-Research"-and their ethical, legal, and institutional implications. The contributors, leading scholars from a range of disciplines, focus on how e-Research is reshaping not only how research is done but also, and more important, its outcomes. By anchoring their discussion in specific examples and case studies, they identify and analyze a promising set of practical developments and results associated with e-Research innovations. The contributors, who include Geoffrey Bowker, Christine Borgman, Paul Edwards, Tim Berners-Lee, and Hal Abelson, explain why and how e-Research activity can reconfigure access to networks of information, expertise, and experience, changing what researchers observe, with whom they collaborate, how they share information, what methods they use to report their findings, and what knowledge is required to do this. They discuss both the means of e-Research (new research-centered computational networks) and its purpose (to improve the quality of world-wide research).

About this title

Review:

The editors have definitely succeeded to attract interesting authors and produce a well orchestrated collection of texts.

--Professor Elena Maceviciute, Information Research

About the Author:

William H. Dutton is Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Professor of Internet Studies, and Professorial Fellow of Balliol College at the University of Oxford. Paul W. Jeffreys, formerly Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre, is Director of IT at the University of Oxford, Professor of Computing, and Professorial Fellow of Keble College at the University of Oxford. Hal Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a fellow of the IEEE. He is a founding director of Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and theFree Software Foundation. Additionally, he serves as co-chair for the MIT Council on Educational Technology. Christine L. Borgman is Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure and Scholarship in the Digital Age (both winners of the "Best Information Science Book" award from ASIS&T), published by the MIT Press. Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor and Director of the Evoke Lab at the University of California, Irvine. He is the coauthor (with Susan Leigh Star) of Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences and the author of Memory Practices in the Sciences, both published by the MIT Press. Paul N. Edwards is Professor in the School of Information and the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996) and a coeditor (with Clark Miller) of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (2001), both published by the MIT Press. Eric T. Meyer is Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Ralph Schroeder is Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Paul Wouters is Professor of Scientometrics and Director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University. Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Head of the Web and Internet Science (WAIS) research group in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton. Wesley Shrum is Professor of Sociology at Louisiana State University and longtime Secretary of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). John B. Taylor is Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and George P. Schultz Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution. Yorick Wilks is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Institute of Language, Speech, and Hearing at the University of Sheffield, UK.

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0262513730
• ISBN 13: 9780262513739
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 424
• Editor: Dutton William H., Jeffreys Paul W.