David De Roure

Advances inDigital Scholarship

• Web as an infrastructure for research

• Web as a source of data

• Web as a subject of research

• Web of scholarly discourse

Research “on” the Web

...the imminent flood of scientific data expected from the next generation of experiments, simulations, sensors and satellites

Tony Hey and Anne Trefethen

Source: CERN, CERN-EX-0712023, http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1203203

Bio

Ess

ays,

, 26

(1):

99–

105,

Jan

uary

200

4

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/

The Problem

Digital Music Collections

Student-sourced ground truth

Community Software

Linked Data Repositories

Supercomputer

23,000 hours ofrecorded music

Music InformationRetrieval Community

Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information

http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/library/special/projects/whats-the-score

DAMES

LifeGuide

eStat

PolicyGrid

Obesity e-Lab

DReSS

OeSS

Genesis

Genesis

Rural communities

Creative Industries

Social Inclusion

Entertainment

Healthcare

highwire

Horizon

Media

Finance

Web Science

Current Nodes

e-Social Science

DE Hubs

DE DTCs

GeoVUE

MoSeS

MiMeG

CQeSS

HUB

NeISS

ncrm

m

m

m m

mm

m

mm

NCRM phase 2

Harnessing advances in digital technology and practice to achieve world-class social

research with maximum impact

www.digitalsocialresearch.net

ds

d NCRM phase 3

Demonstrators& Sustainability

d

ss

s

d

m

New York London Paris Moscow

The Tweet-o-Meter

http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/tom/

B F

C

A

E

D

-

+

B F

C

A

E

D

- +

B F

C

A

E

D

+

F

E

D

B

C

A

- +

Government

Industry

F

E

D

B

C

A

- +

Novice Expert

Theories ofSelf interest

Theories of Exchange

Theories ofCollective Action

Theories of Balance

Theories ofHomophily

Theories ofCognition

QueryInstall

analyticSubscribe

Anatomy of an observatory

ongoing collection

Data flows

Web as lens

Web as artefact

Web as

infrastructure

1

32

Framework for Responsible Research and Innovation in ICT

responsible-innovation.org.uk

SOCIAMThe Theory and Practice of

Social Machines

The order of social machines

Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social constraint – the very processes from which society arises. Computers can help if we use them to create abstract social machines on the Web: processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration… The stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new social engines. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999

An Example Social Machine• The Kenyan election on the

27th December 2007… • wave of riots, killings and

turmoil… • African blogger Erik Hersman

read a post by another blogger Ory Okolloh…

• Resulted in Ushahidi…• “Nobody Knows Everything,

but Everyone Knows Something.”

• Local observers to submit reports using the Web or SMS messages from mobile phones

1. Telling people about the purpose of the research and about its context is a good thing

2. Treat participants as collaborators not as subjects

3. Do not waste people’s time

4. All volunteers, and their contributions, are of equal value to the project

The Zooniverse principles

Versus…• The Deficit model – the

layperson is irrational, ignorant, and even intellectually vacuous

• Human-based computation – a computer science technique in which a computational process performs its function by outsourcing certain steps to humans

Some other machines?

More people

Mor

e m

achi

nes

Social Machines in Context

Big DataBig Compute

Conventional Computation

Social Machines

SocialNetworking

www.einfrastructuresouth.ac.uk

explore.clarosnet.org

The users of a website, the website, and the interactions between them, together form our fundamental notion of a “machine”

“Facebook for Scientists”...but different to Facebook!

A repository of research methods

A community social network of people and things

A Social Virtual Research Environment

A probe into researcher behaviour

Open source (BSD) Ruby on Rails app

REST and SPARQL interfaces, supports Linked Data

Influenced BioCatalogue, MethodBox and SysMO-SEEK

myExperiment currently has 307 groups, 2494 workflows, 643 files and 250 packs - see wiki.myexperiment.org

data

method

Machine

Machine

repeat

Machine

repeat

REPRODUCE

MachineMachine

softwarepaper

paper

ResearchRecord

software

SoftwareREPRODUCE OR REPEAT?

software

workflowpaper

Software

wf

Machine

software

workflow

software

blogs.nature.com/eresearch/

http://force11.org/

The Executable Thesis

new data

new results

executablethesis

PhD Student

• The underlying themes in this talk have been: – Web (co-constituted)– people (expert to lay)– computation (device to supercomputer)– automation / assistance– methods, reuse and value-add

• These reflect significant trends in our “knowledge infrastructure”, and significant opportunities for digital humanities

Discussion

david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.ukwww.oerc.ox.ac.uk/people/dder

blogs.nature.com/eresearch

@dder

Slide credits: Christine Borgman, Ichiro Fujinaga, Noshir Contractor, Marina Jirotka, Nigel Shadbolt, Dave Robertson, Andrew Zisserman

http://www.slideshare.net/dder/advances-in-digital-scholarshiphttp://www.myexperiment.org/packs/313