Experience with New Tools and Infrastructures of Research: An Exploratory Study of Distance From, and Attitudes Toward, e‐Research

Prometheus (United Kingdom)

Volumn 27, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 223-238

  Dutton, William H ^a   Meyer, Eric T ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

attitudes; e Research; e Social Science; survey

Indexed keywords

EID: 77956469208     PISSN: 08109028     EISSN: 14701030     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/08109020903127802     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. This work is based on the e-Infrastructure Project of the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) conducted by the Oxford e-Social Science (OeSS) node at the University of Oxford, supported by a grant from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (RES-149-25- 1022). We thank all the members of the NCeSS Strategy Board, who collectively reacted to early versions of the questionnaire, and advised us on ways to refine the study. Rob Procter and Peter Halfpenny of NCeSS, and Ralph Schroeder and Marina Jirotka of OeSS were more directly involved in supporting the design and conduct of this study. Monica Gerber and Ellen Helsper provided invaluable assistance and feedback with our data analysis. We thank these colleagues.
2. Christine L. Borgman, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007.
3. Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, 'The world wide web of research and access to knowledge', Journal of Knowledge Management Research and Practice, 7, 3, 2009, pp. 218-233.
4. Franz Barjak, Gordon Wiegand, Julia Lane et al., Accelerating Transition to Virtual Research Organisation in Social Science (AVROSS): Final Report, Information Society and Media Directorate General, Commission of the European Communities, Brussels, 2008.
5. Personal communication with anonymous informant.
6. This work is one aspect of an e-Infrastructure Project of the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) conducted by the Oxford e-Social Science (OeSS) node at the University of Oxford, supported by a grant from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (RES- 149-25-1022).
7. Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th edition, Free Press, New York, 2003.
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18. Even this must be qualified, however, since some subfields in the humanities, such as computational linguistics, have been deeply engaged with digital approaches to research for many years.
19. Donald MacKenzie, 'The certainty trough', in W. H. Dutton (ed.), Society on the Line, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, pp. 43-6.
20. Steve Woolgar, 'A new theory of innovation?', Prometheus, 16, 4, 1998, pp. 441-52.
21. William H. Dutton and A. Shepherd, 'Confidence and risk on the Internet', in R. Mansell and B. Collins (eds), Trust and Crime in Information Societies, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, Cheltenham, UK, 2005
22. William H. Dutton and A. Shepherd, 'Trust in the Internet as an experience technology', Information, Communication & Society, 9, 4, 2006, pp. 433-51.
23. The final survey instrument and more detailed results of the survey are available online at: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/microsites/oess/survey/.
24. For simplicity, responses disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with each statement have been excluded, although they can be calculated by subtracting the other two percentages from 100%. The proportion of disagreement was quite low in most cases.
25. The categories 'coder' and 'user' are based on self-report. Although there are certainly differences between serious software engineers who generate computer code and a casual author of scripts to perform tasks, this basic division appears to distinguish between those who generate new methods for interacting with their data and those for whom the computer programmes are more of a black-boxed technology.
26. Of course, there are exceptions to this, particularly within fields and disciplines that relied on computation prior to the advent of desktop computing.
27. William H. Dutton and A. Shepherd, 'Trust in the Internet as an experience technology', Information, Communication & Society, 9, 4, 2006, pp. 433-51.
28. Eric T. Meyer, Han-Woo Park and Ralph Schroeder, 'Mapping global e-Research: scientometrics and webometrics', 5th International Conference on e-Social Science, Cologne, Germany, 2009.