World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities download book

Book: World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities

Author: William H. Dutton, Paul W. Jeffreys

Pages: 424

Format: PDF

Language: English

ISBN10: 0262014394

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-esearch is reshaping not only the research process 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 Tim Berners-Lee, Hal Abelson, Christine Borgman, Geoffrey Bowker, and Paul Edwards, 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 worldwide research).