Abstract

In this paper we review Phase I (2004-2008) of the UK National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) research programme and articulate the roadmap for Phase II (2008-2012).

NCeSS is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) with the objective of enabling social scientists to make best use of innovations in digital infrastructure (‘e-Infrastructure’) so that they are able to develop new methods and address the key challenges in their research fields in new ways. The wider goal is to ensure that the ESRC continues to develop the world-class social scientific infrastructure that is essential if the UK is to have the capacity to remain a centre of excellence in economic and social research. The key research challenges set out in the ESRC’s 2005-2010 Strategic Plan range over diverse topics, disciplines and research methods, and together they collectively entail a set of requirements for the social science research infrastructure which NCeSS is working to satisfy.

The NCeSS programme has two research strands. The applications strand draws on unfolding developments in e-Infrastructure and applies them to the particular needs of the social science research community. The social shaping strand aims to understand the social, economic and other influences on how e-Infrastructure is being developed and used, and its implications for scientific practice and research outcomes.

We begin by outlining the work-in-progress across the Centre’s research programme, and we consider how the Centre contributes to the needs of social science researchers by enabling them to benefit from the ‘data deluge’ and from new computational tools and services. We then turn to the continuing efforts to consolidate and extend the Centre’s research agenda and, alongside this, to encourage transfer of the efforts by the pioneering minority (the ‘early adopters’) to the wider social science research community; to raise awareness of the potential of e-Infrastructure to support domain research; and to tackle the barriers which might otherwise discourage or slow down adoption.

We conclude by reviewing some of the challenges which NCeSS and the e-Science research community as a whole must address over the coming years if the goals of e-Social Science – and indeed e-Science more broadly – are to be fully realized. In particular, we describe a change in focus for Phase II: while the Centre will continue to work with early adopters to achieve advances in leading-edge social science research, the roadmap recognises that the Centre’s future impact will be assessed in terms of the progress it makes in disseminating its new methods and tools throughout the wider social science research community and the extent of the contribution of these new tools and method to advances in substantive social science research.

About the speaker

Mark Birkin is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK. Previously he was Director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Informatics at the University of Leeds (2001-2005) and Managing Director of GMAP Limited (1996-2001). Mark has long-standing research interests in geographical information systems (GIS), spatial microsimulation, geodemographics, and ‘what if?’ predictive modelling. He is currently the Principal Investigator of Moses, a research node of the UK e-social science programme (www.ncess.ac.uk