OPINION DAVID DE ROURE
The digital deluge R
esearchers are experiencing a deluge of data. Some of it comes from new experimental techniques in science, like the Large Hadron Collider, DNA
sequencing or laboratory automation. Equally, as people and businesses become increasingly online, we are generating data in the digital footprints of everyday life.
Our homes have smart electricity meters, our streets sense society in motion and Facebook has become not so much a Large Hadron Collider as a Large People Collider. Meanwhile old data is being reborn digitally in digitisation projects like the transcriptions of historical documents by ‘citizen scientists’. More data is being liberated as government opens up, and we have greater access to previously secure data. Depending on your point of view, it’s an international phenomenon, or it’s a data deluge, a tsunami or a bonanza.
“ ” More data is being liberated and
we have greater access to previously secure data
It was apparent ten years ago that digital
data collection was set to produce more data than individual researchers could handle using existing tools and methods. Partial processing would mean that results hidden in the detail would be missed and it would be difficult to spot patterns in the bigger picture. It isn’t just the scale of the data: while some is specifically collected for re-use by researchers, much is collected to be fit for a different purpose, and much sits in silos, raising numerous challenges of methodology, management and ethics. This was a cross-disciplinary problem demanding cross- disciplinary solutions. The UK e-Science Programme was therefore
created by John Taylor, then director of the UK Research Councils, who defined e-Science as ‘global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it’. Significantly this definition understood that progress is not just about technology but about researchers harnessing technology, and it reminds us to talk about research questions, not just tools. It’s widely accepted now that e-Science should have been called e-Research. Of course, researchers in many disciplines, from computational sciences to digital
16 SOCIETY NOW SUMMER 2011
Professor David De Roure traces the development of the UK e-Science Programme and explains how it has encouraged new research outcomes
humanities, were already sophisticated users of advanced computing techniques. The ESRC had run an ‘analysis of large and complex datasets’ programme where we knew that either ‘large’ or ‘complex’ was enough to be demanding! But the e-Science programme kick-started a broader set of collaborations between computer scientists and domain specialists, and established a wider notion of e-infrastructure to support this. It facilitated co- evolution: researchers and technologists coming together creating and harnessing innovative technology to achieve new research outcomes. For social scientists it became not just a tool but a subject of study.
Observers of the digital research ecosystem might identify three phases of e-Science: the early adopters of new tools, followed by a phase of embedding and re-use and then new research practice and outcomes. More importantly this is against a backdrop of increasing computational capability and everyday participation in the digital world, widespread innovation outside the e-Science programme, and international collaboration. In social science we’re currently in phase two and heading for phase three. e-Science was the name of a vision and a programme, and as we celebrate its tenth anniversary, we could now just call it science but the innovation, application and progress all still continue. So we now talk about ‘Digital Social Research’ – harnessing advances in digital technology and practice to achieve world-class social research. We also hear ‘data-intensive research’, ‘fourth paradigm’ and ‘open science’ which all carry forward parts of the agenda. The ESRC’s commitment to e-Science has
created new methods for social researchers and it has benefited a much wider community who now better understand that e-Science is a socio- technical endeavour. n
i David De Roure is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of
Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. David is National Strategic Director for e-Social Science, Chair of OMII-UK and a Co-Director of e-Research South. His work focuses on creating new research methods in and between multiple disciplines, and his projects draw on Web 2.0, Semantic Web and workflow technologies.
Email
david.deroure@
oerc.ox.ac.uk Telephone 01865 610703 Web
www.digitalsocialresearch.net Blog
blogs.nature.com/eresearch ESRC Grant Number RES-149-34-0001-A
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