Information and Data in e-Science: Making Seamless Access a Reality Merry Bullock, Ph.D. Senior Director, Office of International Affairs, American Psychological Association Deputy Secretary-General, IUPsyS e- SOCIAL SCIENCES

E-Social Science How have the social sciences embraced e-science? What are the challenges to achieving access and to making it work?

The Social Sciences Anthropology Archeology Demography Economics Geography Linguistics Political science Psychology Sociology Statistics Interdisciplinary fields (cognitive neuroscience, learning sciences.

Some characteristics of the Social Sciences relevant to e-science Social Science data and methodologies are enormously heterogeneous Social Scientists study human individuals and organizations E-science is changing how social scientists store, share and access data AND how they generate data E-science is an object of social science research

Data infrastructure History and practice of data sharing Stong traditions in some (economics, political science, sociology) Weak traditions in others (psychology, anthropology)

Data infrastructure Large scale cooperative cross-disciplinary studies: on income, political involvement, education, child and adolescent health, aging… Federal statistical information (census, national surveys, indicators) Data repositories at the national level Large scale cooperative studies

Data collection Computer assisted interviewing (CAI) Web-based experiments Survey tools (TESS, Survey Monkey) Derived data bases Remote virtual laboratories

Is there a problem? Despite vast data resources, researchers are not getting the data they need…. Why not?

E-Social Sciences : Challenges Technical: need for common standards, common catalogues, rapid search, secure access Ethical: privacy, confidentiality assurances Cultural: incentives and reward structure for data sharing; national data sharing policies

E-Social Sciences Technical Challenges Comparability operationalization, metrics translations data types Common standards: Metadata – or meta methods?

E-Social Sciences Ethical challenges Protecting privacy, confidentiality Past strategies – restrict access, introduce error, aggregate De-identification and re-identification threats Video and audio data Lack of informed consent

E-Social Sciences Cultural challenges culture of sharing reward and incentive structure “culture of trust” Cross-national approaches to personal information

E-Social Sciences data infrastructure : – changes to the research landscape Allow broader, deeper questions, models Promote a global perspective Change the norms of replication Promote a change from theory-based to data- driven science

E-Social Sciences Vision for the future Social Sciences as Data Producers and Consumers: Applying Social Sciences to meet general e-science challenges

E-Social Sciences Vision for the future Social Sciences as Data Producers and Consumers: “One-stop discovery”: Global data catalogue (precursors are in place) International mechanisms for data identification and data quality assurance International consensus on access policies Culture of sharing – publications/citation incentives change to sharing incentives; part of basic scientific training

E-Social Sciences Vision for the future Applying Social Sciences to meet general e-science challenges Studies of how cybertools affect the processes of scientific discovery and the nature of work Understand and control threats to access

“Increased operability and data integration will give us the capacity to remove the disciplinary blinders of the 19th Century and to ask new questions with new lenses. The ability to integrate information, to obtain information at no cost, will open many doors intellectually and scientifically. The explosion in knowledge will go far beyond the structure that traditional disciplines and the limits of traditional data have imposed” (Roberta Miller, CIESIN) E-Social Sciences Vision for the future

With thanks to: ICPSR: M. Gutmann, E. Austin CIESIN: R. Miller, R. Chen NSF: W. Ward, M. Barratt ONR: S. Chipman U Chicago: B. Bertenthal, S. Porges Stanford: D. Laitin