Social Science and Digital Research: Interdisciplinary Insights

The research councils, including the ESRC's Digital Social Research Programme, have sought to bring the social sciences to bear on the study of how academic disciplines in the sciences, social sciences and humanities are leveraging digital tools and data to advance research. Over the last decade, efforts to embed computing within research across academic disciplines have operated under various banners: e-science, cyberinfrastructure, e-research, digital humanities, digital social research, e-social science, and others. The aim of these efforts has been the enhancement of their research methods using the expanding capacities of networked computing. Across a number of studies, social research indicates that technical innovations are enabling scholars to reconfigure how they do their work across all phases of the research process, from discovery to dissemination. How have these innovations diffused and with what implications for the foci, quality and significance of research?

This symposium will provide an opportunity to critically assess the outcomes of such interdisciplinary initiatives through presentations that illustrate the potential for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary digital research to break new ground in our understanding of theory and research across disciplinary boundaries. Researchers from the Oxford e-Social Science Project (OeSS) and its various spin-offs will be discussing the lessons learned over the last six years of work in this area. Those researching this area, as well as those involved in completed or ongoing e-Research projects, are encouraged to participate in the symposium.