E- learning and training
4.3 Synthesis of the investigated cases
4.3.5 Impact on research and learning
Each of the projects follows the vision to address and solve existing problems in a new and ambitious way through the combination of using and building e-Infrastructure tools and/or frameworks in and for their application domains.
• MoSeS and SPORT use the potential of simulation and modelling to engage social, political and economic issues on an unparalleled scale.
• ComDAT, DReSS, DoBeS and TextGrid all offer new ways of linking, archiving and working with various types of data within diverse disciplines.
• The AGSC is a service supporting the use and fostering the uptake of AG in the UK and maybe beyond.
• FinGrid had the aim to develop a national information and computing e-Infrastructure for economic and financial data.
The challenges in achieving the project’s goals are particularly seen in making the use as well as the funding sustainable and enlarge the user base (AGSC, ComDAT, DoBeS, TextGrid, FinGrid), followed by solving confidential and security data issues (MoSeS, SPORT) and still bridging the gap between creating new prototypes for the social
sciences and humanities and having an application which at one point is considered to be helpful in research and will de facto be used (DReSS).
Impact on research. There a different categories of impact which have been identified.
• The AGSC can state the uptake and real use of AG and its own support services by various scientific communities. In the last years projects connected to the AGSC are
leads to new funding opportunities or concrete scenarios for future use envisioned by researchers from other domains.
• DReSS, DoBeS and TextGrid in different ways foster the use of digital data and repositories through new means of integration using e-Infrastructure.
• The ComDAT project encounters limited impact on research due to inappropriate means for “utilizing social and behavioural data on e-Infrastructure”, but reports reduction on research time and re-use of successful models for other domains.
• In the completed FinGrid project the impact on the original user community was little and shifted to creating benefits for the European Grid development community.
Impact on teaching and learning. Most of the projects so far have no connection to teaching or formal learning activities, but the needs for e-Infrastructure “to be integrated in future curricula” (DReSS), to address this in a future work-package (TextGrid) or when the technology will be further developed (SPORT) are recognised. While FinGrid did develop a training tool to help with Grid installation, MoSeS and SPORT are the only two projects to have graduate students included in development. MoSeS is the only project to conduct formal coursework and additionally plans to implement a PhD studentship.
4.3.6 Summary
All cases clearly have strengths and weaknesses and we do not wish to rank them in any way. In order to increase the clarity of presentation we further condensed the overview tables for three of the five discussed dimensions – user community, relationship to established practices and policies, and impact – in a simple rating. For each of the dimensions the projects received a summary rating based on partial ratings for the included elements in each dimension between +2 “very good performance or situation”
and -2 “very bad performance or highly problematic situation” (see Annex 5.2 on the ratings). The summary ratings were then depicted in a chart (see Figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2: Summary ratings of the case studies for user community, relationship to established practices and policies, and impact
-5 -3 -1 1 3 5
-6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6
User Community/Relationship to practices
Impact
Relationship to practices User community
AGSC MoSeS
SPORT
ComDAT
FinGrid DReSS
DoBeS TextGrid
Group 1
Group 3
Group 2
Note: The user community values for FinGrid and ComDAT are identical (only one data point shown).
Source: AVROSS.
policies and user community and on the y-axis the impact rating. The impact is rather low in all investigated projects, as most still have significant challenges to solve and an impact on teaching is nearly absent. Relating this to the other two dimensions, three groups of projects can be distinguished:
• AGSC, DoBeS, and MoSeS are projects that fit rather neatly into the established practices in the fields in which they are integrated. They also have a (growing) user community and functioning user-developer interaction. This either has already shown that they can have an impact (AGSC) or puts them in a good position to make an impact as they develop.
• TextGrid and DReSS are weaker in regard to this integration into the field and its practices and they have not yet advanced as far in regard to users as projects in the previous group. They also have not yet achieved an impact and they are in a weaker position in regard to achieving this in the future.
• The last group of projects, FinGrid, SPORT, and ComDAT, are in an even worse position when it comes to user communities and relationships to established practices: They have user communities restricted to the people involved in the project, no discernible strategies for acquiring more users and significant problems in linking up with the potential user communities. Sharing resources seems to be also rather problematic for them. The projects are weak, too, when it comes to the realised impact on research or teaching.
Of course, this is a very much ad hoc rating of the cases that does not take into account the different development stages of the projects. Therefore, the results should not be considered as conclusive, i.e. projects like SPORT and ComDAT might link up to their users and become accepted in the fields, and others might still fail, though the current conditions seem to be very promising. However, we think that the overview is a satisfactory representation of the projects that might help to focus the activities and further development on key preconditions for success.
5.1 Introduction
Our task in this study was to provide recommendations for realising more rapid roll out of virtual research organisations and novel services for students in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). Before we present these recommendations in more detail, a general remark is appropriate on the advantages of locating e-Infrastructure policy at European level rather than at the level of member states.
• In some SSH fields, research approaches differ on a national basis and have a national flavour, for example using specific resources in a particular language or located in a particular (national) culture. More exchange and collaboration at
European level, facilitated through joint e-Infrastructures, would enable disparate and dispersed source materials to be used more widely and across borders, facilitate transfer of competence across countries (and fields) and promote faster adoption of best practice. Also, creativity is generally believed to be boosted when scientists with diverse backgrounds are linked (Simonton, 2004).
• In other SSH fields (e.g. branches of macroeconomics such as Nationalökonomie), research is essentially international, involving comparison of nation states. Where research content and scholarly communication are already strongly international, national e-Infrastructures policies would require considerable coordination to avoid interoperability barriers and duplication of tools and content – problems and costs that might be reduced by choosing a European approach from the outset.
• Many e-Infrastructure elements exhibit quite significant economies of scale which can only be reaped by providing them to a large user community. Building and
maintaining text corpora for historical or minority languages may only be affordable if researchers from several countries join forces to build and use them. The joint knowledge mobilised and the “transactive memory” systems (Wegner, 1987) created both benefit from network effects.
• When for the same reason global collaboration is needed, then the EC is in a better position than any of the individual member states to negotiate and fund such initiatives with other regions of the globe. Services by Google, Yahoo and Amazon such as Google Scholar, Google digitisation or Flickr are examples of new
opportunities global collaboration could provide for research communities, enabling them to create, share, and use information, to communicate and collaborate.
• Common European standards, tools and resource repositories will reduce barriers to mobility in the research environment. Learning costs can be reduced if scholars can remain in familiar technological space while moving in geographical space.
Our recommendations are informed not only by the survey and case studies undertaken for this project but also by our other work (Procter, 2007; Voss et al., 2007) and the related literature. They are intended to complement previous proposals, such as in particular:
1) The ESFRI Roadmap report (2006) sets out to describe the scientific needs for Research Infrastructures of pan-European interest for the next 10-20 years, taking into account input from relevant inter-governmental research organisations as well as the industrial community. ESFRI’s agenda is necessarily concerned with the formulation of strategic, policy-level recommendations and contrasts with the focus of the AVROSS project which has been to identify how e-Infrastructure development and adoption are perceived at the ‘grass roots’. Nevertheless, we find several examples of where the two connect. The ESFRI Roadmap identifies three long-term strategic goals for SSH research infrastructures (comparative data and modelling, data integration and language tools, coordination and enabling) and a number of individual, pan-European infrastructural
CLARIN and DARIAH).
2) The e-Infrastructures Roadmap from e-IRG has the purpose of outlining the necessary steps Europe should take in regard to e-Infrastructures in the next twenty years
(Leenaars, et al., 2005). Coming from a computer science and engineering perspective, the Roadmap includes several recommendations on networking infrastructures,
middleware and organisation, resources, and crossing the boundaries of science. These can contribute to building a European infrastructure for e-Research.
3) The NSF Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Sciences focused on identifying the social, behavioural, and economic sciences’ needs for e-infrastructure/
cyberinfrastructure, their potential for helping in the development of this infrastructure, and their capacity for assessing its societal impacts (Berman & Brady, 2005). Its
recommendations address first what infrastructures are desirable from the perspective of the latter fields; second it suggests certain topics where social science research will be beneficial for e-Infrastructure development in general; third it stresses the needs for sustainable funding schemes; last but not least the document highlights the necessity to develop the e-Social Science community.
The recommendations set out in this report should be viewed as complementary and summarising lessons learnt in e-Infrastructure projects to-date which should be absorbed and acted on as new projects, funded by ESFRI, EC, NSF and others, get under way. In our empirical work we identified numerous issues that will be critical to developing and disseminating e-Infrastructures for social scientists and humanists. Any roll out that requires domain scientists to take up a new approach has several separate components that each independently need to be successful. These include:
1. Capacity building for e-Infrastructures in the social sciences and humanities: the base of motivated scientists and skilled technicians trained on e-Infrastructures needs to be broadened through education and training – with an important role for CSCL – and funding needs both, to take the specific demands of SSH into account and to move on to sustainable funding schemes.
2. Developing appropriate tools: Tool development must be done in close,
permanent and effective interaction with the users. Use barriers are lower if the users are familiar with tools which “only” have been ported on the grid
environment; standardisation raises the confidence in sustainability.
3. Fostering the adoption of the approach by domain scientists: Incentives need to be given and barriers that hinder adoption need to be reduced. Such incentives should be instituted in funding schemes – e.g. to reuse existing data and make new data available through repositories – and become part of SSH research and academic practice, for instance in publishing, evaluation, and promotion. Barriers require at least as often organizational solutions as they require technical
solutions, for instance when it comes to reducing the language barriers between technical developers and domain scientists.
4. Making domain scientists aware of e-Infrastructures: Awareness needs to be raised above all through demonstrating the benefits of e-Infrastructures. This is most effectively done through field-specific information channels and between peers. Institutional environments, of course, need also be responsive to the pay-offs of e-Infrastructure investments. Last but not least, the knowledge on what type of infrastructure and support SSH researchers actually need and where they stand in the adoption process needs to be broadened (also raising awareness in the process of doing so).
Figure 5.1 provides a visualisation of this sequence.
Raising The Components of a Roll Out
Source: AVROSS
Previous research has also made it clear that successful infrastructures are a
combination of ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ processes, implying they cannot be planned in any complete sense (e.g., Edwards et al., 2007). They succeed because a stable socio-technical constituency – an ensemble of socio-technical components (hardware, software, etc.) and stakeholders (people, interest groups, visions, values, etc.) – emerges. Socio-technical constituencies stabilise when stakeholders are able to strike a balance between their interests and those of the wider community. We also note that each cycle of
innovation is disruptive, there are winners and losers as previously stable and successful socio-technical constituencies unravel (Procter, 2007). We believe that the following recommendations will improve the chances for success at each step of the process described in Figure 5.1.
Table 5.1: Overview of policy recommendations
Capacity Building Tool development Adoption Raising awareness 1. Develop dedicated
training events for SSH 2. Step up the role of
8. Involve users at all stages to promote the reuse of SSH data
Most of these recommendations need further analyses and discussions in the process of operationalisation and integration into existing or new policy measures. Doing this would have gone beyond the scope of the AVROSS project. We sketch in Section 5.6 a
to be addressed by future research.