Abstract

December 5, 2005
Title: CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Presented by: Henry Brady, Director, UCB Survey Research Center, UC DATA, and California Census Research Data Center

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Cyberinfrastructure (CI) enables and supports scientific research through online digital instruments, emerging sensor and observing technologies, high-powered computers, extensive data storage capabilities, visualization facilities, and networks for communication and collaboration. Science and engineering are being transformed by Cyberinfrastructure. This is just as true of the social sciences as of the physical, natural, engineering, and biological sciences. With the development of needed, appropriate, and usable Cyberinfrastructure, the social sciences can take a giant step forward. Cyberinfrastructure can enable the development of more realistic models of complex social phenomena, the production and analysis of larger datasets (such as surveys, censuses, textual corpora, videotapes, cognitive neuroimaging records, and administrative data) that more completely record human behavior, and the collection of better data through experiments and simulations on the Internet. Moreover, the revolutionary potential of Cyberinfrastructure is the ability to do these things at a much greater scale and intensity using distributed networks and powerful tools just at a time when social and behavioral scientists face the possibility of becoming overwhelmed by the massive amount of data available and the challenges of comprehending and safeguarding it.

It is equally true that the social sciences are uniquely situated to help computer scientists supported by NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and their community create better Cyberinfrastructure for all the sciences and engineering. Behavioral scientists can help develop better modes of human-computer interaction. Sociologists can analyze the implications for knowledge production of social networks developed on the Web. Organizational theorists and political scientists can develop better management and governance structures for Web-enabled research communities and the Cyberinfrastructure providers that support them. Economists can design incentive-compatible resource allocation methods. Psychologists and linguists can help computer scientists develop computer programs that understand, utilize, and translate natural languages. Working together, social scientists and computer scientists can develop better statistical and analytical methods for dealing with data, and they can understand and control the malevolent behaviors that threaten to limit the capabilities of new Cyberinfrastructure.

In addition to benefiting from and helping to design successful Cyberinfrastructure for all the sciences and engineering, the social sciences can also assess the effects of Cyberinfrastructure on all of society. This task is already an accepted part of the mission of the social sciences, but it is also a natural outgrowth of efforts to develop better Cyberinfrastructure for the sciences and engineering. After all, the Internet is the result of technical innovations that were initially confined to research communities but which expanded to society at large; it seems likely that many future Cyberinfrastructure innovations for research will also find their way into mainstream society. In addition, the vast changes expected from society-wide Cyberinfrastructure must be studied and understood to better channel and control them.