People at the MRL
Tom Rodden (Research Director)
Andy Crabtree (Co-director)
Steve Benford
Chris Greenhalgh
Andy French
Main Contact
Partners at the University of Nottingham
School of English (CRAL: Ron Carter, Svenja Adolphs, Dawn
Knight)
Learning Sciences Research Institute (Claire
O’Malley, Sharon Ainsworth, David Clarke, Pat
Brundell)
Funding
| Funding body: | ESRC (Grant No. RES-149-25-0035) |
| Amount of total eligible funding: | £905,163 |
| Duration of funding: | 2.5 years |
Project Overview
The node seeks to explore and understand how new forms of digital record may emerge from and for e-social science and examine how Grid based technologies can be extended to provide new processes and services through which social science information may be collected, collated, and distributed. Social scientists will work in close partnership with computer scientists on three Driver Projects to develop e-social science applications demonstrating the salience of new forms of digital record. The Driver Projects include:
- Grid-based Assembly of Qualitative Records. This project will develop support for social scientists undertaking social studies of technology. The primary focus will be on the assembly of qualitative records that marry conventional data sources with emerging digital resources to better understand the social shaping of technology in interaction.
- Grid-based Structuring of Assembled Records. This project will develop support for social scientists undertaking corpus-based studies of natural language use. Its primary focus will be on structuring a Grid-enabled multi-modal corpus that combines conventional text-based representations with visual media.
- Grid-based Coupling of Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis will be driven by social scientists undertaking studies of learning to develop techniques that allow researchers to generate, manage, and track transitions between qualitative and quantitative representations of online teaching episodes and learning outcomes.
Development work in each of these areas is underpinned by the following three themes to ensure the development of services that have some general purchase and utility. So developed applications support the recording of multiple forms of data from multiple sources; allow data to be represented and re-represented in different ways to support different kinds of analysis; and enable researchers to replay digital records to support analysis amongst distributed parties in the ‘here and now’ or by others in the future. The work of the node is driven by an iterative user-centred prototyping approach where social scientists work in close partnership with computer scientists to develop e-social science applications that demonstrate the salience of new forms of digital record to the future of social science research.
Downloads
www.ncess.ac.uk/research/digital_records/drs/
Publications
www.ncess.ac.uk/research/digital_records/publications/