World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities

Advances in information and communication technology are transforming the wayscholarly research is conducted across all disciplines. The use of increasingly powerful andversatile computer-based and networked systems promises to change research activity as profoundly asthe mobile phone, the Internet, and email have changed everyday life. This book offers acomprehensive and accessible view of the use of these new approaches--called"e-Research"--and their ethical, legal, and institutional implications. The contributors,leading scholars from a range of disciplines, focus on how e-Research is reshaping not only howresearch is done but also, and more important, its outcomes. By anchoring their discussion inspecific examples and case studies, they identify and analyze a promising set of practicaldevelopments and results associated with e-Research innovations. The contributors, who includeGeoffrey Bowker, Christine Borgman, Paul Edwards, Tim Berners-Lee, and Hal Abelson, explain why andhow e-Research activity can reconfigure access to networks of information, expertise, andexperience, changing what researchers observe, with whom they collaborate, how they shareinformation, what methods they use to report their findings, and what knowledge is required to dothis. They discuss both the means of e-Research (new research-centered computational networks) andits purpose (to improve the quality of world-wide research). William H. Dutton is Director of theOxford Internet Institute, Professor of Internet Studies, and Professorial Fellow of Balliol Collegeat the University of Oxford. Paul W. Jeffreys, formerly Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre, isDirector of IT at the University of Oxford, Professor of Computing, and Professorial Fellow of KebleCollege at the University of Oxford.

The hardcover edition does not include a dustjacket.

Paul W. Jeffreys, formerly Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre, is Director of IT at the University of Oxford, Professor of Computing, and Professorial Fellow of Keble College at the University of Oxford.