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eScience in Action: Workshop on Knowledge and ICTsOn 22 April 2008, Rathenau Institute and the AWT will organise a workshop on eScience. The key question will be whether eScience will fundamentally change science. The workshop will consequently focus on practical applications of eScience, their implications for the work of scientists, and also for policy makers.
eScience in Action A global effort is underway to develop and deploy a new generation of advanced ICT infrastructure which, it is argued, is essential to enable new advances in scientific research. This infrastructure comprises networked, interoperable, scalable computational tools and services that make it possible to locate, access, share, aggregate and manipulate digitised data seamlessly on a hitherto unrealisable scale. It is still an open question how the emergence and use of ICTs have enabled changes in the science system. According to many scholars, knowledge production and exchange are going through a transition. The increasing use of ICTs in knowledge production, not only as a means of communication and collaboration, but also, and increasingly, as data, methodologies, and types of output of scientific fields, has become the focus of debate within science and science policy circles around concepts such as E-science. Often, the definition of E-science is a purely technological one, indicating those efforts that enhance scientific research by means of high-performance computing coupled with high bandwidth networks. This coincides with the programs of national research funding bodies to create a "cyberinfrastructure" (in the United States) and an "e-infrastructure" (in the European Union). However, with the rise of the participative (Web) applications, and more widely-available computing and more participants in science networks, the scope of discussion is expanding to cover many network-enabled science activities that rely on ICTs. The motivation for this workshop is to examine if eScience will fundamentally change science. The aim of the workshop is to present actual eScience practices and discuss their implications. We will focus on three distinct strands of work: the local practices of researching, the exchange and coordination of knowledge and the wider landscape of political and societal contexts in which knowledge is used. This perspective enables us to understand the separate dynamics at the local, global and contextual levels, and how the use of ICTs influences them.
ICTs not only provide new data and analyses, but also new topics of research and new conceptual frameworks. The computer is viewed as a complexity machine with which ever higher degrees of complex phenomena can be computed, manipulated and produced in a variety of imaging forms: charts, graphs, simulations and images. Indeed, it may be or be becoming the 21st century's epistemology engine.
Although the journal-based communication system (whether paper-based or online) still has a dominant role in the disciplinary identity construction and its associated mechanisms of quality control and accumulation of knowledge, the use of ICTs has enabled new ways of collective coordination of scientific communities, leading to different possible identity-formation mechanisms, and diversifying the types of rewards available for individual scientists, thus impacting on their career-path strategies and the resource management of their local contexts.
ICTs have enabled interactions between universities, scientific communities and other societal actors, such as governments, private companies and NGOs, on the basis of a variety of mechanisms: database establishment, increasing need and reliance on theoretical knowledge, societal assessment of relevant knowledge and open innovation processes. The use of ICTs has created more direct links between the scientific community and a heterogeneous set of actors, thus introducing new uncertainties and new possibilities in knowledge production systems.
The variety of digital data, tools, storage, processing capacity and electronic networks creates a heterogeneity that is (partially) adopted in ways that reflect different field-specific patterns and needs. Therefore, in each field, the researching environment, the formation of disciplinary identities and the interactions with society are changing in different ways through the use of ICTs. Clearly there is not one universal transition occurring across all fields. New search regimes require institutional systems in which decisions at political level are taken rapidly; quality signals are credible due to consistent, large scale, purely competitive selection and evaluation of talented people; human, technical and infrastructural resources are mobilised smoothly according to the emergence of new scientific opportunities and are highly mobile. Rapidity, quality signalling, competition, mobility, are all fundamental properties of the required institutional system.
To be determined
More information telephone 00 31 70 311 0931.
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