What's the deal with the web/blogs/the next big technology: a key role for information science in e-social science research?

  • Authors:

  • Mike Thelwall;Paul Wouters

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK;Networked Research and Digital Information – Nerdi, NIWI-KNAW, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • CoLIS'05 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Context: conceptions of Library and Information Sciences
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Since many nations have provided substantial funding for new e-social science and humanities investigations, there is now an opportunity for information scientists to adopt an enabling role for this new kind of research. Logically, a more information-centred environment should be more conducive to information science and to information scientists taking part in other types of research. In this article it is argued that information scientists can play a valuable role by evaluating new information sources in a meta-disciplinary context, developing tools and methods to analyse the data and, crucially, contributing to the prediction of the kinds of research questions that the data may usefully help address. It is argued that this is both an essential service for social science research and one that information science is uniquely placed to provide. A timely response to this challenge may also generate novel research problems within information science itself.