I'm not surprised by the definition of science as the statistical study of relationships between variables. Lots of academics in the social sciences define it so. But that doesn't make it a good definition. Even the kind of scientists that variable analysts in the social sciences look up to as role models--those in biology, chemistry and particularly physics--do not restrict themselves to statistical methods for the investigation of causal relationships. And more than a little of the sociology of science literature indicates that scientists of many stripes often observe their definition of science in the breach. Indeed, definitions of science aren't always that useful for describing science, often because they are really created to perform political "boundary work" that denies some people the scarce resources available to "scientists" (whatever they are) by such entities as universities, grant agencies, etc. On Jan 14, 2008, at 5:15 PM, Denise N. Rall wrote:
Dear Air-ers -
While I come late to this topic, I concur with Nick that the e-science can be misleading - as I indicated forcefully to Sally Wyatt at the e-Science/e-Research roundtable in Vancouver.
e-Science suggests that internet research is answerable to the scientific method (disproving the null hypothesis). Some e-Research does that, much does not.
And before folks go crazy with that, social science has frequently employed the scientific method, particularly in psychological studies. Our understanding of the discipline, social science, employs the term science as Wissenschaft, or a generalised sense of knowledge, as in what can be discovered or known about a given topic.
In that sense, e-Social Science can still describe a domain of knowledge much more comfortably than e-Science. One would have to seriously re-work the word science, as was attempted by Gibbons et al. in 1994. Some may feel they were successful, I do not. No lesser scholar than Bruno Latour said, "science is the hard object, the more we seek to learn about it, the more it resists our efforts" (quote from memory, seminar in Said School of Business, Oxford, "Four + one uncertainties in social science" in 2002.
The articulation of e-Research was suggested by a 2005 seminar of Christine Borgmann speaking to the OII. The link is: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/details.cfm?id=91
I know other worthy scholars are working on this topic, and despite the hard work of Michael Nentwich, (2003) I think that Nick and others will stay with e-Research out of necessity, perhaps. But I applaud their efforts in this area.
Cheers, Denise
Denise N. Rall, PhD Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Tues: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/ Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html
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