P. Wouters (replaced by A. Scharnhorst)
This paper presents the goals and theoretical underpinning of a new programme in e-social science in the Netherlands. Recent transformations in communication and information exchange have created new opportunities for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. It is not self-evident, however, in what ways scholars can best use these possibilities while maintaining and further developing their specific roles in academia and society. This is the rationale of a new national programme in the Netherlands, The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, hosted by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. It aims to support researchers in the social sciences and humanities in the creation of new scholarly practices, termed e-research, as well as in their reflection on e-research in relation to the development of their fields. A core feature of the Virtual Knowledge Studio is the integration of design and analysis in a close cooperation between social scientists, humanities researchers, information technology experts and information scientists. This integrated approach should provide insight in the way e-research can contribute to new research questions and methods in the humanities and social sciences.
The Virtual Knowledge Studio has the following goals:
to contribute to the design and conceptualisation of novel scholarly practices in the humanities and social sciences
to support scholars in their experimental play with new ways of doing research and emerging forms of collaboration and communication
to facilitate the travel of new methods, practices, resources and techniques across different disciplines
to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of knowledge creation.
Thus, the new programme combines analysis of scholarly practices with design of new ways of doing e-research. A systematic and critical interrogation of the potential of e-research paradigms and methodologies for the social sciences and humanities has been hampered by disciplinary boundaries between fields, by a relative lack of resources and research infrastructures, and by the dominance of particular computational approaches in the world of e-science. The Studio will address these problems by: demonstrating and exploring the potential of additional, non-computational as well as computational, ways of doing e-research; making disciplinary boundaries more permeable for new scholarly practices; and pooling resources that are available to the scholarly communities in the Netherlands and abroad.
Because the research projects in the Studio will not be developed for but with scholars in the humanities and social sciences, we expect that the lessons learned in this research programme will have a lasting effect on academia in the Netherlands and abroad. Each research project will result in contributions to the pool of research resources in the form of scientific and technical publications, research methodologies and techniques, software tools, organisational protocols, or best practice manuals, and freely downloadable data and tools. The Studio maintains two forms of long-term collaborative relationships with researchers in the humanities and social sciences: partnerships and collaboratories. These are supported by a suite of Studio web sites2, which will develop into a portal on e-research in the humanities and social sciences.
1 This work has been developed in close collaboration with Anne Beaulieu, Jenny Fry, Iina Hellsten, Matt Ratto, Andrea Scharnhorst, and Katie Vann.
2 The Studio will occupy the subdomain “virtualknowledgestudio” in the following domains: nl, be, org, info, net, biz, and com.
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