Understanding Research 2.0
from a Socio-technical
Perspective
Yuwei Lin
National Centre for e-Social Science
University of Manchester
http://www.ncess.ac.uk

Disclaimer
This paper is not about
 Dichotomy of Research 1.0 and Research
2.0
 Imposing an ideal version of Research 2.0
 Looking at the Research 2.0 activities from
a technology-oriented perspective

Outline
 Point of departure
 Research 2.0 and its meanings and
practices in different scientific disciplines
 Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 design patterns
 De Roure and Goble's 6 Principles of
software design to empower scientists
 MyExperiment development process
 Challenges emerging in the development of
Research 2.0 and possible socio-technical
solutions

Web 2.0
 Blogging
 Bookmarking
 File sharing (slides,
photos, videos, tags)
 Podcasting
 Social networking
 Co-authoring (wiki)
http://web2logo.com/

The World of the Web 2
 Communities
 Connected
and networked
 Shared
resources
 Collective
intelligence
 Wisdom of the
crowds

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SciVee.tv

New kinds of data and
new kinds of platforms
Social scientists:
 analysing Facebook messages, twitter
messages, blog entries
 understanding how Wikipedia is co-
developed
 exploring how YouTube and SlideShare
can be used for disseminating scientific
publications
 how Second Life can be used for teaching

Open Access and Open Data
 Open access journals
 Open data:
Ordance Survey data is not free/openly
accessible.
-> Open Street Map (Open Geo Data)
sourcing crowd wisdom
-> MapTube – developed by UCL Centre
for Spatial Analysis (NCeSS Geographic
Virtual Urban Environments node)
Go voting at
http://www.maptube.org/congestion/

Congestion Charge

Science 2.0 / Academia 2.0
Nature
Publishing Elsevier B.V.
Group
DELL & COLLEXIS
(LinkedIn-like)

O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Design Patterns
1. The Long Tail
2. Data is the Next Intel Inside
3. Users Add Value
4. Network Effects by Default
5. Some Rights Reserved
6. The Perpetual Beta
7. Cooperate, Don't Control
8. Software Above the Level of a Single Device

myExperiment.org
myExperiment
currently has
1286 users, 109
groups, 500
workflows, 139
files and 40
packs
Open
Source
powered by

Workflows
This workflow loads
molecules from the
database and than
checks whether the
perception of the atom
types works or not. After
the extraction of the
database identifier from
all molecules which
caused problems during
this process will the
identifier be written to a
file.

Reuse, repurpose workflows
Use the local java
plugins and some
filtering operations to
fetch the comic strip
image from
http://xkcd.com/
Based on the
FetchDailyDilbert
workflow. I just
uploaded this
example so I can
play around with the
myexperiment api.

The Distributed Team
Develo
Devel per,
User, oper, PM,
Amsterdam Manch Southa
User, ester
Manch mptonUser,
Devel Manche
oper, ester ster
Manch Devel
ester oper,
Manch
ester

De Roure and Goble's
Six Principles
Of design for adoption
 Fit it, don't force change
 Jam today and more jam tomorrow
(incentives)
 Just in time and just enough (delivery)
 Act local, think global
 Enable users to add value (empowerment)
 Design for network effect (community)

De Roure and Goble's
Six Principles
Of user engagement
 Keep your friends close
 Embed users with developers and
developers with users
 Keep sight of the bigger picture
 Favours will be in your favour (trust
building)
 Know your users (rarely there is one kind of
users)
 Expect and anticipate change

Socio-Technical Issues in the
Development Process
 How to keep up with the fast-paced Web2.0
development? -> agile management and
development methods for a “Perpetual
Beta”
 How to involve users? User-centred? Who
are the users? How to draw the boundary?
Fostering existing Taverna user community
or building new communities?How if they
have different requirements?

Ethical issues
 Privacy and confidentiality
 Social networking websites usually offer the
features of personal profiles and online logs
of personal activities online.
 Fear of being watched and monitored and
screened.
 Socio-technical solutions: security
technology + awareness raising

Legal issues
 Intellectual Property Rights
 “Release early, release often”
(mantra of the open source
software community)? ->
Concerned over being copied
or scooped
 Contradicting commercial
interests if data is provided by
private firms
 Science Commons

Communication
 VRE cf. Face-to-face contact
 Behavioural change in a Web 2.0
environment
 Languages
 Trust
 Socio-technical solutions: a better
Graphical User Interface, Ajax, and
Communication Space for improving
human-computer interaction

Multi-disciplinarity
 How to improve mutual understandings in a
distributed and multidisciplinary environment?
 Different terminologies and epistemological
understandings (e.g, tagging and tag cloud)
 Data in different and incompatible formats
 Context and provenance
 Socio-technical solutions:
semantic web +
social annotation

Methodological Innovation
 Collaborative and distributed ways of
conducting research
 To reuse or not to reuse? - Trust building +
Decision making + Social networking
 Mutual shaping between technology and
academia
 A paradigm shift?

Developing a Research2.0 Site
 Research powered by Web 2.0 technologies
for multidisciplinary collaboration,
maintaining relationships
 Sharing, depositing, browsing, organising,
annotating, reusing, recreating resources
(e.g., data, tools, publications, experiences)
in a virtual environment
 Research 2.0 – social networking sites for
scientists?

Research 2.0(?)
 “[...] I am not sure we are building a full social
networking site -- we are building a social
curation site.”
 “One of the things that makes myExperiment a
quot;virtual research environmentquot; rather than a
social networking site is that it has support for
the particular research objects that people are
using - we've focused on workflows and
experiment plans just now.“

Future Research
 Contexualising 'Research 2.0' is important –
how Research 2.0 is perceived, adopted and
practised for conducting what kind of work
 How skills and knowledge are enacted in situ
 How this supposedly democratic and
seamless integration of distributed scientific
work affects academic identities and shapes
the social organisation of science.
 Whether e-Science practices can be easily
translated across boundaries.

Thank you for your attention.
Yuwei Lin
National Centre for e-Social Science
University of Manchester
http://www.ncess.ac.uk