Alex Voss

Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications

Sharing research resources of different kinds, in new ways, and on an increasing scale, is a central element of the unfolding e-Research vision. Web 2.0 is seen as providing the technical platform to enable these new forms of scholarly communications. We report findings from a study of the use of Web 2.0 services by UK researchers and their use in novel forms of scholarly communication. We document the contours of adoption, the barriers and enablers, and the dynamics of innovation in Web services and scholarly practices. We conclude by considering the steps that different stakeholders might take to encourage greater experimentation and uptake.

Reading the riots on Twitter: methodological innovation for the analysis of big data

For social scientists, the widespread adoption of social media presents both an opportunity and a challenge. Data that can shed light on people’s habits, opinions and behaviour is available now on a scale never seen before, but this also means that it is impossible to analyse using conventional methodologies and tools. This article represents an experiment in applying a computationally assisted methodology to the analysis of a large corpus of tweets sent during the August 2011 riots in England.

Collaboration and Trust in Healthcare Innovation: The eDiaMoND Case Study

This paper presents findings from an investigation into requirements for collaboration in e-Science in the context of eDiaMoND, a Grid-enabled prototype system intended in part to support breast cancer screening. Detailed studies based on ethnographic fieldwork reveal the importance of accountability and visibility of work for trust and for the various forms of ‘practical ethical action’ in which clinicians are seen to routinely engage in this setting. We discuss the implications of our findings, specifically for the prospect of using distributed screening to make more effective use of scarce clinical skills and, more generally, for realising the Grid’s potential for sharing data within and across institutions. Understanding how to afford trust and to provide adequate support for ethical concerns relating to the handling of sensitive data is a particular challenge for e-Health systems and for e-Science in general. Future e-Health and e-Science systems will need to be compatible with the ways in which trust is achieved, and practical ethical actions are realised and embedded within work practices.

Supporting informality: team working and integrated care records

This paper reports findings from an ethnographic study of the work of Adult and Care of the Elderly Community Mental Health Teams in the context of the deployment of an Electronic Medical Record. Our findings highlight the importance of informal discussions and provisional judgments as part of the process by which teams achieve consensual clinical management decisions over time. We show how paper-based documentation supports this collaborative work by affording both the revision of preliminary clinical management options and the accretion of contributions by team members with different clinical perspectives and expertise. Finally, we consider the implications both for teamwork and the Integrated Care Record (ICR) as clinical documentation becomes increasingly held and distributed electronically.

Reading the riots : what were the police doing on Twitter?

The widespread adoption of new forms of digital communication platforms such as micro-blogging sites presents both an opportunity and a challenge for researchers interested in understanding peoples attitudes and behaviours, especially in the context of unfolding crises and the need for government agencies such as the police to inform the public and act swiftly to ensure public order and safety. In this paper, we use a study of a recent public order crisis in England to explore how the police, other organisations and individuals used Twitter as they responded to this event.

Virtual research environments in scholarly work and communications

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implications of the emergence of virtual research environments (VREs) and related e‐research tools for scholarly work and communications processes.Design/methodology/approach – The concepts of VREs and of e‐research more generally are introduced and relevant literature is reviewed. On this basis, the authors discuss the developing role they play in research practices across a number of disciplines and how scholarly communication is beginning to evolve in response to the opportunities these new tools open up and the challenges they raise.Findings – Virtual research environments are beginning to change the ways in which researchers go about their work and how they communicate with each other and with other stakeholders such as publishers and service providers. The changes are driven by the changing landscape of data production, curation and (re‐)use, by new scientific methods, by changes in technology supply and the increasingly interdisciplinary nat...

Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination: A collaborative response

In this paper, we reflect on the disciplinary contours of contemporary sociology, and social science more generally, in the age of ‘big and broad’ social data. Our aim is to suggest how sociology and social sciences may respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by this ‘data deluge’ in ways that are innovative yet sensitive to the social and ethical life of data and methods. We begin by reviewing relevant contemporary methodological debates and consider how they relate to the emergence of big and broad social data as a product, reflexive artefact and organizational feature of emerging global digital society. We then explore the challenges and opportunities afforded to social science through the widespread adoption of a new generation of distributed, digital technologies and the gathering momentum of the open data movement, grounding our observations in the work of the Collaborative Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) project. In conclusion, we argue that these challenges and opportunities motivate a renewed interest in the programme for a ‘public sociology’, characterized by the co-production of social scientific knowledge involving a broad range of actors and publics.

'Repairing' the machine: a case study of the evaluation of computer-aided detection tools in breast screening

In this paper, we consider the problems of introducing computer-based tools into collaborative processes, arguing that such an introduction must attend to the sociality of work if it is not to impact negatively upon the work that they are intended to support. To ground our arguments, we present findings from an ethnomethologically-informed ethnographic study carried out in the context of the clinical trial of a computer-based aid in medical work. Our findings highlight the problematic nature of traditional clinical trials for evaluating healthcare technologies, precisely because such trials fail to grasp the situated, social and collaborative dimensions of medical work.

Agile Project Management: A Case Study of a Virtual Research Environment Development Project

In this paper we use a case study of a project to create a Web 2.0-based, Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for researchers to share digital resources in order to reflect on the principles and practices for embedding eResearch applications within user communities. In particular, we focus on the software development methodologies and project management techniques adopted by the project team in order to ensure that the project remained responsive to changing user requirements without compromising their capacity to keep the project ‘on track’, i.e. meeting the goals declared in the project proposal within budget and on time. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we describe how the project team, whose members are distributed across multiple sites (and often mobile), exploit a repertoire of coordination mechanisms, communication modes and tools, artefacts and structuring devices as they seek to establish the orderly running of the project while following an agile, user-centred development approach.

Achieving Dependability in the Configuration, Integration and Testing of Healthcare Technologies

This paper presents two case studies, which highlight the practical work involved in developing and deploying dependable healthcare systems. It shows how dependability is a thoroughgoingly practical, contexted achievement. We show how dependability is an outcome of the reasoning and argumentation processes that stakeholders engage in, in situations such as design and testing. What becomes relevant during these interactions stands as the dependability criteria that must be achieved. Furthermore, we examine the way in which different dependability criteria need to be managed, and even relatively prioritised, before finally discussing the types of work this provokes at the boundaries of organisations, particularly when integrating work and technologies.