Tobias Escher at the OII

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the Doctoral Colloquium of the 3rd Annual e-Social Science conference in Ann Arbour (Michigan). Within the vast array of topics covered in the presentations (as one expression of the diversity of approaches to e-Social Science) I saw some pretty interesting research so here a selection:

Anna Barford talked a bit about her recent work with Worldmapper which aims to represent the world map as you’ve never seen it as each country is grown or shrunk to its relative size according to some measure, in this example for example Internet users. As you can see, Africa basically does not exist on this map of the world…

Christian Castle just finished his PhD developing an agent-based simulation of how pedestrians move in the currently built King’s Cross tube station(s) in order to find out how people could be evacuated quickly in case of an emergency.

Cory Knobel was my esteemed co-chair on the student volunteer program for the conference and he should get a price simply for having the most creative titles: Apart from having a website called “Scholar Warrior” he talked about “Cyberinfrastructure and OEP Choreography”. It is hard stuff but basically he tries to find ways to help researchers from different disciplines overcome their problems in communicating and collaborating with each other due to their different backgrounds and understandings. For everybody having been working on an interdisciplinary project, this is a big issue and it is important for e-Social Science as a lot of it actually requires co-operation across various disciplines.

For the first time in my life I also had to prepare a poster which is available for download and summarizes the current state of my research in a hopefully aesthetically pleasing way. I should add my thanks to the National Science Foundation for actually paying the whole trip!

So, now the crucial question: What is e-Social Science? The answer is: depends on you, really. Even at this conference there were several different definitions. For some it is basically to apply ever more powerful technology to crunch problems, following on from e-Science. Therefore it is no wonder that in the US e-Social Science is called cyberinfrastructure. For others it is more a new way of doing social science, maybe by using new tools or by looking at novel sources of data. I certainly belong to the latter camp. Obviously the borders can be fluent but the main distinction is whether you get excited if people talk about tera and petaflop computers or whether you ask yourself what to do with ever more computing power if you do not even know how to put together some sound research that helps explain a little bit about the Internet/information/network society.