Summary

• Themes
• Useful tools
• Truths and Consequences - Truths view 2
• Final Topics

• Background
  • Introduction: Configuring Anthropology
  • What is e-Social Science?

Some results from the workshop

• Podcasts
• Use Cases
• Further Work
• Workshop Conclusions
• Workshop Report

ESRC/NSF Sponsored Special Activity:

Agenda-setting Symposium to explore Anthropological Applications and Development of e-Science/ CyberInfrastructure

Michael Fischer (Kent), H. Russell Bernard (Florida), David Zeitlyn (Kent)

For the past few years a funding priority has been established labelled e-Science in the UK and Cyberinfrastructure in the USA. e-Science has been described in many ways, but basically refers to capabilities emerging from shared networked infrastructure relating to computation, storage and communication. More succinctly, the development of shared/common computational resources for research and teaching. The e-Science community tends to thing of this in terms of ‘big iron’ and fast networks. We have extended the idea asynchronously to the establishment of standards and software that facilitate collaboration on and off line.

The workshop brings together a group of colleagues from the US and the UK to discuss the requirements of anthropology for support in systematic data collection, data analysis, and data sharing. Participants are Janet Bagg (Kent), H. Russell Bernard (Florida), Sukaina Bharwani (Stockholm Environment Institute), Christine Eagle (Kent), Michael Fischer (Kent), David Henig (Durham), Aryeh Jacobsohn (Florida), Hugh Jarvis (Buffalo), Larry Kuznar (IPFW), Bert Little (Tarleton), Stephen Lyon (Durham), Laura McNamara (Sandia Labs), Simon Platten (Kent), Dwight Read (UCLA), Nick Ryan (Kent), Susan Squires (Sun Microsystems), Sonia Vougioukalou (Kent) and David Zeitlyn (Kent).

We will discuss how to implement available technology in service to these goals and suggest priorities for the development of new technology, particularly web-based solutions to the problems of data collection, analysis, and sharing.

We see the main purpose of the workshop is to realistically talk out where we are in Anthropology, where we would like things to go (at least a substantial thread in the discipline), and some practical things that we can do to help achieve this, not focusing on the computing, but on methods and theory - and then what we can do with respect to developing cyberinfrastucture to support this and attract other anthropologists (e.g. tools that diminish some of the technical entry barriers). We think that if we can arrive at concrete concepts (i.e. research proposal abstracts) that we can help fund a great deal of these over the next decade from the UK and Europe sources.

The workshop is co-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the National Science Foundation (USA).

See Agenda, Background and other items in the left menu for more information.