The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and
Social Sciences @ the Royal Netherlands Academy of
Arts and Sciences
Paul Wouters
Networked Research and Digital Information (Nerdi)
NIWI-KNAW
Amsterdam
8 November/14 December 2004
1
Summary
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 new KNAW programme, The
Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, aims to support researchers
in the humanities and social sciences in the Netherlands in the creation of new scholarly
practices, termed here 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.
Mission
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.
The humanities and social sciences are no backwater with respect to e-research. This is
demonstrated by a host of new initiatives in the areas of digitisation, Web based repositories
and archives, digital libraries, and collaboratories, in the Netherlands as well as abroad. A
number of fields have undergone radical transformations through the use of novel analytical
techniques and related shifts in research paradigms. Yet, a systematic and critical
interrogation of the potential of e-research paradigms and methodologies for the humanities
and social sciences is 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
 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. 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
sites1, which will develop into a portal on e-research in the humanities and social sciences.
The Studio will occupy the subdomain “virtualknowledgestudio” in the following domains: nl, be,
org, info, net, biz, and com.
1
2
The Studio will organise a yearly Summerschool, seminars and workshops to involve new
generations of researchers and students (PhD and Research Masters).
Problem formulation
The creation of knowledge is the research object of the Virtual Knowledge Studio. In the
context of e-research, it is tempting to focus on the digital technologies. Such an approach
would, however, ignore the epistemic dimension of knowledge practices. Scholarly and
scientific developments are intellectually codified, so that they are relatively resistant to
external steering, but not to technological change. The study of the interaction between users,
designers and technological artefacts is the topic of a number of well-established fields of
research: humanities computing, social informatics, technology studies, human computer
interaction, computer supported cooperative work, and innovation studies. Although the
researchers at the Studio will be able to draw upon this knowledge, its research agenda will
not be limited to these user-oriented paradigms.
The central problem in the development of e-research is not the technology, nor the role of the
user in technological environments, but the cultural and historical specificity of knowledge
production in the new technologically mediated contexts. This is the reason the Studio puts
knowledge creation centre stage. The central research question of the Studio is how it is
possible to develop novel ways of knowledge creation in the humanities and social sciences
by utilizing and adapting e-research concepts, instruments and ways of working. This
includes the epistemic and cultural effects of e-research on the humanities and social sciences.
Research themes
The Studio will concentrate its work in three research themes:
 Data and Digital Information: the role of data, digital information and data standards
in scholarly research
 Networked Research: novel forms of collaboration and communication in the
humanities and social sciences
 Virtual Institutions: the emergence and dynamics of new institutional arrangements in
e-research.
Data and digital information play complex roles in research in the humanities and social
sciences. This creates particular challenges for the application of e-research methods and
techniques, especially if complex and fuzzy data sets are involved (eg. visual data, music,
complex texts). The increased availability of digital resources, data and collections, partly the
result of digitisation of cultural heritage and of administrative databases, affects the very core
of humanities and social science research by changing existing research objects and creating
new ones. The theme Data and Digital Information will address the question of which
characteristics these new research objects will and should have, and how they may
reconfigure scholarly research. What type of questions will be foregrounded and which
questions may become less central? Which assumptions are built into the new epistemic
objects and how may they influence the boundaries between scientific specialties? We will
also pay attention to the specificity of qualitative data. They are often more fuzzy and less
easy to standardise. The Studio research will strive to complement existing research into
scientific and scholarly data and data standards by focusing on the epistemic and social role of
data and data sources in the humanities and social sciences. Additional attention will be given
to issues of data sharing and the specific problems related to the use of Web data in scholarly
work.
The humanities and social sciences are a particularly interesting area to study the
development of scientific and scholarly collaboration because the variation of forms of
3
collaboration and non-collaboration is so huge. Virtually every possible configuration is
practiced in one field or another. The Studio research in the theme Networked Research will
focus on the way the new media interact with forms of collaboration and communication. It
moreover aims to support scholars with building new forms of collaboration (eg.
collaboratories) and communication (eg. new Web site conceptions). A key issue concerns the
ways the dynamics of collaboration are affected by mediation by digital communication
networks. How does the technological possibility intersect with traditional human needs for
communication? The implications of collaborative work for the resulting knowledge products
will also be studied. How are forms of knowledge affected by the way they need to be
communicated? Which types of intellectual work seem amenable to virtualisation and
digitisation?
In e-research, digital infrastructures and emergent institutions play a crucial role.
Collaboratories, research infrastructures or the lack thereof, digital libraries, digital
repositories and collections, and new venues for scholarly publication directly influence the
extent to which scholars in the humanities and social sciences can effectively make use of
new research possibilities. Given the recent emergence of e-research, the consequences of the
accompanying institutional rearrangement is not yet well understood. The theme Virtual
Institutions will explore which institutional arrangements are conducive to the humanities and
social sciences. This should help to understand the specificities of institution building in the
humanities and social sciences. Important questions are also: how does the textual nature of
digital infrastructures affect textual practices of researchers and scholars? How does
infrastructure sustain various levels of formalisation and circulation of knowledge and
information? How universities and research institutes have organised their systems of quality
control and accountability may have a profound effect on knowledge creation because of its
impact on the criteria of scientific and scholarly quality and integrity. What are the
implications of new e-research information infrastructures for regimes of quality control in
universities and research institutes?
Methodological foci
The Studio will develop methodological innovation of the study of e-research. Of course, this
should be relevant to other researchers in the humanities and social sciences as well. The
Studio focuses on those methodologies that (1) are not yet well covered by methodologists in
social sciences and humanities at the universities, and (2) are particularly relevant for the
study of scientific and scholarly knowledge practices. Three methodological foci will be given
priority in the first three years of the Studio:
 Virtual Ethnography
 Web Archiving for scholarly research
 Simulation in e-research.
Virtual ethnography extends the notions of field and ethnographic observation from the
exclusive study of co-present and face to face interactions, to a focus on mediated and
distributed interactions. The key research question in the Virtual Ethnography focus will be
how ethnography can be pursued in mediated settings. This research should establish which
aspects of ethnographic research are challenged in particular in the shift from face to face
interaction to mediated digitised interaction. This will make clear how ethnography can be
conceived as a flexible practice, while remaining recognisable as a specific methodology.
More specific questions are which new concepts of “field” or “research site” are needed for
virtual ethnography, how virtual elements can be integrated in traditional fieldwork, and
which new ethical issues arise in the practice of virtual ethnography.
The Web Archiving focus will develop a new methodology for systematic, longitudinal
analysis of Web sites that are produced in the sciences and humanities. Presently there is no
4
clear way how to make Web data available for scholarly research. Libraries and archives are
now only beginning to develop concepts that enable the medium- and long-term archiving of
Web sites. The emphasis in this focus will be on the analysis of the Dutch and European
academic Web. The central question is which specifications and analytical tools are needed
for the extraction of meaningful data sets for research in the humanities and social sciences
from the flood of raw Web data.
The aim of the research in the methodological focus Simulation is to develop further expertise
in simulations and systematic reflection on the heuristic value of modelling and simulation for
theory building in the social sciences and humanities. The extended use of data visualisation
technologies and virtual reality techniques in simulation research methods is often seen as one
of the hallmarks of e-science. The respecification of general simulation models for research
questions in the social sciences and humanities will be central in this focus. Both agent-based
and network-oriented models and simulations will be included. The study of the heuristic and
epistemic value of modelling and simulating as a research strategy in both the humanities (eg.
language variation processes) and social sciences (eg. social selection) is intrinsic part of this
respecification.
Theory
The empirical research in the Studio will address a number of theoretical questions that
pertain to the development of e-research in the humanities and social sciences. The most
important questions are:
 does e-research lead us to redefine how we can understand the development of
scholarly cultures?
 how can we explain and understand diversity of mediated knowledge practices, for
example across disciplines and specialties?
 what roles do digital epistemic objects (eg. data, metadata, analytical tools, digital
libraries) play in knowledge creation?
 how can we use these digital epistemic objects to reformulate specific informatics
problems in the humanities and social sciences in generic terms of information
science, and vice versa?
 do we need to rethink the conceptualisation of scientific labour and markets to
understand the dynamics of e-research practices?
 does the extra connectivity of e-research lead to new forms of complex relationships
in social structures and does this lead to new understandings of complex systems?
 does the operationalisation of concepts of agency, institution, textuality and
infrastructure need to be revised in order to study mediation in e-research?
Organisation
Three modes of enquiry are central in the Studio: thinking, observing and playing. These
three metaphors capture the interplay we expect between thorough analysis and more
experimental, playful design of new tools and practices. The design of new tools is never only
a technical job. Opening up new possibilities for humanities and social science scholars with
the help of advanced networked information and communication technologies implicates the
rethinking of old research questions, questioning established research methods and
techniques, and asks for the intellectual courage to try out new forms of scholarly work. This
is why we emphasise that the Studio will not in the first place help design new tools but rather
new scholarly practices.
To realise its dual mission of increasing our understanding of e-humanities and e-social
science, and of supporting scholars to make use of e-research, the Studio has two interrelated
5
modules: the Analytic Centre (AC) and the Construction Platform (CP). These facilitate longterm research based on a clear intellectual agenda combined with flexible short-term projects
created in response to the changing needs of researchers at universities and research institutes.
All projects in the CP result from, and are led by, partnerships with external research groups.
Whereas the CP helps create new epistemic objects and practices in the humanities and social
sciences, both inside and outside of the Studio, the AC studies this process. To facilitate this,
the AC is responsible for the creation and maintenance of the Studio’s inhouse knowledge
database.
The Studio will be supervised by a scientific advisory board which has two roles: to oversee
the scientific quality of the research program and to promote the anchoring of the Studio in
the Dutch humanities and social science communities, and in relevant audiences outside of
academia. The Studio should be housed in a research oriented environment. The core budget
of the Studio is 900 k€ per annum. Additional external funding is expected to increase the
Studio budget considerably.
6
Baccalaureus
En voorwaarts schrijd ik, zelfverrukt en vlug;
Vóór mij het licht, het duister in de rug.
Mephistopheles
Origineel! Verdwijn in al uw pracht!
Hoe diep zou u het inzicht krenken:
Wie kan iets zots, wie iets verstandigs denken
Dat niet voorheen reeds werd bedacht?2
Introduction
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.
In May 2004, the KNAW published a call for proposals for a research programme aimed at
stimulating the development of e-science in the humanities and social sciences (KNAW
2004). The new program is part of a broader KNAW policy “aiming at significant advances in
the effective use of ICT in the humanities and social sciences”. This new policy includes
actions on different levels: principles of open access to research output and data, investments
in ICT infrastructure, and the establishment of data archiving networked services (jointly with
the Netherlands Research Council NWO). With this new e-science research program, the
KNAW seeks to “fuel the development of this emerging field in the Netherlands and achieve
a leading position internationally”.
We wish to realise these goals by creating The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities
and Social Sciences, which is both a novel multidisciplinary research programme with
intellectual merits of its own, and a new intellectual and technological infrastructure for the
communities of researchers and scholars in the humanities and social sciences. The Studio
aims to support researchers in the humanities and social sciences in the Netherlands in the
creation of new scholarly practices, termed here e-research, as well as in their reflection on eresearch in relation to the development of their fields.
This programme builds upon decades of research in the humanities, social sciences,
information science, and science & technology studies about new forms of knowledge
creation. It also elaborates on the results of the current NIWI-KNAW research programme,
“Networked Research and Digital Information 2001-2005”. Not only has this programme led
to a better understanding of the informational turn in academic research, it has also made
clear that the role of the new media and of information and communication technologies in
the creation of scholarly and scientific knowledge is indeed a problematic relevant, interesting
and complex enough to merit the focused attention of a multi-disciplinary research program.
In efforts to study these topics, the humanities and social sciences are often underrepresented.
Attention tends to follow the flow of funding and most research in science & technology
studies has therefore been conducted on the physical and natural sciences. We see the
decision to focus a new research program on the humanities and social sciences as a welcome
2
J. W. von Goethe, Faust Twee, Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam, 1982 (1949), Trans. N. van
Suchtelen, 6805- 6810 (p. 288). Translation: //Baccalaureus: I, quite free, as my spirit cites, / Happily
following my inner light, / And speeding on, in delight, / Darkness behind: and all before me, bright. /
Mephistopheles: Go forth in splendour, you primal man! - / How could insight harm you, ever: / Who
can think of stupid things or clever, That past ages didn’t, long ago, understand. // Poetry in
Translation, A. S. Kline’s Online Literature Archive http://www.tonykline.co.uk/
7
opportunity to at least partly redress this imbalance and to put the practices and problems of
researchers in the humanities and social sciences squarely central. We also see it as an
opportunity to strengthen the ties between researchers of the humanities and social sciences
and researchers in those fields.
Mission
Goals
According to the KNAW-call, the programme needs to address a dual mission: (i) “to
stimulate the development of e-science in the humanities and social sciences”, and (ii) “to
study the effects of e-science on the practice, activity and quality of research in those fields”.
The call stipulated that this mission is to be pursued “by an integrated program of cooperative
research between the humanities, social sciences and information sciences”. 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. The programme is integrated at all levels: its goal and mission, its
research projects, its internal peer review, its funding acquisition, its collaboration and
publication policies and its data management. This does not mean that disciplinary differences
will become invisible. On the contrary, we rather expect that these distinctions will be
productive and contribute to that creative tension which is the hallmark of innovative research
and scholarship. This integrated approach should thereby provide insight in the way eresearch 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.
These goals are intimately connected, one cannot be reached without the other. Moreover,
they are not only relevant to the humanities and social sciences but to the development of and reflection on – present-day knowledge societies.
What is the matter with e-research?
e-Science is generally defined as the combination of three different developments: the sharing
of computational resources, distributed access to massive datasets, and the use of digital
platforms for collaboration and communication (Hey and Trefethen 2002; Nentwich 2003).
The precise definition varies between the UK, the US and the Netherlands, which inter alia
illustrates the local nature of this type of global developments. Nevertheless, these three
elements are generally recurring in e-science projects and programmes. In the Dutch
initiatives of e-science, the e stands not in the first place for “electronic” but for
“enhancement”3. The core idea of the e-science movement (most of it still promise rather than
practice) is that knowledge production will be enhanced by the combination of pooled human
expertise, data and sources, and computational and visualisation tools. e-Science has become
a buzzword for funding large-scale facilities, especially in those research fields in which
3
See http://www.wtcw.nl/nl/projecten/eScience.pdf.
8
research is driven by huge high-technology research groups. The confrontation of this ideal of
enhanced knowledge creation with scholars in the humanities and social sciences has mostly
yet to begin. So far, the meeting is partly metaphorical, with the exception of facilities for
computationally or experimentally oriented social sciences and humanities (eg. in economics
and linguistics).
In this proposal we use the notion of e-research rather than e-science to indicate that it is not
a matter of importing e-science ways of working into the social sciences and humanities. The
humanities and social sciences will develop their own specific ways of integrating the use of
networked information and communication technologies (Bijker and Peperkamp 2002; Bijker,
Schurer et al. 2003; Boonstra, Breure et al. 2004; Kircz 2004). This does not have to mean
that the difference with natural sciences will become less important. Hence, the generic term
e-research is preferable over the notion of e-science.
The humanities and social sciences are no backwater with respect to e-research. For example,
archaeology has developed e-science ways of working in its combination of natural science
and humanities expertise, its use of sophisticated Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
software packages, and its use of expert systems in parts of its research and training. In the
field of linguistics, both corpus-based and experimental approaches have led to a
transformation of the study of language and the creation of sophisticated research
infrastructures. The cognitive sciences are an example of the confluence of natural sciences,
social sciences and humanities which drives them into a new experimental direction that relies
heavily on computer-based imaging techniques. Economists are interested in modelling and
simulation and develop fields like neuro-economics4. In sociology, computational research
seems to catch on again in the form of new research programmes aimed at, among others,
micro-simulations of households and agent-based modelling (Ahrweiler and Gilbert 1998).
Moreover, computerised social network analysis is a well-established tradition in sociology
(Wasserman and Faust 1994). Even in the more traditional fields, many researchers in the
humanities and social sciences are adept users of the most advanced tools they can get, as
long as the learning curve is not perceived as too steep.
The Studio in the humanities and social sciences
Yet, the implications of e-research for the humanities and social sciences are far from clear. A
systematic and critical interrogation of the potential of e-research paradigms and
methodologies for the humanities and social sciences 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
 pooling resources that are available to the scholarly communities in the Netherlands
and abroad.
The humanities and social sciences are not a unified set of knowledge practices, as is well
known. Methodologies and techniques do not travel easily from one field to another. This has
a direct bearing upon the development of e-research tools, practices, infrastructures and
institutions. For example, in fields like philosophy, art history or literature studies, scholars
Seminar series in History and Methodology of Economics, “Neuroscience and Economics:
what are the implications?”, Marcel Boumans, John Davis and Harro Maas, September 2004,
University of Amsterdam.
4
9
even may not be aware of e-science as relevant to them at all. The equipment of many
academic scholars with the tools and “play space” they need to independently assess the
merits of e-research has moreover been hindered. Lack of funding has decreased the space for
advanced instrumentation and support staff. Moreover, ICT has been standardised within the
paradigm of office automation and therefore lacks many features that would be useful for
scholarly work. In so far as ICT has been tailored to research needs, it has been based on
computational research and often assumes mathematical and programming skills on the part
of the researcher. In many fields scholars have different needs, such as the representation of
ill-defined data, analysis-oriented visualisation of manuscripts and multimedia sources, and
specific source-oriented analytical tools. These needs are often not met by standard
computational and mathematical analytic methods.
The meeting of e-research and the academic scholar is moreover problematic because it is far
from clear whether the present needs of the scholar can be met by e-research at all. Important
fields in the humanities and social sciences are characterised by a huge epistemic diversity; by
specific, sometimes person-bound, roles of the researcher; by the lack of consensus about the
research agenda in a host of specialties; by a relatively low-tech research environment (often
aggravated by the scarcity of university funding); by the specificity of writing and reading as
features of knowledge creation; and by a historically grounded and relatively large share of
solitary research practices (Becher 1989; Whitley 2000). In all these dimensions, many fields
seem ill-suited to become enthusiastic adopters of the e-science paradigm as it now stands. If
e-research should make sense to a variety of specialties in the humanities and social sciences,
new non-computational and computational paradigms of e-research need to be developed.
The Studio will therefore orient itself to a critical interrogation of the very notion of eresearch, by taking seriously the intellectual and social characteristics of the humanities and
social sciences and the implications of these characteristics for the hermeneutics of e-research
as a prospective intellectual and technical horizon. At the same time, existing knowledge
practices in the humanities and social sciences should not be taken for granted. There is ample
space for enhancement indeed (see for example the NWO programs focused on new research
practices in the humanities and social sciences (NWO 2000; NWO 2001; NWO 2001)). This
must in the end be enacted by the research communities themselves, which is why we wish to
engage them in the Studio. Advanced research projects and the discussion of these projects in
seminars and Summer Schools can play a catalytic role in this development by the
involvement of new generations of researchers and students (PhD and Research Masters).
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. 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.
This may be reinforced by the host of recent new initiatives in the areas of digitisation, Web
based repositories and archives, digital libraries, and collaboratories, in the Netherlands as
well as abroad. New programmes such as the Dutch national initiative DARE5 and the NWO
programme CATCH6 attest to this. Indeed, digitisation of the humanities has been on the
agenda for a number of years (NWO 2000). Recently, a consensus has emerged about the
need for a national data archive in the humanities and social sciences (DANS) (see for the
social sciences SWR 2003). This coincides with a rethinking of the social and cultural roles of
the humanities in the Netherlands (Bijker and Peperkamp 2002; NWO 2002) and abroad (eg.
Ang and Cassity 2004). The Studio will not duplicate these efforts. Its research will also not
try to take over the responsibility of R&D departments of data archives, repositories and
5
6
http://www.surf.nl/themas/index2.php?oid=18
http://www.nwo.nl/subsidiewijzer.nsf/pages/NWOP_66EUM7?Opendocument
10
academic and research libraries. To the extent that these R&D efforts will take more shape,
the Studio will take initiatives to cooperate in joint research projects on common themes. We
expect that these projects will focus on the role of data and data standards in scholarly work.
Complementary relationships also will be developed with scholars engaged in methological
research in social science and humanities university departments, and with research groups in
humanities computing. The Studio will not try to interfere with already well-established
methodological traditions and research programmes in Dutch universities. Monodisciplinary
methodology is the responsibility of the relevant research groups, not of the Studio. Rather,
the Studio will contribute to the exchange of methodologies between different research
traditions by creating an experimental space and repository of e-research related methods and
tools. In e-research it is sometimes less clear what a research method actually entails than in
traditional research contexts. For example, the difference between tools for communication
and tools for analysis may become blurred. This is especially true for collaborative analytical
and annotation tools, a niche area that may be worthwhile for the Studio researchers to
explore. This area is usually not yet covered in more traditional methodological research. The
Studio moreover aims to contribute to the methodological development of the study of eresearch itself. To this end, the Studio develops a concentrated research effort in three specific
methodological domains (see Methodological foci).
Research problem
Central question
The creation of knowledge as a social and cultural process is the research object of the Virtual
Knowledge Studio. In the context of e-research, it is tempting to focus on the digital
technologies. Such a singular approach would ignore, however, the epistemic dimension of
knowledge practices. Scholarly and scientific developments are intellectually codified, so that
they are relatively resistant to external steering (Van den Daele, Krohn and Weingart 1977;
Weingart 1974; (Whitley 2000), but not to technological change (Joerges and Shinn 2001).
The study of the interaction between users, designers and technological artefacts is the topic
of a number of well-established fields of research: humanities computing, social informatics,
technology studies, human computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, and
innovation studies. And although the researchers at the Studio will be able to draw upon this
knowledge, its research agenda should not be limited to these types of user-oriented
paradigms. The central problem in the development of e-research is not the technology, nor
the role of the user in technological environments, but the cultural and historical specificity of
knowledge production in the new technologically mediated contexts. This is the reason the
Studio puts knowledge creation centre stage.
The central research question of the Studio is how it is possible to develop novel ways of
knowledge creation in the humanities and social sciences by utilizing and adapting eresearch concepts, instruments and ways of working. This includes the epistemic and cultural
effects of e-research on the humanities and social sciences. In terms of e-research: are the
social sciences and humanities susceptible to enhancement and what would enhancement
mean for the nature and role of academic scholarship?
This approach contrasts with three more limited approaches:
 It is not in the first place a matter of changing the humanities and social sciences to
make them fit a particular model of large-scale, data oriented research
 It is not only a matter of creating information technologies that better fit the needs of
scholars in the humanities and social sciences
11

It is not simply a matter of responding to the perceived needs of scholars with new
tools, tailor-made software and research instruments.
All three aspects are part of the problem of e-research, and will provide important building
blocks of the Studio, but none of them are the central issue.
The central research question will be tackled by developing analysis and design in three
intellectual dimensions. The first dimension consists of the topical research themes, the
second dimension is the development of novel methodologies, and the third dimension is
theory development in the humanities and social sciences to further specify the research
question and its ramifications.
The first dimension of the Studio is the research theme to which a particular research project
belongs. In the first five years of the Studio, three themes will be studied:
 Data and Digital Information: the role of data, digital information and data standards
in scholarly research
 Networked Research: novel forms of collaboration and communication in the
humanities and social sciences
 Virtual Institutions: the emergence and dynamics of new institutional arrangements in
e-research.
The second dimension is methodological innovation of the study of e-research. Of course, this
should be relevant to other researchers in the humanities and social sciences as well. The
Studio focuses on those methodologies that (1) are not yet well covered by methodologists in
social sciences and humanities at the universities, and (2) are particularly relevant for the
study of scientific and scholarly knowledge practices. Three methodological foci will be given
priority in the first three years of the Studio:
 Virtual Ethnography
 Web Archiving for scholarly research
 Simulation in e-research.
The third dimension is the intellectual frame of reference for the research at the Studio. The
empirical research in the Studio will address a number of theoretical questions that pertain to
the development of e-research in the humanities and social sciences. Although we will focus
our theoretical work, the Studio will maintain theoretical plurality in its approach of eresearch phenomena. This is necessary since we cannot expect that e-research, being a part of
culture and of social reality, can ever be interpreted as a theoretically unified reality
(Wallerstein, Calestous et al. 1996). To better understand the dynamics and meaning of eresearch practices and infrastructures therefore means to converse in different theoretical
traditions. We need to be able to create “trading zones” (Galison and Stump 1996; Galison
1997) to make local connections between different theories. The most important questions
are:
 does e-research lead us to redefine how we can understand the development of
scholarly cultures?
 how can we explain and understand diversity of mediated knowledge practices, for
example across disciplines and specialties?
 what roles do digital epistemic objects play in knowledge creation, and how can we
use them to reformulate informatics problems in the humanities and social sciences?
 do we need to rethink the conceptualisation of scientific labour and markets to
understand the dynamics of e-research practices?
 does the extra connectivity of e-research lead to new forms of complex relationships
in social structures and does this lead to new understandings of complex systems?
 does the operationalisation of concepts of agency, institution, textuality and
infrastructure need to be revised in order to study mediation in e-research?
12
Research themes
Digital information and data
Digital information and data play complex roles in research in the humanities and social
sciences (SWR 2003; Arzberger, Schroeder et al. 2004; Boonstra, Breure et al. 2004). This
creates particular challenges for the application of e-research methods and techniques,
especially if complex and fuzzy data sets are involved (eg. visual data, music, complex texts).
The increased availability of digital resources, data and collections, partly the result of
digitisation of cultural heritage and of administrative databases, promises to facilitate more
possibilities for comparative research. There may be more scope for interdisciplinary research
that is based on the combination of data from very different types of sources. Questions that
until recently could only be dealt with in a speculative way may now be approached by dataoriented empirical research. Re-use of data may become more prominent (SWR 2003). The
capacity to process and visualise huge datasets is moreover expected to create additonial
opportunities for empirical research with the help of new computational research methods. In
short, both in the humanities and in the social sciences new objects of research, which we call
“epistemic objects” (Rheinberger 1997), will emerge. This development is parallel to the
creation of new experimental arrangements in e-science.
The research in this theme will address the question what the characteristics of these new
epistemic objects will and should have, and how they may reconfigure scholarly research.
What type of questions will be foregrounded and which questions may become less central?
Which assumptions are built into the new epistemic objects and how may they influence the
boundaries between scientific specialties? We will also pay attention to the specificity of
qualitative data. They are often more fuzzy and less easy to standardise. This also influences
the development of research traditions to share qualitative data for comparative (re)-analysis
(Wouters and Schröder 2003).
The Studio research will strive to complement existing research into scientific and scholarly
data and data standards by focusing on the epistemic and social role of data and data sources
in the humanities and social sciences. Purely technical research into data and meta-data
formats is the domain of expertise of computer and data science departments in the
universities. Where a joint effort seems fruitful, we will seek cooperative research with
research teams in information and computer science (eg. CWI and the Telematics Institute).
In the area of informatics for the humanities, we will seek collaboration with humanities
computing research groups in the Netherlands and abroad, and with the R&D departments of
data archives and repositories.
To provide a sharper focus on the particularities of data handling in the social sciences and
humanities (Hockey 2000; SWR 2003; Boonstra, Breure et al. 2004), the research in this
theme will maintain a firm comparative perspective with the natural and technical sciences.
This will also enable the Studio researchers to be alert to new developments in data science
and technology. For example, in those fields that have undertaken major digitisation projects,
how does e-research change the way data is conceptualised, handled and shared? And how do
disciplinary communities organise their work around digitised data, eg. do practices become
standardised or do field differences persist? In this respect, the comparison of the
development of data initiatives in the humanities with ‘data grids’ in the social sciences seems
relevant.
The data theme will also pay specific attention to the issue of data sharing and data sharing
policies. This research is based on the completed Nerdi projects on data sharing (Wouters
2000; Beaulieu 2003; Wouters and Schröder 2003; Arzberger, Schroeder et al. 2004). The
emergence of e-research creates specific tensions for data sharing, partly because it may no
longer be clear who has control over the data sets. Increased attention to data sharing, also in
13
the framework of the organisation of new data archives in the social sciences and humanities,
may create tensions with established research practices and routines that are often not oriented
to data sharing. The Studio will therefore not only study data sharing but also resistance to
data sharing.
The flood of Web data poses a new challenge to social science and cultural analysis which
cuts across the divide beteen quantitative and qualitative data. The Studio will organise a
Webometrics Collaboratory within the theme Data and Digital Information to enable the rapid
mobilisation of existing international expertise in this area.
The last decade has witnessed an increase in quantitative methods using Web data and in
sophisticated quantitative analyses of the structure of the Web and the internet (Ebeling and
Feistel 1990; Adamic 1999; Watts 1999; Albert and Barabasi 2002; Scharnhorst 2003). This
has even led to the establishment of a new field in the information sciences, “webometrics”
(Almind and Ingwersen 1997; Rousseau 1997; Boudourides, Sigrist et al. 1999; Björneborn
and Ingwersen 2001). Web data can be used to analyse the internet and the Web as a complex
information space in which communication patterns emerge and self-organise (Leydesdorff
2002). Webometrics can also be used to study the change of institutional structures (by means
of hyperlink analysis) and the emergence of new institutional structures and infrastructures.
Changes in scientific production and communication can be studied in so far as they can be
represented in Web based indicators. We expect that webometrics will also contribute to our
understanding of the emergence of new forms of Web based scientific communication and
collaboration, such as related to e-journals, collaboratories, online databases, file sharing and
collaborative simulations. Indicators developed on the basis of Web data can have both an
evaluative and descriptive role. In this collaboratory, they should primarily provide insights in
the nature of knowledge production in e-research.
The research in this theme builds further on recent European research projects in
webometrics, in particular on WISER7 and EICSTES8. It will extend the research questions in
these projects toward a “reflexive webometrics”. It aims to develop novel methods for
automated data gathering (with open source web crawlers, commercial software, Web page
annotation schemes, and search engine tools) and to contribute to the development of
professional standards to observe the dynamic Web. We expect that this will lead to analytic
tools that can be used by other researchers in the social sciences and humanities without the
need for additional programming expertise (Thelwall 2001; Thelwall 2002). We expect that
these methods will be particularly successful if they are intimately related to qualitative and
quantitative content analysis of Web phenomena. For instance, hyperlink network analysis
has shown interesting topological features in graph theory. It is, however, still far from clear
how these graph theoretical structures can be interpreted. An important aspect of future
research in webometrics will be the development of dynamic observation based on the selforganizing and fluid nature of the web as a medium. New insights of complexity theory into
the description of complex structures will have to be taken into account in this research.
Networked Research
e-Research is not only about data, it is also about collaboration. It is expected to facilitate new
forms of large-scale collaboration and more collaboration across the boundaries of disciplines
and specialties (Finholt 2002; Walsh and Maloney 2002; Berman, Fox et al. 2003). Many escience pilots are moreover the fruit of intense cooperation between academia and industry.
7
8
http://www.webindicators.org/
http://www.eicstes.org/
14
The humanities and social sciences are a particularly interesting area to study the
development of scientific and scholarly collaboration because the variation of forms of
collaboration and non-collaboration is so huge (Fry 2003b). Virtually every possible
configuration is practiced in one field or another. The spectrum goes from the traditional, lone
scholar working in a decidedly low-tech environment to the tight industrially organised group
in which each PhD student and postdoc solves a particular problem. This means that
comparative fieldwork in the humanities and social sciences is very rewarding. The same is
true for the forms in which scholars and researchers choose to communicate their work and
results to larger audiences. The Studio research in this theme will focus on the way the new
media interact with forms of collaboration and communication. It moreover aims to support
them with building new forms of collaboration (eg. collaboratories) and communication (eg.
new Web site conceptions).
A key issue concerns the ways the dynamics of collaboration are affected by mediation by
new media and digital networks. How does the technological possibility intersect with
traditional human need for communication? The implications of collaborative work for the
resulting knowledge products will also be studied. Are forms of knowledge affected by the
way they need to be communicated? Which types of intellectual work seem amenable to
virtualisation and digitisation? How does audience variation across disciplines shape
collaborative practices and the integration of e-research? Does the organisation of research
change, as units within a field become more dependent or more specialised? An interesting
question is in what ways the dynamics of very large-scale collaboration differs from more
modest networks and how this affects the development of scientific collaboration in the
humanities and social sciences. An important question is also how e-research shapes the
traditional boundary between informal and formal communication across fields. Answers to
these questions affect the way we think about the design of tools for collaboration. This is for
example relevant to the construction of collaborative analytic instruments.
Within this theme, the use of the Web as means of representation and collaboration will be a
specific focus. This will intersect with the work in the methodological focus on Web
archiving. The creation and dynamics of collaboratories will be a priority within this theme.
The collaboratories of the Studio themselves will be monitored in order to draw lessons about
their dynamics.
Virtual Institutions
In e-research, digital infrastructures and emergent institutions play a crucial role (Bowker and
Star 1999). Collaboratories, research infrastructures or the lack thereof, digital libraries,
digital repositories and collections, and new venues for scholarly publication directly
influence the extent to which scholars in the humanities and social sciences can effectively
make use of new research possibilities. Given the recent emergence of e-research, the
consequences of the accompanying institutional rearrangement are not yet well understood. It
is therefore relevant to understand the specificities of institution building in the humanities
and social sciences. The theme Virtual Institutions will explore which institutional
arrangements are conducive to the humanities and social sciences.
Important questions are how textual infrastructures affect the textual practices of researchers
and scholars. Does it make a difference that digital infrastructures are also forms of writing?
Standardisation and ordering of these infrastructures, such as computer interoperability or
database standards, have a tremendous impact on the work of scholars. To what extent can
they influence these processes if they are implemented at a higher level of organisation (such
as the university or a data repository)? For example, how does infrastructure sustain various
levels of formalisation and circulation of knowledge and information?
15
In this theme, specific attention will be paid to the systems of accountability in universities
and research institutes. How universities and research institutes have organised their systems
of quality control and accountability may have a profound effect on knowledge creation
because of its impact on the criteria of scientific and scholarly quality and integrity. Does eresearch go together with new ways of assessing research performance and output? In what
ways do new research practices create problems for existing peer review and visitation
procedures? How will individual careers be judged in very large-scale collaborative research
institutes and networks? How do the forms of knowledge evolve in e-research and are
particular practices hampered by the way researchers are being assessed? And in what ways
are internet based information systems being used by the institutions of accountability?
Methodological foci
Virtual Ethnography
Virtual ethnography is a recent development in the area of anthropology, science &
technology studies, and internet research (Mason 1996; Hine 2000; Howard 2002; Beaulieu
2004; Beaulieu forthcoming 2005; Hine forthcoming 2005). It extends the notions of field and
ethnographic observation from the exclusive study of co-present and face to face interactions,
to a focus on mediated and distributed ones (Hine forthcoming 2005). It combines two related
but distinct ideas. First, virtual ethnography tries to create virtual counterparts of the basic
ethnographic concepts and interrogates whether they can be applied to mediated interaction.
Second, virtual ethnography aims to change the notion of the fieldsite from a localised space
into a network of interlinked mediated settings. In this, it is related to the ethnography of
networks (Newman 1998). Virtual ethnography maintains a number of values of traditional
ethnographic work. It aims to sustain practices of “thick description” (Geertz 1983), and to
achieve this by paying attention to the perspective of the actors themselves (Ward 1999;
Slater 2002). This makes virtual ethnography distinct from Web site content analysis or
Webometric studies, although it may make use of the same qualitative and quantitative
techniques to locate networks and Web sites (Scharnhorst 2003), or to understand media
forms.
The key research question in the Virtual Ethnography Focus is: how can ethnography be
pursued in mediated settings? Research in this focus will establish which aspects of
ethnographic research are challenged in particular in the shift from face to face interaction to
mediated digitised interaction. This should make clear how ethnography can be conceived as
a flexible practice, while remaining recognisable as a specific methodology.
More specific questions that will be dealt with are which new concepts of “field” or “research
site” are needed for virtual ethnography, how virtual elements can be integrated in traditional
fieldwork, and which new ethical issues arise in the practice of virtual ethnography (Fox
2000). In the field of internet research, a fair amount of work has already been devoted to the
challenge to crucial notions of research ethics in the context of mediated social science
research, and the Studio research will elaborate on these guidelines and reflections in the
course of doing research.
Web Archiving for scholarly research
This focus will develop a new methodology for systematic, longitudinal analysis of the Web
sites that are produced in the sciences and humanities. It is clear that Web and internet data
are central in many ways in e-research, also in the humanities and social sciences. To the
extent that researchers and scholars are creating more and more presentations on the Web (the
Web is the dominant interface with the internet in academia), Web data are clearly important
to understand the development of these fields. However, presently there is no clear way how
16
to make Web data available for scholarly research. Libraries and archives are only beginning
to develop concepts that enable the medium- and long-term archiving of Web sites. They are
confronted, among others, with the problem that the concept of the document is not adequate
for this area. The Studio will not take it on to crawl and archive the Web itself: this must be
the responsibility of libraries and archives. It will however in cooperation with the
WebArchivist organisation9, the Internet Preservation Consortium10, the Internet Archive11,
and the nascent European Internet Archive, develop methods and techniques to conceptualise
Web archives in such a way that they can produce datasets for social science and humanities
research.
In this effort, the emphasis will be on Web archiving of the Dutch and European academic
Web. This work will build on a current project at NIWI-KNAW on digitisation of two
KNAW institutes and expand the scope of this effort in order to be able to analyse the whole
of “the academic Web” for analysis. A “Web sphere” is conceptualised in this research as a
linked set of dynamically defined digital resources spanning multiple Web sites that together
demarcate a specific type of content or action in online structures (Foot and Schneider 2002).
Presently, there are still many methodological problems that need to be solved before one can
analyse the dynamics of digitisation as represented in the Web sites produced by scientific
and scholarly research. This research aims to solve these problems by using a suite of
software tools, developed by WebArchivist.org, based on lessons learned through
collaborative projects with the US Library of Congress and the Internet Archive. In
collaboration with the internet researchers involved in developing this tool, at the University
of Washington (Seattle) and the Institute of Technology of the State University of New York
(Utica), this method will be adapted to the study of scientific Web sites.
The work in this methodological focus will “scale up” this project by developing methods to
combine in-depth qualitative Web site analysis with large-scale comparative “surface
analysis” of the Web. The central question is which specifications and analytical tools are
needed for the extraction of meaningful data sets for research in the humanities and social
sciences from the flood of raw Web data.
Simulation
The extended use of data visualisation technologies and virtual reality techniques in
simulation research methods is often seen as one of the hallmarks of e-science (Berman, Fox
et al. 2003). Computer based simulation and modelling has become a standard repertoire in
the natural and technical sciences and is increasingly used in the life sciences and medicine
(Fishwick 1995; Banks 1998). In a number of social sciences and humanities, models have
been a standard tool for decades (eg. economics, sociology, archeology) (Gilbert and
Troitzsch 1999; Burenhult 2002; Schweitzer 2002). The use of simulation is however a more
recent phenomenon in these fields. Moreover, the value of simulating and modelling as a
research method is often not undisputed.
The aim of the research in the methodological focus Simulation in the Studio is to develop
further expertise in simulations and systematic reflection on the heuristic value of modelling
and simulation for theory building in the social sciences and humanities. The research will not
focus primarily on the creation of new models since there is already a large variety of models
and simulation techniques available. Instead, the respecification of general models for
research questions in the social sciences and humanities will be central. Both agent-based and
network-oriented models and simulations will be included in the research agenda. The study
9
http://www.webarchivist.org/
The author is member of the scientific committee of the IPPC.
11
http://www.archive.org/
10
17
of the heuristic and epistemic value of modelling and simulating as a research strategy is
intrinsic part of this respecification. For example, from the perspective of social theory one
might wish to give agents in large systems as many individual traits as possible. However,
this easily leads to an exponential increase of the degrees of freedom of the model. This raises
the question how low-dimensional approaches can be combined with individualisation of
agents in multi-agent models and simulations.
The research in this methodological focus will focus on evolutionary modelling (including the
modelling of innovation), the application of evolutionary strategies as heuristic concept and as
mathematical tools, and the diffusion of simulation into the humanities (Scharnhorst 1998;
Scharnhorst 2001; Ratto and Scharnhorst 2004). We expect that this might also lead to a
toolbox of simulation principles in combination with principles for the reflection on the
conceptual implications of such models (which are often not explicitly discussed in the
literature). The simulation will moreover be developed in close collaboration with domainspecific experts in the social sciences and humanities. This may also produce interactive
simulations that can be used in different contexts in research and teaching.
Theoretical framework
It is clear that the internet and its World Wide Web interface are rather central in the present
e-research pilot projects. Without fast and high-capacity digital networks, the idea of eresearch would not be very practical. But how do we conceptualise the internet? The internet
is usually captured in terms of older metaphors, especially the archive, the library and the post
office. Seen from these three perspectives, the internet brings drawbacks as well as some
advantages. Many needs of new services or infrastructures formulated by scholars in the
humanities and social sciences are implicitly founded on one of these metaphors. However,
this conceptualisation ignores the crucial aspect that the internet is a medium that represents
older media while adding fundamentally new characteristics to each of them. The novelty of
the net is its hybrid character and its potential to re-inscribe and re-mediate other media
(Slevin 2000).
Theoretically, the internet can be conceptualized as a complex communication space in which
distributed digital inscriptions proliferate in ways that build upon and differ from the
distribution of other types of inscriptions (Poster 2001; Wang 2002). This social space
mediates both practices of technology design and development, and knowledge practices. In
e-research this culminates in the creation of novel, digitally inscribed, epistemic objects
(Rheinberger 1997) that promise to become accelerators of scientific and scholarly
development. Epistemic objects are generators of questions and the creation of novel types is
strongly related to technologically embedded paradigms or scientific styles (Hacking 2002).
Examples of epistemic objects are databases, new phenomena that are created in experimental
settings, and imaging technologies that create new perspectives. They share that they facilitate
new questions. The creation of new epistemic objects and the study thereof in the domain of
the humanities and social sciences will be the core business of the Studio in theoretical terms.
We expect that this combined effort will lead to empirically based discussions and
explorations of the following theoretical questions12:

does e-research lead us to redefine how we can understand the development of
scholarly cultures?
12
This work will result in synthesising publications in the form of journal articles and book chapters. A
first result of this work will be an invited contribution to the Handbook of Science and Technology
Studies Wouters, P., A. Beaulieu, et al. (in preparation 2007). Mediation, distributed inscriptions and
networked knowledge practices: STS meets the challenge of the internet. Handbook of Science and
Technology Studies. E. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch and J. Wajcman, MIT Press..
18
The notions of epistemic culture (Knorr-Cetina 1999) and epistemic object (Rheinberger
1997) have been developed to capture the fine-grained nature of knowledge creation.
However, they have been mainly applied in studies of knowledge practices in the natural and
physical sciences. There is still a relative lack of theoretical understanding of the specificities
of knowledge practices in the humanities and social sciences (but see Dehue 1990). How are
the relations to empirical materials and the process of interrogating them changing as
e-research develops in the humanities and social sciences? In what ways are digital data and
meta-data affecting the dynamics and order of epistemic cultures (Beaulieu 2004)? How do
scholarly communities within diverse specialisms conceptualise e-research and its valency in
their knowledge creation practices? We will be particularly interested in what we can learn
from the collaborative creation of new epistemic objects for research in the humanities and
social sciences that will be conducted in the Studio partnerships.

how can we explain and understand diversity of mediated knowledge practices, such
as across disciplines and specialties?
In the sociology of knowledge, a number of theoretical models have been developed to
explain and understand the variation of knowledge practices across the sciences (Weingart
1974; Becher 1989; Whitley 2000). They are crucial in the study of e-research in the
humanities and social sciences because they critique a linear model in which it is assumed
that all research will in the end adopt the e-science practices of the physics community. At the
same time, the development of e-research practices in the humanities and social sciences is an
exemplary case to further test and refine these theories of intellectual change (Fry 2003a). For
example, how do Web based communication practices relate to the social and intellectual
organisation of academic work? How do technical task uncertainty and strategic dependence
(Whitley 2000) shape collaboratories and email practices and how can these practices be used
as proxies for those theoretical notions? How do mechanisms at the level of the university
(the computer network structure and its ICT policy), the level of the discipline (international
conferences, (e-)journals), the level of the specialty, and the level of the research group
interact in the creation of intellectual and institutional variation?

what roles do digital epistemic objects play in knowledge creation, and how can we
use them to reformulate informatics problems in the humanities and social sciences?
A specific characteristic of e-research is the comprehensive digital representation of research
objects, often intimately embedded within digital research instruments and resources. This
may generate new dynamics in the creation and analysis of research objects, leading to new
research questions as well as analytical methods in a variety of fields. This is particularly
relevant to the humanities and social sciences. We have already noted how increased
availability of digital collections and data may enable new forms of research. The question
which roles are played by these digital epistemic objects in the humanities and social sciences
has not yet been addressed in the literature. Theoretical work in this area is urgent because it
may help to reformulate specific problems in humanities computing and humanities and
social informatics into more generic information science terms. Presently, many practical
problems are addressed on an ad-hoc basis. This is partly the result of lacking resources, but
also of less than satisfactory theoretical models in information science.

do we need to rethink the conceptualisation of scientific labour and markets to
understand the dynamics of e-research practices?
An important element of e-science is the increase of scale in the organisation of scientific and
informatic labour. This affects the research practices but also the formation of scientific
humanpower and expertise, the labour market of researchers and information specialists, and
the political economy of e-science. It also raises the question of how to understand
theoretically the role of scientific labour as value creation (Vann, 2004). This is the more
important, since the upscaling of research in a number of fields goes together with an increase
of standardisation of expertise that also affects the formation of new scientific researchers. To
19
what extent do we witness a certain homogenisation of the qualities of scientific labour? Does
this also affect the scholarly practices in the humanities and social sciences and the
knowledge created in these fields? How do e-research institutions position themselves in the
chain of value creation and what influence does this have on the future development of the
labour market for researchers and information experts in e-research? This relates to the
process of accounting for research, especially with respect to the evaluation of research
institutes, the competition between universities, and the systems of reputational control and
career development. For example, how does the increasing role of data and databases in
research affect the way scientists and scholars can build up their reputation? And conversely,
how do existing systems of reputational control promote or hinder the adoption of e-research
practices and institutions?

does the extra connectivity of e-research lead to new forms of complex relationships
in social structures and does this lead to new understandings of complex systems?
In recent decades, the interdisciplinary interaction between physics, mathematics,
evolutionary models and sociology has led to exciting interdisciplinary approaches based on
the notion of complex systems (eg. sociophysics). e-Research is a particulary interesting case
to explore and develop these approaches because it is the product of the interaction of two
complex systems: the system of knowledge and innovation, and the internet. The emergence
of the knowledge society can be understood as the reflexive reorganisation of the role of
knowledge in the subsystems of economy and politics (Leydesdorff 2000). In this process, the
social sciences and humanities may play an increasing role, partly because they reflect and
organise the systemic self-representation of society and culture. The hybrid research
programmes in which the humanities and social sciences are called to contribute to the
development of the European knowledge society attest to this trend. This means that the
humanities and social sciences will be taken up in more complex interactions than in the past.
By studying these, we expect that we can contribute to the development of domain specific
models of complex systems. Simulations of specific processes in these interactions (Ebeling,
Karmeshu et al. 2001) may throw light on key events in the self-generation of these complex
systems.

does the operationalisation of sociological concepts of agency, institution, textuality
and infrastructure need to be revised in order to study mediation in e-research?
The combination of networking and digitisation has led to a proliferation of social interactions
that are mediated by information and communication technologies. This is particularly strong
in scientific and increasingly also in scholarly contexts. This puts into question key concepts
of social order and cultural interaction. Issues of access to resources is crucial for the
distribution of authority. Do agency, institution and infrastructure acquire new characteristics
in these mediated contexts? To what extent do information and communication infrastructures
embody both agency and institution, and thereby enable and constrain particular social and
cultural configurations? Does the fact that digital infrastructures make visible otherwise
“hidden” interactions, affect the duality of agency and structure? And last but not least, how
can the textuality of digital media be characterised in relation to circulating data and objects,
and to infrastructures in e-research?
20
analytic center
virtual
ethnography
web archiving
simulation
DATA
COLLABORATIONS
INSTITUTIONS
construction platform
Figure 1 The structure of the Studio.
Organisation
The research process in the Studio
Three modes of enquiry are central in the Studio: thinking, observing and playing. These
three metaphors capture the interplay we expect between thorough analysis and more
experimental, playful design of new tools and practices. The design of new tools is never only
a technical job. Opening up new possibilities for humanities and social science scholars with
the help of advanced networked information and communication technologies implicates the
rethinking of old research questions, questioning established research methods and
techniques, and asks for the intellectual courage to try out new forms of scholarly work. This
is why we emphasise that the Studio will not in the first place help design new tools but rather
new scholarly practices.
To realise its dual mission of increasing our understanding of e-humanities and e-social
science, and of supporting scholars to make use of e-research, the Studio has two interrelated
modules: the Analytic Centre (AC) and the Construction Platform (CP). These facilitate longterm research based on a clear intellectual agenda (AC) combined with flexible short-term
projects created in response to the changing needs of researchers at universities and research
institutes (CP). For this reason, all Studio research projects will have a complex blend of
curiosity-driven and application oriented goals (Ang and Cassity 2004). All projects in the CP
result from, and are led by, partnerships with external research groups. Whereas the CP helps
create new epistemic objects and practices in the humanities and social sciences, both inside
and outside of the Studio, the AC studies this process. To facilitate this, the AC is responsible
for the creation and maintenance of the Studio’s inhouse knowledge database. The structure
of the Studio is presented in Figure 1 The structure of the Studio.
21
For the scholars who are the client-partners of the Studio, the design work must lead to useful
insights in the form of concrete deliverables, such as new protocols, best practice manuals,
new software tools, perspectives on new analytical techniques to answer old questions, and
new research questions in their fields. For the researchers at the Studio, this design work is
also a mode of enquiry into the process of knowledge creation. In other words, the
Construction Platform is a field laboratory in which different scholarly practices and
configurations are tried out and assessed on their consequences. This will, we hope, lead to a
better understanding of the characteristics of knowledge creation as a cultural and social
process. The researchers in the Analytic Centre have a special responsibility to link up the
results of the CP to the scientific and scholarly literature in the fields of information science,
science & technology studies, and communication sciences. To facilitate the management of
this type of research, the AC reviews the research in the Studio on its contribution to basic
knowledge about the process of knowledge creation. The CP will specifically examine the
utility of the Studio research for scholars in the humanities and social sciences based in
universities and research institutes in the Netherlands.
Observation, with all the advanced observation tools available in social and cultural analysis,
is central to the Studio. This may involve the participant observation of prototypes of new
infrastructures (such as collaboratories or Grid computing for social science), but may also
entail the systematic observation of mundane processes in research in the social sciences and
humanities. This is important to counteract the danger of bias in favour of “the new new
thing” (Lewis 2000; Woolgar 2002). We can only put the promise and practice of e-research
into perspective by taking distance from the claims and critically interrogate both the promise
and the practice (cf. Wouters and Schröder 2003). This also holds for the innovative projects
that are conducted within the Studio itself. Since these are oriented to the exploration of new
modes of inquiry, they run the danger of biasing the novel over the traditional. Reflexive selfobservation in different forms is therefore an important element of the research cycle in the
Studio.
A drawing by Bruce Goff may make this more clear (Figure 2). This drawing shows a studio
that resembles a bit what the proposal aims to accomplish. Although the Studio exists of
different workspaces, each can operate at different levels, and they are strongly interrelated
and mutually embedded. There is no great divide between the Construction Platform (the
elevated platforms in the middle) and the Analytic Centre (the spaces around the platforms
from which one can look both at the platforms and through the windows to the world outside).
We need different workspaces to get the work done on time: the emphasis is different (on
building in the CP, on understanding in the AC); and part of the staff will have different
skills; but the goals are the same and the research in the CP builds upon the results and
experiences from the AC and vice versa.
22
Figure 2 A pictorial representation of the VKS13.
The Construction Platform
The Construction Platform (CP) will tune the research of the Studio to the needs of scholars
in the humanities and social sciences in universities and research institutes, the client-partners
of the Studio. All projects in the Construction Platform are the result of partnerships with
external research groups. This will usually mean that projects are run under a dual scientific
management. Each project is led by a Studio researcher who is responsible for the project
management and the dissemination of its results.
The research infrastructure of the Platform is based on the needs of the research projects and
is also the result of these projects. The Studio will start with a modest computer network in
which two different operating systems can seamlessly work together: MS Windows and
Unix/Mac OS X. The latter operating system will be used for development and design tasks,
data visualisation and data mining. The intellectual infrastructure is the combination of
knowledge provided by the external partners and by the Analytic Centre. This infrastructure is
dynamic: each project can draw upon it and affect it by its specific needs, and its results will
be added as a new layer or set of skills to the infrastructure. We expect that this layeredgrowth model will lead to the gradual rise of the Studio as a centre of expertise in a number of
areas. This may mean that more intense requirements need to be fulfilled by the technological
infrastructure of the Studio. To anticipate this, we will prepare an application to NWO Groot
for a Humanities & Social Science Grid Application in coordination with the Dutch Grid
Forum organisation14.
The CP contributes to the development of informatics oriented to the humanities and social
sciences. This entails both the fundamental question whether specific approaches within
informatics need to be developed in order to address crucial problems in the humanities and
social sciences as well as project-specific research questions. The distribution of projects over
the three research themes of the Studio does not have to be equal, but is determined by the
needs of the humanities and social science communities. Within the theme Data and Digital
Information, specific attention will be paid to questions of data and source representation and
13
14
Drawing by Bruce Goff, available at http://www.architechgallery.com/arch_info/
Grid Forum Nederland, of which the author is a founding member.
23
data analytical tools. Within the theme Networked Research, the building and analysis of
collaboratories and the development of collaborative Web based analytical tools has priority.
Within the theme Virtual Institutions, the use of emerging institutional structures and new
roles of the humanities and social sciences in governance and global markets will be given
special attention. However, these priorities may change on the basis of the needs that emerge
from the acquired projects.
The acquisition of new research projects may lead to the formation of new partnerships, for
which the programme leader of the Studio carries the main responsibility. Research projects
are brought in on a competitive basis by making use of the established quality control
mechanisms that have been developed in the scholarly and scientific communities by
universities and NWO. This way of project acquisition is meant to ensure that the work in the
Studio is tuned to the core intellectual issues in the humanities and social sciences and does
not start to live a life of its own. It may also help prevent capture of this program by vested
interests in computer technology. In practice, this means that research groups are invited on
the basis of their research performance. For example, winners of NWO prizes, new members
of the KNAW, and research groups that have acquired prestigious international funding will
be approached to discuss possible projects that may be of use for the further development of
their research practice. Once a project has been selected, the project team may be housed in
the Studio for the duration of the project, or the project researcher(s) may be located in the
research group of the external partner.
The Studio organises a yearly Summer School about e-Research and workshops for PhD
students and postdocs in collaboration with the Graduate Research Schools. This is oriented
towards new generations of scholars and social scientists. The CP maintains a suite of
Websites15 that can also be used as a repository for university based researchers where they
can find tools and ideas for new interdisciplinary analytical and methodological approaches,
and new ways to make use of the Web and the internet in scholarly research.
The Analytic Centre
The Analytic Centre (AC) studies the construction of new epistemic objects in the humanities
and social sciences, both inside and outside of the Studio. The AC has a specific
responsibility in the selection of research projects of the Studio: it reviews whether candidate
projects fit in the overall research programme and to which themes and methodological foci
they relate most strongly. To facilitate this, the AC is responsible for the creation and
maintenance of the Studio’s inhouse knowledge database. The AC organises workshops and
seminars to which the researchers of the CP are invited to explore and develop common
theoretical, methodological and practical concerns.
The staff consists of (senior) researchers, PhD students, postdoctoral research fellows, and
visiting scholars. Science & technology studies (including the history and philosophy of
science) and information science are the core fields in the AC, although the team is
thoroughly multidisciplinary. The AC makes use of the same technological infrastructure as
the CP. If new tools are added to the AC’s toolbox (such as advanced data visualisation and
simulation tools), they will therefore also be available to the researchers in the CP.
Researchers in the AC may also be member of project teams in the CP, depending on the goal
of the projects. The AC is responsible for the organisation of the in-house Studio Seminar in
which the progress of all Studio research projects is discussed. This seminar is organised once
a week and discusses one research project at a time on the basis of a presentation by project
leaders.
The Studio will occupy the subdomain “virtualknowledgestudio” in the following domains: nl, be,
org, info, net, biz, and com.
15
24
The research in the AC, like the work in the CP, is organised according to the research themes
and the methodological foci of the Studio. The main output of the AC will consist of articles
in refereed international and national scientific and scholarly journals, of academic books
which have a synthesising role, and of professional publications aimed at a larger audience.
These results are also aimed to provide background information for scholars in the humanities
and social sciences in the Netherlands about e-research. Where available and relevant,
annotated data sets are made available to established data archives and repositories after
completion of the research projects.
The research staff of the AC are members of the relevant Graduate Research Schools, either
at the local or at the national level. The researchers develop their theoretical and
methodological work in cooperation with university-based researchers in science &
technology studies, internet research and information science (see also the Campus Site
below). Studio personnel policy promotes part-time dual appointments with universities to
create opportunities for teaching by the research staff in the Studio at the level of Research
Masters and PhD degrees.
To further this interaction, the Studio maintains the “Virtual Knowledge Studio Campus Site”
at one or more universities. This is a low-cost reservation of a lecture theatre of one of the
universities on a regular basis, for example once a month. This Campus Site (CS) aims to
reduce the barrier for students and university scholars to communicate with the Studio staff.
The CS will be used to present the regular Virtual Knowledge Studio Lecture Series, to hold
scientific workshops, seminars and outreach programs, to organise an information market
twice a year where university students can explore the possibility of doing thesis work in the
Studio, and to present the work developed in the Studio. Also, visiting scholars may make use
of the CS to present their work to the local academic communities.
Forms of collaboration
The Studio maintains two forms of long-term collaborative relationships with researchers in
the humanities and social sciences: partnerships and collaboratories. Partnerships are the
main vehicle to intensify cooperation with scholars in the Netherlands around projects. The
partnerships are formed on the basis of common research projects and include detailed
arrangements about project leadership, project management and dissemination of the results
and data. The depth of the partnership may vary. Some partnerships may limit themselves to a
particular research project, others may amount to common research programmes, dual career
possibilities for postdocs and PhD students, sustained combined acquisition of external
funding, and chairs in particular areas of e-research. The Studio collaboratories are aimed at
mobilising international expertise in specific areas, especially where there is a lack of experts
in the Netherlands. The Studio will start off with four collaboratories. The research in the
Methodological Foci will be organised in collaboratories with international research groups
that have specialised in the specific methodology: virtual ethnography, Web archiving for
scholarly research, and simulation. In addition, the Studio will organise its work on Web data
also in the form of a collaboratory. These collaboratories will be used to stimulate bilateral
visits between the collaboratory participants, organise panels at scientific conferences,
coordinate special issues of scientific journals or edited volumes, co-supervise students and
prepare joint research proposals at the international level. Prospective portals of the
collaboratories will also be used to exchange experiences in the field and share research
materials and methods. More details about the Partnerships and Collaboratories are given in
the Appendix.
25
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