e-Research
e-Research
It has been suggested that the wider community might prefer to use the term ‘e-Research’, which is a more inclusive and cross-disciplinary term (and a much more accurate summary of how the technology can be used) but is yet to be universally adopted in preference to ‘e-Science’.
The deployment of grid technologies and the funding of e-Research in the arts and humanities is dependent on researchers formulating strategies that will utilize the technology in appropriate ways, or even advance the process of enquiry that technologists have currently developed to answer existing questions. It is easy to understand why an e-Science approach has been adopted to cope with the amount of data that is produced by certain types of scientific enquiry.
Astronomical telescopes and satellites are capable of producing terabytes of data every day and analysing that information is clearly easier using multiple and distributed servers or scientific instruments. The challenge for arts and humanities researchers is to devise strategies for using this technology in their own fields where the automated collection of data is much less widespread and the interpretative methods required to make sense of that information are often varied and dialectical in their nature.