E-science creates another dimension

Remote teamworking is set to have a growing role in scientific research and experimentation.

The January issue of the august Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication contains no fewer than 11 articles on e-science. Broadly, e-science means long-distance teamwork using IT to manage R& D and to collect, archive, give access to and electronically publish both the scientific data and the analysis that goes with it.

According to guest editor Nicholas Jankowski, tomorrow’s e-science will feature grid-based access to very large amounts of data, heavyweight computing, and “high-performance visualisation back to the individual user scientists”.

Jankowski is sceptical about whether e-science has transformed the whole pursuit of science. It is, he says, early days. Different countries’ rates of adoption of this innovation will depend on the active participation of their scientific communities. E-science is primarily shaped by the state; it is “payrolled by government agencies, largely to assure competitive advantage in scientific developments”, Jankowski says.

The interesting UK sociologist Christine Hine claims that digitising collections of biological specimens has rehabilitated the stuffy Victorian discipline of systematics, or the classification of organisms and the study of the relationships between them.

But Hine also points to the importance of off-line dialogues to e-science. She hints that the revival of systematics may have less to do with IT than with the Convention on Biological Diversity that was signed at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.

From South Africa comes evidence that email aids scientific communication, but that it doesn’t contribute much towards the publication of scientific papers.

Yet it would be wrong to underestimate the impact that IT will have on science.

In a paper entitled Shake, Rattle, and Roles: Lessons from Experimental Earthquake Engineering for Incorporating Remote Users in Large-Scale E-Science Experiments, two North American contributors report on their talks with 94 experts on how materials and structures react to seismic forces.

The paper’s authors found that their respondents liked being in the lab in person when experiments are carried out. But as they point out, that doesn’t mean that in the future, other remote scientists won’t be able to go “beyond being there” when new experimental buildings are again shaken to their foundations.

Quite right. The world needs lots of well-funded remote boffins, using IT to view lab tests in ways that are complementary to the ones used by the testers. That kind of e-science, I can get along with.