Data Curation and Analytics to Advance Science and Scholarship

The development of cyberinfrastructure for research and scholarship is a high-stakes endeavor. Not only is it extremely costly, but expectations are inflated. The predictions we hear about the digital, networked information environment, and its ability to seamlessly support data-intensive, interdisciplinary, collaborative research, are based on a reasonable understanding of changing technology. But, they suffer from a superficial understanding of the interplay among emerging technologies and the materials and practice of science and scholarship. Our presentation for the GSLIS Research Showcase will discuss contributions being made by the Center for Informatics Research in Science & Scholarship (CIRSS) to the advancement of e-research through its work in the areas of Data Curation and Data Analytics. As researchers do more and more of their work online in the Google-centric Web environment, curated collections will become increasingly important as anchors for meaningful engagement with digital information. Moreover, analytical approaches and tools will play a larger part in managing and interpreting the extensive bodies of literature and data required for scientists and scholars to make progress. However, to advance science and scholarship we need both data and an accurate understanding of the human processes that surround discovery. Our talk will highlight the synergies between research questions, methods, and findings from a range of CIRSS faculty and student projects and discuss the implications of this work for the information professions