What is the National Centre for e-Social Science?
The ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) aims to develop and promote the use of e-science to benefit social science research. The NCeSS research programme is led by eight nodes based at institutions throughout the UK, co-ordinated by a National Strategic Director for e-Social Science.
What is e-Social Science?
e-Social Science refers to the application of a new generation of distributed, digital technologies to social science research problems. The aim is to enable social research by developing innovative and more powerful, networked and interoperable research tools and services that make it easier for social scientists to discover, access and analyse data, and to collaborate so that they may tackle increasingly complex research challenges.
The emergence of e-Social Science over the past five years has reflected a much broader interest in exploiting a growing diversity and scale of data resources - including new sources of data such as administrative and transactional records, and the Web - for social research. Realising the research value of these data resources demands the development of more sophisticated and secure techniques for data discovery, access, linking and management, and more powerful tools - both quantitative and qualitative - for data analysis. To meet these needs and so ensure that UK social research remains world-leading, e Social Science seeks to harness global efforts - including those led by the UK e Science programme - to advance the state of the art in digital research infrastructure or 'e Infrastructure'.
National Strategic Director for e-Social Science
Professor David De Roure, based at the University of Southampton, is the 'National Strategic Director for e-Social Science', with Dr Marina Jirotka of the Oxford e-Research Centre as Deputy Director. Professor De Roure's role is to co-ordinate the research activities of the Centre and to advise ESRC on the future strategic direction of e-Social Science.
NCeSS Node Research Programme
The NCeSS node research programme, developed and coordinated between 2004 and 2009 by the NCeSS hub at the University of Manchester, has been a key driver behind the development of e Social Science. It is the single largest investment in e Social Science anywhere in the world. The main strand of the programme consists of a series of projects which are seeking to draw upon unfolding advances in e Infrastructure tools and services and apply them to the particular needs of the social science community. The projects cover quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods approaches and a wide range of social science disciplines. The programme also contains a second but equally important social shaping strand which aims to understand the social, economic and other influences on how e Infrastructure is being developed and used, and its implications for scientific practice and research outcomes.
The current research programme consists of the following nodes:
Completed Nodes:
Further information
Director:david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
ESRC contact: claire.feary@esrc.ac.uk - Telephone: 01793 412862