[Air-L] anthropology is not a science?

[Denise N. Rall]

Dear Air-ers -

While I come late to this topic, I concur with Nick
that the e-science can be misleading - as I indicated
forcefully to Sally Wyatt at the e-Science/e-Research
roundtable in Vancouver.

e-Science suggests that internet research is
answerable to the scientific method (disproving the
null hypothesis). Some e-Research does that, much does
not.

And before folks go crazy with that, social science
has frequently employed the scientific method,
particularly in psychological studies. Our
understanding of the discipline, social science,
employs the term science as Wissenschaft, or a
generalised sense of knowledge, as in what can be
discovered or known about a given topic. 

In that sense, e-Social Science can still describe a
domain of knowledge much more comfortably than
e-Science. One would have to seriously re-work the
word science, as was attempted by Gibbons et al. in
1994. Some may feel they were successful, I do not. No
lesser scholar than Bruno Latour said, "science is the
hard object, the more we seek to learn about it, the
more it resists our efforts" (quote from memory,
seminar in Said School of Business, Oxford, "Four +
one uncertainties in social science" in 2002.

The articulation of e-Research was suggested by a 2005
seminar of Christine Borgmann speaking to the OII. The
link is:
http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/details.cfm?id=91

I know other worthy scholars are working on this
topic, and despite the hard work of Michael Nentwich,
(2003) I think that Nick and others will stay with
e-Research out of necessity, perhaps. But I applaud
their efforts in this area.

Cheers, Denise


	

Denise N. Rall, PhD
Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA 
Tues: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Mobile 0438 233 344 
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/
Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK
http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html


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