July 16, 2013, the National Social Sciences Database officially launched by CASS. 

 

 

Information technology has re-shaped human society in term of politics, econo­my, culture, society, military and technol­ogy, and it has also led to fundamental changes in research methods. In light of these trends, researchers are asking what e-science is, and how the study of philosophy and social science can benefit from advancements in IT.

 

The 10th Cross-Strait Symposium on IT and Application Exchange was held in Beijing on Sept. 2. At the symposium, an in-depth discussion was conducted among scholars from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Taiwan Academia Sinica on the develop­ment strategy of e-science, information infrastructure, and the application of IT in social sciences studies as well as ways to meet the new demands, new trends and challenges in the e-science era.

 

The term “e-science” is generally used to describe the application of IT in scien­tific investigations in Western countries, which consider resource-sharing net­works and cross-origin collaboration to be the key to e-science develop­ment. The concept “e-social science” was brought up later. Wang Guocheng, a research fellow at the Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics at CASS, said science encompasses nat­ural science as well as the humanities abroad, so social sciences is included in the concept of e-science but further emphasized by e-social science.

 

Compared to natural science, philoso­phy and social sciences have a distinctive need for information technology because they are highly dependent on documents. Currently, the demand for traditional lit­erature resources and services cannot be fulfilled, which is why bibliographic data­base construction is of vital importance.

Meanwhile, the support of detailed and reliable data is required in the broad ap­plication of social investigation methods as well as the promotion of interdiscipli­nary studies, cross-disciplinary research, qualitative research and visualization study.

 

Yang Peichao, director of the CASS Information Management Office, said that e-social science should come with IT advancement in research environment, tools, materials, management and per­sonnel. In theory, the new e-social science research platform can help social scien­tists to investigate and explain multi-level social issues while complex economic statistical model calculations, large-scale social groups and opinion surveys, research data, analysis tools sharing and cooperation within research teams in the virtual environments pave the way for breakthrough and innovations in social science research.

 

But in reality, the impact of e-social science on social sciences development is limited given the fact that most small-scale social science research teams or the individual researchers work separately, leading to small, scattered and redundant research projects as well as insufficient IT application capability and imperfect relevant research policy.

 

Therefore, improving information infrastructure, enhancing data storage transfer capability and utilizing cloud computing appear to be particularly important for philosophy and social sci­ences research in the Big Data era.

 

Currently, universities and research institutions in China are emphasizing infrastructure construction. For exam­ple, CASS has put a high premium on e-science, making great efforts to enhance its overall academic dissemination capabilities as well as its support abil­ity and application level of e-science by increasing investment in IT infrastruc­ture, improving its network information environments, creating digital libraries, setting up the Surveys and Data Centers, and initiating Chinese Social Sciences Net. Through effective integration of in­formation technology resources and the construction of a “Digital Academy,” CASS is determined to form a new pattern of e-social science.

 

From a national perspective, informa­tion services have also made significant progress. Jiang Ying, deputy director of the CASS Library said that the funding spent on electronic resources is almost on par with the purchase of paper docu­ments in universities in China. Libraries have also been equipped with automa­tion systems, cloud computing, mobile services and other IT technology. By the end of 2010, the collections of the Na­tional Digital Library project maintained more than 194 million full-text data files, with a total of 388 terabytes of storage resources.

 

However, the improvement of the re­search environment is far from enough. Wang Guocheng explained that computa­tional thinking upholds rigor and precise logic. He suggested researchers combine both the logics of information technology and the humanities in a way that avoids either the purely instrumental methodol­ogy of natural sciences or the “unverifi­able” humanities in the social sciences development so as to refine social science research methods and renew research concepts.

 

The Chinese version appeared in Chinese Social Sciences Today, No. 644, Sept.10, 2014      

The Chinese link is: http://sscp.cssn.cn/xkpd/xszx/gn/201409/t20140910_1321970.html

 

Translated by Yang Xue