Is Digital Scholarship Meaningful?: A Campus Study Tracking Multidisciplinary Perceptions

Increased computational and multimodal approaches to research over the past decades have enabled scholars and learners to forge creative avenues of inquiry, adopt new methodological approaches, and interrogate information in innovative ways. As such, academic libraries have begun to offer a suite of services to support these digitally inflected and data-intense research strategies. These supports, dubbed digital scholarship services in the library profession, break traditional disciplinary boundaries and highlight the methodological significance of research inquiry. Externally, however, these practices appear as domain-specific niches, e.g., digital history or digital humanities in humanities disciplines, e-science and e-research in STEM, and e-social science or computational social science in social science disciplines. The authors conducted a study examining the meaningfulness of the term digital scholarship within the local context at University of Colorado Boulder by investigating how the interpretation of digital scholarship varies according to graduate students, faculty, and other researchers. Nearly half of the definitions (46 percent) mentioned research process or methods as part of digital scholarship. Faculty and staff declined or were unable to define digital scholarship more often than graduate students or post-doctoral researchers. Therefore, digital scholarship as a term is not meaningful to all researchers. We recommend that librarians inflect their practices with the understanding that researchers and library users’ perceptions of digital scholarship vary greatly across contexts.

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For a heterodox computational social science

Big Data & Society ◽

10.1177/20539517211047725 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 205395172110477

Author(s):

Petter Törnberg ◽

Justus Uitermark

Keyword(s):

Complex System ◽

Social Science ◽

Computational Methods ◽

Social Life ◽

Critical Realism ◽

Computational Social Science ◽

Digital Data ◽

Neoclassical Economics ◽

Research Strategies ◽

Digital Capitalism

The proliferation of digital data has been the impetus for the emergence of a new discipline for the study of social life: ‘computational social science’. Much research in this field is founded on the premise that society is a complex system with emergent structures that can be modeled or reconstructed through digital data. This paper suggests that computational social science serves practical and legitimizing functions for digital capitalism in much the same way that neoclassical economics does for neoliberalism. In recognition of this homology, this paper develops a critique of the complexity perspective of computational social science and argues for a heterodox computational social science founded on the meta-theory of critical realism that is critical, methodological pluralist, interpretative and explanative. This implies diverting computational social science’ computational methods and digital data so as to not be aimed at identifying invariant laws of social life, or optimizing state and corporate practices, but to instead be used as part of broader research strategies to identify contingent patterns, develop conjunctural explanations, and propose qualitatively different ways of organizing social life.

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The “Intimidating” Archives: Teaching Graduate Students Historical Research Methods

Collections ◽

10.1177/155019061701303-403 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 13 (3-4) ◽

pp. 225-241

Author(s):

Margot Note

Keyword(s):

Graduate Students ◽

Research Methods ◽

Graduate Program ◽

Research Process ◽

Research Strategies ◽

Professional Literature ◽

Small College ◽

Conducting Research ◽

K 12 ◽

First Time

This article discusses approaches I used to teach “Research Methods,” an archival-based course for a history graduate program at a small college. The instruction included baseline research strategies for students new to the humanities as well as advanced methodologies for experienced researchers, with attention given to archival research techniques. Most professional literature focuses on teaching archival literacy aimed at K-12 students or undergraduates; this article explores the distinct research and instruction needs of graduate students. It examines how graduate students perceive the research process, what difficulties they encounter while conducting research, and what impact attending the course could have on their long-term research procedures. While teaching the course, I discovered that students viewed archives as intimidating. By acknowledging that new users can feel daunted by researching archival collections, instructors and archivists can consider how to make the archives more welcoming to first-time visitors.

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Social Science Mechanics: A Graduate Training Module that “Looks under the Hood” at Innovative Research Designs

Political Science and Politics ◽

10.1017/s1049096514002145 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 48 (02) ◽

pp. 373-377

Author(s):

Katie A. Cahill ◽

Michael R. Brownstein ◽

Amanda E. Burke ◽

Christopher Kulesza ◽

James A. McCann

Keyword(s):

Graduate Students ◽

Social Science ◽

Graduate Training ◽

Research Process ◽

Training Module ◽

Innovative Research ◽

Complex Processes ◽

Trade Offs ◽

Research Designs ◽

Graduate Seminars

ABSTRACTScholars in the fields of instructional development and pedagogy note that learning outcomes can be improved when teachers use “narratives” to communicate how complex processes work or how problems are addressed. In this article, the authors describe a narrative-centered approach to graduate-level instruction in research methodology. This approach is intended to supplement, not replace, conventional graduate seminars in quantitative or qualitative methods. In a series of lectures, scholars reflected on how their published articles originally were framed, the trade-offs that were necessary to advance the investigation, the methodological challenges and non-findings that had to be addressed—but may not have been printed—and the evolution of a piece as it progressed through the peer-review stages. This approach to exposing graduate students to the entirety of the research process is termedSocial Science Mechanics: A Look under the Hood at Innovative Research Designs. Surveys used to evaluate the series confirmed that graduate students who attended the presentations found them to be highly engaging and beneficial. Many faculty members also attended and found the lectures to be equally instructive.

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