Conference Aims

The 5th International Conference on e-Social Science will be held at Maternushaus in Cologne on 24th - 26th June 2009.

The aim of the annual international conference on e-Social Science is to bring together leading representatives of the social science, e-Infrastructure, cyberinfrastructure and e-Research communities in order to improve mutual awareness and promote coordinated activities to accelerate research, development and deployment of powerful, new methods and tools for the social sciences and beyond.

We invite contributions from members of the social science, e-Infrastructure, cyberinfrastructure and e-Research communities with experience of, or interests in:

* exploring, developing, and applying new methods, practices, and tools afforded by new infrastructure technologies - such as the Grid and Web 2.0 - in order to further social science research; and
* studying issues impacting on the wider take-up of e-Research.

Contributions from professionals working in and with data services to support research and teaching in the social sciences are especially welcome.

Submission categories include: full and short papers, posters, demos, workshops, tutorials and panels.
Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following:

* Case studies of the application of e-Social Science methods to substantive social science research problems
* Case studies of e-Research, including benefits and problems in collaboration across organisational, disciplinary and geographical boundaries
* Case studies of 'Open Access Science', social networking and 'Science 2.0'
* Best practice examples of social research data infrastructure, including virtual distributed databases, open access repositories, self-archiving
* Advances in tools and services for data discovery, harmonization, integration, management, annotation, curation and sharing
* Challenges of exploiting new sources of administrative, transactional and observational data, including security, legal and ethical issues in the use of personal and sensitive data
* Advances in analytical tools and techniques for quantitative and qualitative social science, including statistical modelling and simulation, data mining, text mining, content analysis, socio-linguistic analysis, social network analysis, data visualisation
* Case studies of collaborative research environments, including user engagement, development and use
* User experiences of e-Research infrastructure, services and tools
* Factors influencing the adoption of e-Research, including technical standards, user engagement and outreach, training, sustainability of digital artefacts, IPR and ethics
* New methods, metrics and tools for measuring the adoption and impact of e-Research and for informing policy-making
* The evolving research infrastructure technology roadmap, including grids, cloud computing and web 2.0
* National e-Infrastructure development programmes, international cooperation in e-Infrastructure development