seminar
Social Machines of Science and Scholarship
Traditionally we have designed and constructed computer systems around a notion of computers and their users. In this talk I will suggest it's fruitful instead to think of an ecosystem of interacting "social machines" where each social machine comprises a digital part (think website or app) and its users in combination. The theory and practice of social machines, from human computation to online communities for collective action, are emerging research topics. This talk will introduce social machines and take a look at digital scholarship from a social machines perspective, drawing on music information retrieval as a case study.
<p>David De Roure is Professor of e-Research at University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre and coordinates Digital Humanities at Oxford. Focusing on advancing digital scholarship, he works closely with multiple disciplines including social sciences (concentrating on social machines), digital humanities (computational musicology) and previously bioinformatics (in silico experimentation), chemistry (smart labs) and environmental science (sensor networks). He is an expert in big data analytics and has an extensive background in distributed computing, Web, Linked Data and social computing, runs the myexperiment.org social website for sharing scientific workflows and promotes innovation in scholarly communication. For the last 3 years he has also held a national role as National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research.</p>