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Exploring VREs and Collaborative Research Opportunities

This article delves into the potential for new collaborations in research fostered by Virtual Research Environments (VREs). It examines the intersections of collaboration, epistemic practices, and challenging traditional research canons. Through methodologies like interviews, document reviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, it explores how VREs reshape research activities and foster interdisciplinary collaborations.

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Exploring VREs and Collaborative Research Opportunities

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  1. VREs and the Potential for New Forms of Collaboration Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka

  2. Why VREs? • Longitudinal study of VREs, in particular JISC • Oxford e-Social Science Project • Ethical, legal, and institutional dynamics of e-sciences • Embedded in larger context of virtual organisations and virtual communities • Focussing on the opportunities for collaboration afforded by VREs

  3. Collaborative work • Collaboration is a major area of research - CSCW, groupware, distributed systems • Work place studies, awareness, public vs private, presence, seamless movement between the real and digital environments • Collaboration and research activities / practices

  4. Methodology • JISC VRE programme as case study • Emerging vision of VREs from the research community themselves • Interviews • Extensive document review • Attendance of workshops • Ethnographic field work • Focus groups and workshops • Analysis

  5. Our focus • Potential for new collaborations in research • Relation between a mode of collaboration and typical research activities • Epistemic practices • Overlapping features across VREs • Four features that participants are responding to positively and that have the potential to re-shape research

  6. Four features • Collaborations formed around new: • objects of research • mappings of objects of research • mappings of interactions • ways of producing, undertaking or performing

  7. Objects of research • Niches of data • Previously excluded • Not part of the canon • Fragile or illegible texts • Canon shapes a discipline • Authoritative, standard-setting list or group of texts or documents

  8. Challenging the canon • Transformative moments in a discipline occur when the canon is contested (eg feminism, post-colonialism) • History of Political Discourse VRE • Marginal texts (unauthorised editions or translations; pamphlets) • Excluded and marginalised texts and documents made available through digitalisation • Re-shapes a research area in a profound way • Accessibilty plus the set of relations created around them – in particular teaching relationships

  9. Shaking up interpretive paradigms • Fragile or illegible texts • Previously geographically dispersed fragments brought together to partially re-construct the document; yet to embody in digital form some of the physical properties that are so important to deciphering their meaning (eg smell, touch) • Implications for collaboration • Inter-disciplinary collaboration between researchers and computer scientists (making visible and legible) • Questioning of ways of conducting interpretation in each discipline

  10. Mappings of objects of research • Access to resources and mapping of the entities or processes that are being studied • Representational or organisational role • Silchester Roman Town • Connects on-site data gathering from the excavation site with collaborative research domains • With ‘picture’ the relevant part of the excavation site

  11. Mapping and knowing • Real spatial disposition of excavation site • Mapping a physical entity • Knowledge management as well as representational role • Organisation and disposition of the map on the screen are not neutral

  12. Mapping interactions • Meetings • Tools and technologies to facilitate meetings • Access Grid with enhancements • MeMeTiC • Screen Streamer (participants can share computer screens) • Compendium: concept mapping tool

  13. Self-reflectiveness • Recording and replay: making ephemeral events persistent or durable • Operating on the events: organising and mapping them • Semantic web tool for search and find disparate content relating to events such as teaching events and conferences: IUGO • Collaborative processes plus ability to analyse and monitor • Self-reflectiveness is intertwined in the process of the interaction • Neutrality of the mode of mapping or formative with respect to the way in which the event is remembered or understood.

  14. ‘Doing’ research • Producing, undertaking and performing • Physical interactions with objects within real environments in sciences and in the arts • Performative processes • Multi-sensory • Co-presence with objects • CSAGE - Access Grid with ‘semi-immersive stereoscopic facilities to create an increased level of ‘presence’ within the AG environment’; • Facial reconstruction and performance

  15. Co-defining in action • There is not a pre-defined capability sought; technology and performance are co-define • Feeling of embodied co-location and co-presence • Transfer from performance to other contexts • Facilitates a more naturalistic experience • Naturalism vs artifice

  16. Conclusions • As technologies for research emerge, some research activities are enabled and enhanced, some will be changed and some will recede in the background • Re-shaping of research landscape opens some spaces, closes others • Re-shaping is not value neutral

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