So far I think many of the responses to this question have concerned
the "who" aspect. As people have noted, several sites already exist to
tie people together. I am interested, however, in the "what and where"
Raffael mentions. If we had a giant database of researchers (and
research), how could I search it to find out when someone is working
on questions I'm interested in?
This is more than a hypothetical. I'm a prospective graduate student
trying to find faculty researching in areas that I want to study and
later research myself. My method was to compile a list of people
publishing in Political Methodology and then count up the number of
papers per institution. While I think I found what I was looking for,
my target was fairly large. Aiming for specific research (rather than
just the broad "Formal and Quantitative Methods" topic) would have
been much harder.
This problem reminded me a talk I recently heard from the 2005
International Lisp Conference [1]. The speaker outlines what he
considers to be the biggest problem facing biological researchers: a
lack of formalism to describe what they find, what work they used to
build their models, and so on. He refers mainly to modeling biological
processes, and his solution is to model them using symbolic computing
(something Lisp does well). I wonder if social researchers are facing
a similar problem, and could use a similar solution?
As I said, I'm still an aspiring member of the research set, so take
my opinion with a grain of salt. :-)
Cheers,
-Mark
[1] http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2005/speakers.html#jeff_shrager
On Nov 26, 2007 3:40 AM, Himmelsbach Raffael
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear subscribers,
>
> In the age of facebook & co. I have been thinking how beneficial a
> database would be that would collect data concerning which researcher
> works on what project and where. That kind of database would create
> great synergies and could lead to collaboration beyond a network of
> traditional personal acquaintances.
> My question to the polmeth community is now if somebody knows if that
> kind of platform already exists (no need to reinvent the wheel), and
> more generally, what are your thoughts about such a proposal?
>
> Looking forward to your reaction,
>
> Raffael
> __________________________________
>
> Raffael Himmelsbach
>
> Institut d'Etudes Politiques et Internationales
> Batiment Anthropôle, Bureau 5128
> Université de Lausanne
> CH-1015 Lausanne
>
> Phone: +41 21 692 31 76
> Cell: +41 79 756 85 10
>
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