Collaborative Research: CI-TEAM Demonstration Project: Enhancing Social Science Research Training with Collaborative Tagging

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This is a proposal to demonstrate new ways to engage students as creators and users of social sciences cyberinfrastructure. At the core of this approach is collaborative tagging technology, which are used to allow users to register "tags" with social science data and then search on tags registered by themselves or others to locate objects. This technology is used to allow student researchers to access and contribute to a collaborative exegesis on social science data, thus improving their knowledge and understanding of data, building their capacity to work with others, and speeding up their ability to be high quality researchers. In this Project a diverse student population that attends the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor will be used. The project team will build upon Nature Publishing Groups' Connotea technology to construct a taggable version of the General Social Survey (GSS), a widely used dataset in social science research and teaching. In Summer 2008, the project team will conduct preliminary work with students and faculty in the ICPSR Summer Program to develop and evaluate the tagging concept. By summer 2009, the project will be ready for a full-scale test and evaluation, in which a treatment group and a control group will receive the same instruction but make use of differently configured GSS datasets, one configured with access to the tagging system, and one without. Evaluation of student outcomes will determine the program's success, drive dissemination of findings, and assist in planning future activities.