New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-science

New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-Science offers a distinctive understanding of new infrastructures for knowledge production based in science and technology studies. This field offers a unique potential to assess systematically the prospects for new modes of science enabled by information and communication technologies. The authors use varied methodological approaches, reviewing the origins of initiatives to develop e-science infrastructures, exploring the diversity of the various solutions and the scientific cultures which use them, and assessing the prospects for wholesale change in scientific structures and practices. New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-Science contains practical advice for the design of appropriate technological solutions, and long range assessments of the prospects for change useful both to policy makers and those implementing institutional infrastructures. Readers interested in understanding contemporary science will gain a rich picture of the practices and the technologies that are shaping the knowledge production of the future.

Christine Hine is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey, UK. She researches the sociology of science and technology, focusing on the use of information and communications technologies in science, and in developing methodological approaches to the understanding of the Internet. She has been particularly prominent in the development of ethnographies of the Internet. Her work on e-science builds on a background in science: she holds a first class honors degree in botany from Oxford University, a master’s in biological computation, and a Ph.D. in biology from the University of York, UK. She is currently president of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology.