Big Data Meets Survey Science

24Moving Social Science into the Fourth Paradigm: The Data Life Cycle

Craig A. Hill

RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA

Professor Sir John Taylor, Director General of the UK Research Councils, coined the term “eScience” almost two decades ago, which he defined as, “science increasingly done through global collaboration enabled by the Internet, using very large data collections, terascale computing resources, and high‐performance visualization.” He went on to elaborate that these collaborations in key areas of science would have to be enabled by a “next generation of infrastructure” – and, by that, he did not mean only hardware and software but also culture. A few years later, Hey, Tolle, and Tansley (2009) emphasized this point in the concluding chapter of their book: “at the heart of scientific computing in this age of the fourth paradigm is a need for scientists and computer scientists to work collaboratively… to make significant progress, the research community must be supported by an adequate cyberinfrastructure comprising not only the hardware… but also the software tools and middleware.”

Microsoft researcher Jim Gray recognized all of this – and more. In 2007, he spoke at the US National Research Council (NRC), outlining his fourth paradigm view – a shift in the way in which scientific research would be conducted in the future. In this view, science was poised to advance into its next, fourth paradigm: that is, after starting with (i) empiricism, graduating ...