Hyperlinking the World of Social Science

Jostein Ryssevik 
Norwegian Social Science Data Services

The idea of connecting intellectual resources by means of (hyper)links was
first conceived by Vannevar Bush in his article As We may Think in
pre-digital 1945. Further down the lane the concept was brought to the Net
- first as a vision in Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project (1960-), later as a
generally accepted navigation tool in Tim Berners-Lee's first protocol for
the Web (1991). Today jumping from one Web-page to another by means of
mouse-clicks has become so trivial that we do not longer reflect over the
power of the concept, let alone being thrilled by the fact that the linked
objects might be stored on different continents. In the first generation
of the Web hyperlinks was merely used to create shortcuts between
fragments of texts. Today all kinds of digital objects, like pictures,
sounds, animations and software components might be linked.

For empirical social science there are at least two classes of digital
objects that gradually are making their way onto the Web. One is the
scientific text - the conference papers, the journal articles and in a few
cases even the books. The other is the empirical data that the scientific
texts are based upon. The paper will discuss and demonstrate (with live
examples based on the NESSTAR platform) how this powerful technique can be
used to integrate on-line texts with live data (not only dead tables or
graphs but live data objects that can be analyzed and manipulated by the
users). It will also discuss how these these new techniques (which in many
ways are blurring the division between the role of researcher/publisher
and reader) might be used to facilitate cumulative research or to create
digital interactive teaching materials or knowledge gardens.