Integrating cyberinfrastructure into existing e-Social Science research

This study has been facilitated by an NSF/ESRC exchange programme between researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Nottingham. At the University of Nottingham the National Centre for e-Social Science node seeks to explore, understand and demonstrate the salience of new forms of digital record as they emerge from and for eSocial Science. The Nottingham Multimodal Corpus (NMMC) is a corpus of multimodal data that marries established coding schemes with visual mark-up systems to foster a richer understanding of the embodied nature of language use and its manifold relations to the production of distinctive social contexts. At the University of Chicago, the NSF-funded Social Informatics Data Grid (SIDGrid) is being built to enable researchers to collect realtime multimodal behaviour at multiple time scales. Multimedia data (voice, video, images, text, numerical) is stored in a distributed data warehouse that employs Web and Grid services to support data storage, access, exploration, annotation, integration, analysis, and mining of individual and combined data sets. With particular reference to the analysis of and markup of hand gestures in spoken discourse, this paper explores some basic steps in integrating cyberinfrastructure into existing e-Social Science research as an interdisciplinary team with perspectives from linguistics, psychology, data and computing systems, and machine analysis of multi-modal data.