The experience of using Digital Replay System for social science research

This paper explores the ways in which the Digital Replay System (DRS, innovative social science software, constructed as part of the National Centre for e-Social Science’s Digital Records for eSocial Science node) has facilitated research from two distinct social science based end-users; learning scientists and corpus linguists. We discuss how DRS has been designed with the flexibility to allow users from a different methodological backgrounds to collaborate and re-use data sets. We set out to describe how DRS addresses the basic software requirements of social scientists, for the processes of organising, replaying, annotating, coding, rerepresenting and analysing data. The paper discusses the real-life experiences of using DRS in order to combine qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, allowing users to address key research questions and problems. We present the key features of the Digital Replay System (DRS), in relation to the support it offers for the research activities of learning scientists, linguists and ethnographers. We describe the underlying ontology and illustrate how DRS can be used to import both raw and structured data, replay synchronised multimodal data and allow further structuring and coding. We will further illustrate how DRS can be used to create databases that are flexible and configurable to suit the needs of individual research programs. Finally, we touch on some of the ethical issues that e-Social Scientists need to address when using multimedia data.