Nick Barnes of Climate Code recently shared his vision for the future of Web Science. He writes, “The culture and practice of science is undergoing a revolution, driven by technological change. While most scientists are excited by the shifts and the opportunities they present, some are uneasy about the pace of change, and unclear about the destination: where is science going, and how will it help their own research. In this post, I will lay out my vision of twenty-first century science: the shape of future scientific practice, and in particular the future of scientific computation and data-processing.”

He continues, “This vision concerns a birdsong research project in the year 2020, run by a young scientist named Binita…^. Binita has an interest in the shifting geographic and seasonal patterns of birdsong, which she believes may be connected to climate change. She has some old data from a nineteenth-century global network of ornithologists, who exchanged and collected form letters recording bird sightings: that data was digitized in 2018 by a crowd-sourcing project, similar to Old Weather, called ‘Funny Old Bird’. The Funny Old Bird data is on the Victorian Historian data hub, and like most science data is entirely open. Binita needs twenty-first century data for comparison.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Flickr/ phalinn