The National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to stimulate the production of new computer based tools and services and their uptake by social scientists, to enable them to address the key challenges in their research fields in new ways. zuerst diese website - http://www.ncess.ac.uk/ (jetzt 2010 eingestellt) -  re–vitalised the e-Social Science research programme with the launch of the Manchester eResearch Centre (MeRC)  http://www.merc.ac.uk/?q=node/689 - andere englische Websites -
http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/microsites/oess/  ---
http://redress.lancs.ac.uk/

(allgemein - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Science )

What is eResearch?
eResearch is research enabled by the application of advanced information and communication technology (ICT). It has grown out of the UK e-science programme, launched by the Research Councils in 2001 following an injection of over £210m new funding by the (then) Department of Trade and Industry. The initial emphasis of the e-science programme was on the Grid, that is, the hardware, software and standards necessary to co-ordinate geographically distributed compute and data resources and deliver them to researchers regardless of location. The ambition was to facilitate bigger and faster science, with collaborators world-wide addressing key challenges in new ways. This model was particularly appropriate to particle physics, and such challenges as weather predictions and earthquake modelling. However, the approach was less matched to those disciplines subsequently encouraged to join the e-science bandwagon, including the social sciences, where mixtures of numerous quantitative and qualitative methods are used to pursue relatively small scale issues, with few generic problems requiring complex middleware to coordinate huge distributed compute and data resources. Accordingly, as e-social science – or eResearch within the social sciences – developed, it broadened out to include

• the use of digital data harvested from the Web to capture people’s views and map their individual behaviours and their networks;

• the exploration of new forms of digital data, such as mobile phone logs and GPS;

• the creation and exploitation of metadata to facilitate the sharing and reuse of data;

• linking data about individuals and the confidentiality and ethical issues that this raises;

• webometrics;

• mapping geo-referenced data;

• large-scale social simulations of various sorts;

• parallelisation of statistical routines;

• collaborative markup of video data about social interaction;

• text and data mining;

• and tools for delivering behavioural interventions over the internet.

In the humanities, scholars have been particularly enthusiastic about the digitisation of their data resources and advanced search facilities because in combination these dramatically increase the efficiency with which original sources can be discovered, interrogated, and combined. At the same time, the technical environment of eResearch has been changing.

The notion of the Grid being at the core of e-science has gradually given way to an emphasis on e-infrastructure (cyberinfrastructure in the US). This in not simply a synonym for the Grid but marks a shift of attention to a broad range of computing tools and services that support the everyday work of scientists, including those that are loosely collected together under the title of Web 2.0. While these are technically less powerful than Grid-based solutions, their relative simplicity – both in terms of implementation effort and ease of use – has made them attractive to users who do not need more sophisticated tools and services, and who are deterred from using Grid services by their complexity and the perceived barriers to access. Many of the new tools and services are freely available on the Web (often in exchange for accepting advertisements) or are open source, and some have very active and technically adept support groups available. These features considerably reduce the barriers to uptake.

More information can be found in the recently published collection edited by Nicholas W Jankowski, E-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice, Routledge, 2009 www.routledge.com/9780415990288

Nutzung von "Informationsströmen" im Internet - Früherkennung von Krankheitswellen - Registrierung nach welchen Begriffen gesucht wird; wie häufig Meldungen zu "googeln" sind (GNTZ);
"M-Eco" Forschungszentrum L3S der Uni Hannover (Dr.Kerstin Denecke); Surveillance im RKI (Dr. Tim Eckmanns)
- Harvard University - Health Map - www.healthmap.org

Netnographie : Marktforschung durch Analyse von Kundenverhalten im Internet - allgemein Beobachtung Verhalten von Menschen in Bezug zum Internet (wikipedia) (engl - online ethnography)

-   „Web-based studies in nutrition: the NutriNet-Santé Study“ - http://info.etude-nutrinet-sante.fr/en/presentation_en
(seit 2009; observational prospective cohort study; in ganz Frankreich; >300.000 Teilnehmer = nutrinautes)

Eva-Maria Endres - Masterarbeit „Ernährungskommunikation in Sozialen Medien" (Hochschule Fulda, Betreuer: Prof. Dr. habil Christoph Klotter)  (link)