Surviving the Three Revolutions in Social Science Computing

Abstract

This article argues that for the social sciences to develop the software and services needed for effective use of computer networks, they will have to adopt and abide by standards that have been developed largely outside the social sciences. These standards are essentially those employed in the World Wide Web. It is suggested that these standards will prove sufficiently powerful to meet the needs of the social sciences and that, in fact, a qualitatively superior level of information services can be made available to students and researchers through such tools. Communication, cooperation, and collaboration are urged for efficient and rapid development of these services for the social sciences. Keywords: World Wide Web, Mosaic, Internet, telecommunications, archive, distributed computing, NCSA, SGML, HTML, supercomputing.