E-Social Science from a Systems Perspective: Applying the SACS Toolkit

Many digital databases housed on the web today are organized in ways that are problematic for systems researchers, primarily because they are prearranged for conventional, reductionistic, linear, statistically-aggregated research. To make use of such data, systems researchers need an intermediary, e-scientific framework that can translate their digital data into a “systems-oriented” format, so that this data can be modeled and analyzed from a complex systems perspective. We have designed just such an intermediary framework, called the SACS Toolkit. The SACS Toolkit helps systems researchers translate and use digital data trapped in non-useful formats through its unique systems-based ontology and methodology. In the current article, we demonstrate the utility of the SACS Toolkit by applying it to a digital case study: a web-based, community health science database we are currently researching. We begin our article with a bit of background, including a review of e-social science and, more specifically, the SACS Toolkit. Next, we provide a brief description of our digital case study and the challenges it presented us; followed by an explanation of how we used the SACS Toolkit to solve our challenges. We end with a summary of how other systems researchers working with digital data may find the SACS Toolkit useful. Journal of Sociocybernetics, 7 (S) (2009) 89