Rediscovering the Early History of Social Scientific Data Centers in the US
Social scientific data centers have long been essential to how social science research in the US gets done. Yet, there has been little historical investigation of their origins and early institutional lives. To rediscover this early history, I rely on a range of published works by social scientists...
Guardado en:
| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/rhsh, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lenguaje: | Anglais |
| Publicado: |
Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines
2025
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumario: | Social scientific data centers have long been essential to how social science research in the US gets done. Yet, there has been little historical investigation of their origins and early institutional lives. To rediscover this early history, I rely on a range of published works by social scientists who participated in the data center boom, unpublished institutional records of the two earliest social scientific data centers founded in the postwar period, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research and the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research (ICPSR), as well as more recent historical accounts of this period. All of these sources speak to the intellectual and professional aspirations that drove the creation of social scientific data centers and the most fundamental obstacles they faced. I conclude by reflecting on how the dominance data centers ultimately achieved continues to shape social scientific knowledge and research. |
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