Critical accountability: Dilemmas for interventionist studies of e-science

E-science initiatives are technology-enabled interventions in current research practices. These interventions are justified by the hope that e-science infrastructures and tools will foster new venues for researchers and scholars. This triggers a complex interaction between hope, hype, and accountability. In this article, we discuss a new initiative at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)—the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS)—in which we are directly involved. The VKS combines the goals of reflexive analysis with design of scholarly practices in a variety of fields. The article discusses this nexus and the tensions involved, as exemplary of the types of challenges that researchers will experience in e-social science as it develops.