This project intends to create a virtual and physical infrastructure for field research. The infrastructure includes participation of key social scientists at the University of Illinois-Chicago and around the country in various efforts to train and mentor graduate students and junior faculty in standard and web-based techniques. The Clark Center at UIC will become an intellectual center for debating the modernization of field research.

A digital library will help create an electronic interface to analyze qualitative documents, merge quantitative and qualitative data, and increase interaction between communities and the academy. A four city study will be organized as a template for how to conduct comparative field research and fully utilize web technology.

We have adopted a modest stance in writing this proposal, and the reader may think this is a mistake. However we believe our modesty is appropriate to the august task of transforming the practice and training of field research and establishing an infrastructure for field research in the 21^st century. Our notions of how organizations learn is drawn from the business literature (e.g. Senge 1990) and we are unapologetic about what we don't know. What we do have are the requirements of a successful , "world class" organization: we aspire to be "destroyers of walls and builders of bridges" to use Kanter's (1995) phrase.

Most importantly, we have

1. key social scientists, both on-site and in already existing networks, to train and mentor others in field research;

1. the technical capacity through UIC's Library and History Department to create web-based archiving systems and an electronic interface for qualitative data sets;
2. an historic data set in the Chicago School documents;
3. a GIS-based method already in use at UIC Data Visualization Center which can merge quantitative and qualitative data sets;
4. an exciting research question on the digital divide;
5. nationally known field researchers from many disciplines across the country who can work in a web-based collaboratory through videoconferencing, organizing their work through the digital library and
6. knowledge of the right questions, if not all the right answers.

Best of all, the Kenneth B. Clark Center has already begun work on all of the initiatives cited in this proposal. The National Science Foundation is being asked to help us do our work in a properly funded atmosphere and in a more open, national environment.

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