Preface

VSMM 2010 promises to be an important milestone in the changing world of approaching research. The topic of “Transdisciplinary” as an emerging methodology is timely. I want to give credit to the organizers who have chosen our direction this year. We have reached a point where the deluge of data in the digital world challenges our older methods and we have non trivial problems related to search, retrieval, and pattern discovery. Scholars identify themselves as “domain experts” and are educated to limit most of the basic research to their particular domain. This process often results in non-generalizable findings. More troubling is that these approaches do not scale. In the current digital age, however, the limits on “what can be considered” have shifted. The goals and strategies of traditional scholarship have begun to falter.