AI-Ready Research Workflows in Computational Social Science: Lessons on Building a Shared Language for Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining traction in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). However, adoption remains limited by technical barriers to high-performance computing (HPC), validation processes that lag behind AI's rapid progress, and reproducibility standards that most SSH teams cannot meet. Research workflows--common in the life sciences--address these problems via encoding and abstracting technical complexity into repeatable routines; yet, accounts of how to build them in SSH remain scarce. We report on a two-year effort to build a workflow that enables a Science and Technology Studies unit to query, analyze, and enrich OpenAlex--a database of some 460 million scholarly records--on the MareNostrum supercomputer, using methods ranging from large-scale bibliometrics to LLM-based classification. We found the main challenge was translating domain-specific research questions into engineering requirements -- bridging two distinct methodological languages, with implications that were both organizational and technical. Organizationally, it meant adopting and adapting Agile to the research rhythm and pace, and reframing collaboration from a service arrangement to a co-design process. Technically, model-driven engineering was as valuable for collaboration as it was for automation; co-building the model facilitated both the creation of a shared vocabulary and the abstraction of HPC complexity. Finally, we highlight limitations we found in validation, reproducibility, and FAIR metadata -- beyond what any single project can sustain -- calling for coordinated, cross-institutional investment in the tooling and standards needed for AI-ready SSH workflows sustainable at scale.