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Collaboration in the Development of Cyberinfrastructure

Keywords: ethnographic research, collaborative design of information systems, cyberinfrastructure, innovation, CSCW

 

NSF Award IIS-0712994 “Collaboration in the Development of Cyberinfrastructure”, 9/2007-9/2010.

 

 

 

 

Recent years have seen the rise of new forms of large-scale distributed scientific enterprises supported primarily through advanced technological infrastructures such as supercomputers and high speed networks. We refer to these as cyberinfrastructure. Cyberinfrastructure is transforming and accelerating scientific and engineering practice. Although one of the primary aims of cyberinfrastructure is to transform practice, relatively little research has focused on systematically studying the actual practices of cyberinfrastructure development and use or on studying the transformations that cyberinfrastructure is created to engender.

Given that cyberinfrastructure is comprised not only of advanced computational technologies, but also of scientists and engineers who are both developers and end users, I am:

  • Investigating existing scientific and engineering practices;

  • Investigating how scientific and engineering practices are collaboratively transformed in the creation of cyberinfrastructure;

  • Identifying patterns of collaboration (e.g. social networks, communication strategies, management strategies) and relate those patterns to organizational and scientific outcomes. 

Ethnographic methods are being used including participant-observation and semi-structured interviews. Qualitative social science methods are useful for understanding practice and how work processes change and develop over time. A nascent metagenomic cyberinfrastructure project is serving as a field site.
Technology Garden: Encouraging Sustainable Activities

Keywords: design research, CSCW, user studies, sensors, plants, sustainability, experience design

Visit the Technology Garden Development Blog

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The Technology Garden is a community maintained garden located in an office that will be equipped with sensors and ubiquitous displays mounted throughout the workplace.

The Technology Garden will support dialog and thinking about how humans and plants relate to each other. By involving our institution in the care and observation of a community garden located in an office, we will also explore what role institutions may play in supporting sustainable activities and thinking. We wish to facilitate new forms of awareness and interaction among humans and nature through and with technology. Our goal is not only to bring nature into a working space, but also to establish new forms of understanding of nature/organic planting, of what it means to take care of a plant and how that can be explored in a collaborative manner. We will explore how to transform a working environment into a hybrid living space that values not only group collaboration and efficient technology, but also provides an enjoyable place that invites relaxation and promotes health.

Goals
  • Encourage interaction between humans and nature.
  • Promote awareness of the interaction of natural and human processes.
  • Explore how technology can encourage relationship building through common activities.
  • Encourage dialog on sustainability and sustainable practices.
  • Provide a “place with a purpose to meet and relax” for both visitors and residents.
  • Create a form of sociality that extends beyond the immediate space of an office or a hallway through visualizations that support garden awareness.
Information Practices of Hobbyist Collectors

Keywords: ethnography, social informatics, leisure studies, library and information science, hobbyist collectors

 

 Recently the study of leisure has become an area of interest in Information Science. Despite the extreme popularity of hobbyist collecting, few studies have been undertaken of the social informatics and information behavior of hobbyist collectors.  We conducted an ethnographic study of rubber duck collectors including 13 interviews and participant-observation both in-person and in an online collecting community. Our data yielded a model for comparing rubber duck collectors and a typology of three types of hobbyist collectors. We describe the specifics of the information needs of  the collectors as well as methods for identifying expertise in domains of activity that lack experts vetted by publishers or institutions of higher learning. Our research breaks new theoretical ground by designating: types of hobbyist collectors, their activities relative to existing theories of leisure, and how these activities relate to their information behavior.

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