David Ribes

Current Activities

Links

Welcome …

I joined Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology Program (CCT)  in the fall of 2008 as a Visiting Assistant Professor. My research and teaching interests, which lie at the intersection of sociology, philosophy and history of science&technology, have focused on the emerging phenomena of Cyberinfrastructure (i.e., networked information technologies for the support of science) and how these are transforming the practice and organization of contemporary knowledge production. My primary methods are ethnographic and archival.

Below are my current activities ….

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Call for Papers JCSCW: Supporting Scientific Collaboration Through Cyberinfrastructure and e-Science

Call for Papers Special Issue of JCSCW

Guest Editors: Charlotte P. Lee, David Ribes, Matthew Bietz , Marina Jirotka, and Helena Karasti

For this special issue on computer supported scientific collaboration, we welcome research on topics such as, but not limited to: case studies or comparative analyses of cyberinfrastructure & e-Science development or use; novel applications for large-scale scientific collaboration; and practices for supporting heterogeneous, distributed, or long-term collaborations. We seek empirically grounded studies with a sensibility for theoretical contributions to CSCW and closely related fields.

For more information, click here.

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‘Scientific Collaboration on the Internet’ Published by MIT Press

The book ‘Scientific Collaboration on the Internet’ edited by Gary Olson, Ann Zimmerman and Nathan Bos has, at long last, been published.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11603

This book contains a GEON case study written by yours truly (with Geof Bowker) focusing on the two primary ‘disciplinary boundaries’ that participants must navigate as they seek to develop common Cyberinfrastructure: domain/domain (e.g., geophysics and paleobotany)  and domain/IT (e.g., geoscientists and computer scientists).

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Two NSF awards!

I have been awarded two NSF grants to fund my research on Cyberinfrastructure and Virtual Organization!

I am a principal investigator (PI) on ‘Delegating Organizational Work to Virtual Organization Technologies‘ from the Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems (VOSS) program.

I am a co-PI on ‘Monitoring, Modeling and Memory: Dynamics of Data and Knowledge in Scientific Cyberinfrastructure‘ from the Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) program.

I’ll be working closely on these exciting projects with my colleagues for the next few years.  More on this to come.

Participants and institutions on these projects include: Christine Borgman (UCLA); Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (Santa Clara University); Paul N. Edwards, Steven J. Jackson and Thomas Finholt (University of Michigan).

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I have arrived at Georgetown

I’m now at Georgetown University in the Communication, Culture and Technology (CCT) program.

I’m teaching two masters courses this fall. I’ll write more about this but for now, the short of it is that I’m teaching an introduction to Science and Technology Studies (STS) and a ‘classics of qualitative studies of technology’ course.

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Inaugural Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems

Currently attending (07.20-25) the Inaugural Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems (CSST).  This elaborate title actually reflects a very exciting endeavor to bring together senior and junior scholars in social informatics, STS and other information centered studies.

The primary organizers (Steve Sawyer and Tom Finholt) have assembled a spectacular cast of characters and we’ve been discussing everything from research and methods, to the development of institutionalized support and creating venues for our disparate research.

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The Use of ‘Community’: Knowing Users in the Face of Changing Constituencies

On April 15th, 2008, here at the UMich iSchool, I presented my work on how participants within Cyberinfrastructure projects come to know (and thus constitute) their intended communities.

 Click here for a draft of this article to appear in CSCW2008.

Below is the abstact for the talk.

Abstract:

‘Community’ is one of the most important, yet most variably deployed, terms within contemporary information infrastructure design. I seek to clarify its usage by turning attention to the ways in which it serves as an organizing principle. To do so, I ethnographically traced the activities in the Water and Environmental Research Systems Network (WATERS). WATERS is a large observatory and cyberinfrastructure development project intending to serve heterogeneous scientific disciplines studying the water environment. In 2005 WATERS was forced to reorganize as a new group of hydrological scientists was added to the project. This event initiated a series of discussions about who the infrastructure was intended to serve, and how it would do so.

In WATERS the definition of their communities became a stand-in for debates over design decisions, the allocation of resources, and a future trajectory of scientific research. The use of ‘community’ by participants in IT development projects is substantially divorced from its traditional meanings which emphasize collective moral orientations or shared affective ties; instead, community is closer in practice to ‘constituency,’ and is used as a short-hand for issues of (political) representation, inclusion and mandate.

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Clickworkers as a study in Distributing Expert Work

On Feb.6 2008 I presented my early work on the NASA Clickworkers interface at the UMich Science, Technology and Medicine Studies speaker series. Below is my abstract.

Redistributing Professional Vision: Of Practice and Expertise in Classifying Craters

This presentation focuses on the case of NASA Clickworkers, a web-based interface in which “average users” classify literally millions of cosmological images.

I will explore this technology with respect to the notion of “professional vision” as it has been formulated within practice-centered studies of science. Through Clickworkers, software engineers restructure relations of expertise, relocating proficiency at the site of design and distributing generic training and “human informational tasks” to anonymous users.

In the second part of this presentation I will turn to the emerging base of engineering knowledge that seeks to systematize the production of such software platforms.

In January I presented a similar talk as a guest lecture at Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology Program.

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iConference 2008: Working at the intersections of information, domain and social science

I’m organizing a panel at the upcoming iConference at UCLA, Feb.28-March.1 (http://www.ischools.org/oc/conference08/)

The panel draws together four ‘informationally oriented’ researchers who have worked at the intersections of information, domain and social science: Karen Baker, Christine Borgman, Geoffrey Bowker, and Tom Finholt.

Each presenter will tell a narrative (or story) which illustrates their experiences, difficulties and learning from such ‘action research’.

Here is a full description.

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Fall Conference Schedule — ‘The Long Term Series’

This fall I’ll be attending three conferences. At each I’ll be exploring a different facet of my research on building infrastructure for the long-term.

E-Social Science — Ann Arbor — ‘Six Tensions in Developing Long-Term Infrastructure’: Along with Tom Finholt I’ll be presenting on six tensions that actor’s describe as they go about the work of developing scientific information infrastructure.

Social Studies of Science — Montreal — ‘Consequences of the Long-Term Today’: How are the goals of developing ‘long term cyberinfrastructure’ impacting the funding, organization and practice of science today?

GROUP — Sanibel Island — ‘Across the Scales: Designing Infrastructure for the Long-Term’ : Along with Tom Finholt I’ll be presenting on our research which explores actor’s work as they simultaneously seek to engage institutional, organizational and technological ’scales’ to create persistent informational resources for the sciences.

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