Welcome …
I joined Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology Program (CCT) in the fall of 2008 as an 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 ….
Invitation to a Workshop on Studies of Sociotechnical Systems
We invite participation in the second iConference Workshop on Sociotechnical systems, to be held prior to the iConference on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign on February 3, 2010. To see “who we are”, check out the facebook group – “Researchers of the Sociotechnical” or our website at http://www.sociotech.net . You may register here: https://www.ischools.org/conftool/
Workshop: “Keywords of the Sociotechnical”
Organizers: Steven Jackson, University of Michigan; David Ribes, Georgetown University; Sean Goggins, Drexel University
In 1975 British cultural historian Raymond Williams published his influential pocket dictionary /Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society/. The text tackled the most difficult, contested and often underexplored terms in his field: culture, agency, technology, etc. Today studies of sociotechnical systems finds itself at a place not unlike where British Cultural Studies was in the early 70s: a meeting place for scholars of multiple disciplinary backgrounds deploying concepts and tools whose commonality (and separateness) of meaning has yet to be fully established.
What are the words that transcend the sectional interests of, say, organizational science and HCI, CSCW and science and technology studies? When an HCI researcher and a social informatics scholar say ‘system’ or ‘design,’ are they really talking about the same thing? Relatedly, how do we go about attaching these keywords to concrete socio-technical research problems in our diverse disciplinary traditions? How do we go about transforming a cross-field coincidence of research objects (Wikipedia, eScience, social practices in pervasive computing spaces, and countless others) into a mutually informed set of research problems?
This workshop will provide a venue to gather and discuss our intellectual traditions, research objects, and vocabularies in order to elaborate and clarify the keywords of the sociotechnical.
Studying Sociotechnical Systems
The workshop builds on and extends efforts that have included the 2008 & 2009 Summer Research Institute of the Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems (CSST). These Research Institutes, supported by the National Science Foundation and held at the University of Michigan (2008) and Syracuse University (2009), brought together a diverse set of researchers from fields as diverse as science and technology studies, human-computer interaction, management and organizational studies, library and information science, sociology, social informatics, and computer science, to begin exploring and framing a future research agenda centered on socio-technical research.
CFP: 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
Scientific collaboration using cyberinfrastructure (CI), or e-Science, is forward facing. e-Science projects aim to support the collaboration of research communities, whether by facilitating distanced collaboration or sharing data and computational resources. The most ambitious e-Science projects are creating entirely novel scientific fields, anticipating and actively cultivating new scientific communities and practices. Such endeavors present original challenges to researchers in CSCW fields: questions of large-scale technology development, of supporting communities in addition to groups, and of long-term sustainability.
Cyberinfrastructure and e-Science projects are partially information technology research ventures, but they are also forms of applied sociology, e.g., building bridges across heterogeneous disciplinary traditions and scientific methods. Careful attention must be paid to the full range of participants activities as they go about their work. How to establish reliable, accessible and appropriate information infrastructure is a challenge for contemporary CSCW.
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.
Schedule and Submission Process
| October 1, 2009 .. | Deadline for submission of manuscripts |
| November 1, 2009 . | Notification of acceptance |
| January 15, 2009 | Submission of finished manuscripts |
| 2010 | Publication |
Instructions for Authors: http://www.springer.com/computer/journal/10606
Submitting Manuscripts: Authors should submit their manuscripts to the Editorial Manager (EM) system (at http://www.editorialmanager.com/cosu/ ). Select the appropriate special issue under Article Type: Scientific Collaboration Through Cyberinfrastructure.
About the Journal: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) disseminates innovative research results and provides an interdisciplinary forum for the debate and exchange of ideas concerning theoretical, practical, technical, and social issues in CSCW. Coverage ranges from ethnographic studies of cooperative work to reports on the development of CSCW systems and their technological foundations.
'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/
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
In January I presented a similar talk as a guest lecture at Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology Program.