Below are my current activities ….

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.

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 participant’s 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

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.

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).

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’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.

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.

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.

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.