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’.
Research
CURRENT FUNDED RESEARCH:
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.
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).
LINKS:
Primary Research Themes
Below I outline six themes of my research. Together they serve as organizing principles as I prepare a book manuscript on computerization movements and universal information infrastructure:
1- Technical Work as a Social and Organizational Activity: Interoperability is usually understood as a technical capacity. My research has shown that this is an impoverished view. Instead, interoperability should be understood as a continuation of the central themes of library, archival and information science: sustainability, access, preservation, automation, and accountability . Each of these themes must be addressed as simultaneously technological, social and organizational. For example, my work on ontologies tracks the emergence persistent routines to support technical development and methods for community outreach.
2- Strategies for the Long-Term: Infrastructure evokes images of a sustainable, reliable and ubiquitous environment for supporting work. However, within cyberinfrastructure circles there is little understanding of how to create and sustain such environments in the long-term. For example, funding institutions have yet to make commitments that match the spans of time we associate with infrastructure. The science of the long-term remains nascent and emergent field. In order to build sustainable scientific infrastructure we must be able to plan for the long term shifts, such as continuous shifts in technology, institutional support or practical research methods.
3- The Role of the State in Science: Infrastructure is expensive in terms of time, necessary expertise and financial investment. This presents new challenges for the institutions of science. For example, a tension has emerged between infrastructure and research. The NSF primary mandate is to fund new science, however in recent years it has dedicated increasing portions of its budget to the creation of facilities supporting scientific work. Furthermore, from a historical perspective infrastructure building represents a significant shift in the role of scientific institutions such as the NSF that have usually taken a hands off approach to the projects they fund. These changes are significant and merit scholarly attention.
4- Transformations in Knowledge Work: The introduction of novel information technologies is spawning transformations in the everyday practice of science. As new forms of representation (data visualization, geographic information systems, knowledge mediation) are introduced what counts as scientific work will also be changed. Does creating metadata count towards a professors tenure in geoscience? Is a meteorological visualization tool a contribution to atmospheric science?
5- The Emergence of New Organizational Forms: Cyberinfrastructure is an emergent organizational form. Such projects seek to bring together under a single umbrella the development of computational resources, community building and cutting edge scientific research. What kind of organization can support these diverse forms of activity? What are the consequences of large-scale infrastructure development for the practicing scientist and the production of knowledge?
6- The Role of Social Science in Infrastructure Design: Recent large-scale infrastructure initiatives have opened many new opportunities for the direct participation of social scientists in design. These opportunities pose new challenges for social science: what are our available methods for participation? How to manage tensions between research and participatory intervention? What are the ethical and political considerations for action research as social science becomes enmeshed with design and implementation? My research in GEON, the CIP and the NCSA community engagement project extend beyond the research-observation goals of traditional social science and has afforded me the opportunity to substantially participate in information infrastructure development. The active and effective participation of social science in systems design and deployment is a methodological commitment of my current and future research.
Bio
David Ribes joined Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology Program (CCT) in the fall of 2008 as a Visiting Assistant Professor. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Science Studies (STS) from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) (2006), and came to Georgetown University from the University of Michigan where he did a post-doc at the School of Information. His masters is from McGill University in Montreal and his Bachelors is from York University in Toronto.
David’s 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 (or networked information technologies for the support of science) and how these are transforming the practice and organization of contemporary knowledge production e.g., distributed and interdisciplinary scientific collaboration; novel data visualization technologies; user studies; knowledge representation, and science policy. His primary methods are ethnographic and archival.
David has several articles published in major peer-reviewed journals, including Information and Organization, and the Journal of the Association of Information Systems. He has a chapter in the 2008 MIT Press edited volume (Olson, Zimmerman, Bos) ‘Scientific Collaboration on the Internet’. He is also co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (JCSCW) on Cyberinfrastructure and eScience. David is currently a PI on two National Science Foundation grants studying the consequences of novel information technologies on the work of scientists and exploring new patterns of distributed collaboration.
As a member CCT, he teaches the course Infrastructure Studies: Knowledge, Distribution and Power and a variety of other offerings, such as an introduction to Science and Technology Studies, and methodology courses on grounded theory and qualitative studies of technology.
David grew up in Ottawa and Madrid. He’s had six parakeets and they’ve all been called Budgie.
Writings
Publications are linked to a .pdf file of a final draft or publication website.
Ribes, D. and G.C. Bowker, Between meaning and machine: learning to represent the knowledge of communities. Information and Organization, 2009 (pages & issue, forthcoming).
Geiger, S. and D.Ribes, The work of sustaining order in Wikipedia: The banning of a vandal. Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).
Ribes, D. and T.A. Finholt, The long now of infrastructure: Articulating tensions in development. Journal for the Association of Information Systems (JAIS): Special issue on eInfrastructures, 2009. 10(5): p. 375-398.
Ribes, D. and T. A. Finholt (2008). ‘Representing community: Knowing users in the face of changing constituencies.‘ Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).
Ribes, David and Bowker, Geoffrey C. (2008) ‘Organizing for Multidisciplinary Collaboration: The Case of GEON’, in G.M. Olson, J.S. Olson and A. Zimmerman (eds), Science on the Internet (
Book Reviews
Ribes, D. 2008. The Matter of Users Review of How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of users and technologies, Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch (eds.). Metascience 17(1).
Ribes, D. 2008. Tying Internet Studies Together Review of Sociology in the Age of the Internet, Allison Cavanagh. Metascience 17(2).
Dissertation
Under Preparation, Review or Revision
CV
Updated May 2009
Click here: CV in .pdf and then follow the link that says ‘click here’ to download attachment.
Contact Information
David Ribes
Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT)
3520 Prospect St. NW, Suite 311
Washington, DC, 20057
- Phone: 202.687.4831
- Fax: 202.687.1720
E-mail: dr273 at georgetown.edu
This picture is here in case you see me. Feel free to say ‘alo.
Dissertation
LINKS:
David’s dissertation traces development in the Cyberinfrastructure project GEON (the Geosciences Network) 
. GEON seeks to provide computing, visualization and data integration resources to the broader earth sciences. David’s research focuses on the practical processes of work across distance, institutional difference and technical expertise in building an umbrella community infrastructure for the earth sciences. He shows how integrating — or ‘interoperating’ — the geosciences has involved much more than information technology R&D, it has also been a significant social and organizational undertaking. In building GEON members have had to navigate the multiple existing institutions of science and the diversity domain knowledges while simultaneously developing a distributed organization and information infrastructure. The primary method for data collection involved a three year multi-site ethnography including participant observation, interviews and document analysis. On several occasions David intervened on the GEON project providing formal feedback on social and organizational aspects of ongoing development.
Ribes Dissertation Abstract
Universal Informatics: Building Cyberinfrastructure, Interoperating the Geosciences
Comittee: Steven Epstein & Geoffrey Bowker (co-chairs); Andrew Lakoff; Chandra Mukerji; Susan Leigh Star
The creation of cyberinfrastructure is an ambitious
This dissertation is based on a three-year ethnography of one such emergent infrastructure project: GEON, the geosciences network. I identify, as a principal research object, the logic of interoperability: an emerging set of techniques and technologies which seek to preserve the specificities of heterogeneous sciences while linking them. In principle standardization offers the benefit of making possible communication, data sharing and integrated computing systems; however, in practice such projects often fail or generate substantial opposition.
I argue that the logic of interoperability seeks to blunt the politics of standardization while retaining its enabling properties. Rather than erasing disciplinary difference interoperability calls for the sciences to be known and mapped in order to make possible an automated crossing. In this vision, the specificity of the sciences are preserved while domains are linked through relations of mediation.
Drawing from research in Science and Technology Studies and the methodologies of actor-network theory and ethnomethodology, I trace the enactment of the logic of interoperability in GEON at three scales of action: institutional, organizational, and technical. At each scale I sustain a focus on the material and organizing practices of members as they work to interoperate the earth sciences. At the institutional scale there is a growing impetus and increasingly sophisticated skill-set for the arrangement of multidisciplinary collaborations of domain and computer science. At the organizational scale new methods for constructing large-scale umbrella infrastructures are being invented. At the technical scale a set of technologies of interoperability are under development which seek to automate translations of the data, language, concepts, and knowledge of science itself. Together these point to a mounting confluence of efforts at interoperability seeking a revolution of science at all scales of action and positing a new model of governance for science.
Comparative Studies
Comparative research is conducted in collaboration with two funded research projects: the Comparative Interoperability Project (CIP) and the
This article summarizes the CIP rationale for comparison:
Comparative Interoperability Project: Configurations of Community, Technology, Organization Proceedings of the Second ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (2005)(Author list: Ribes, Baker, Millerand, Bowker)
The CIP Team: Karen Baker, David Ribes, Florence Millerand, Geoffie Bowker
AcademaToons
Life in the iBureaucracy (from the eyes of an artiste)
My Visit to CHI (oh, don’t be so sensitive!)
After the thesis defense.
A metaphorical, but accurate representation of the thesis defense.
