Welcome …

I am a visiting assistant professor in Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture & Technology Program. I study the development of information infrastructure for the sciences, computer supported cooperative work, visualization, user studies, and the practice of science/information policy.

Below are my current activities…

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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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Communities and Technology Conference

Karen Baker and presented our paper, Modes of Social Science Engagement, at the Communities and Technology Conference (C&T2007 - June 28-30).

We also attended the attached workshop on Geof Bowker’s concept of ‘Memory Practices’.

Finally, and most surprisingly, I was asked to be a (fill-in) panelist for the ‘Enabling Communities in Cyberinfrastructure’ keynote. In a hastily prepared, but stellar, presentation I talked about sustainability, stability and maintenance work.

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Open Educational Resources Initiative Meeting

Visited lovely Half-Moon Bay for a workshop informing the Hewlett foundation on their future funding strategy for the Open Educational Resources Program (see Hewlett OER - Atkins, Seely Brown, Hammond Report).

The question was how to develop what they call an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure. Geof Bowker and I then wrote a report on this workshop.

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Presentation at Enriching Scholarship

Along with Tom Finholt I presented on ‘Clickwork’, ‘Crowdsourcing’ and New Modes of Public Participation in Science at the May 7th Enriching Scholarship event here at UMich. Here are our powerpoint slides (3MB, no video); the talk will be archived for webcast from the enriching scholarship site.

We were the panel commentators for Bryan Alexander’s keynote on Ubiquitous Computing and Gaming.

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San Jose, CHI and and CIP meeting

I made a guest appearance at CHI by virtue of its power to draw together various satellite meetings. We had a CIP meeting in San Jose, and the ‘NSF Understanding Infrastructure Report’ people (Edwards, Jackson, Bowker…) were hosting meetings to get feedback….

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