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

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.

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.

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:

About the Dissertation

Comparative Studies

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 professor’s 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.