Drew Paine

From The Matrix to a Model of Coordinated Action (MoCA): A Conceptual Framework of and for CSCW

The CSCW community is reliant upon technology-centric models of groupware and collaboration that frame how we examine and design for cooperative work. This paper both reviews the CSCW literature to examine existing models of collaborative work and proposes a new, expanded conceptual model: the Model of Coordinated Action (MoCA). MoCA is a broader framework for describing complex collaborative situations and environments including, but not limited to, collaborations that have diverse, high-turnover memberships or emerging practices. We introduce MoCAs seven dimensions of coordinative action and illustrate their connection to past and current CSCW research. Finally, we discuss some ramifications of MoCA for our understanding of CSCW as a sociotechnical design space.

The work of developing cyberinfrastructure middleware projects

Middleware software, which provides an abstraction layer between low-level computational services and domain-specific applications, is a key component of cyberinfrastructure. This paper presents a qualitative study of how cyberinfrastructure middleware development is accomplished in two supercomputing centers. Our investigation highlights key development phases in the lives of middleware projects. Middleware development is typically undertaken as part of collaborations between technologists and domain scientists, and middleware developers must balance the pressure to meet specific scientific needs and the desire to explore their own R&D agendas. We explore how developers work to sustain an ongoing development trajectory by aligning their own work with particular domain science projects and funding streams. However, we find that the key transition from being a component in a domain-specific project to a stand-alone system that is useful across domains is particularly challenging for middleware development. We provide organizational and national policy implications for how to better support this transition.

What are the implications for teaching? An analysis of how educational implications are represented in engineering education

The objective of this work is to explore how implications for educational practice are represented in the scholarly literature of engineering education. This work is motivated by the increasing urgency to understand how research can be used to transform educational practice. Because scholarly writing (such as conference papers and journal articles) represents one place where researchers articulate ideas about how their research can be used (i.e., educational implications), an analysis of how such implications are represented can provide insight into ideas about the uses we imagine for our research. Once we have characterized the vision of use, we can step back and think about whether the collective vision we present may provide clues to the more general issue of transforming education.

A sociotechnical exploration of infrastructural middleware development

While previous CSCW research has noted that computer scientists have their own research interests pertaining to cyberinfrastructure development projects, most have focused on the research imperatives of scientists. This qualitative, interview-based study investigates the perspective of computer scientists developing middleware software for cyberinfrastructures at two supercomputing centers. This paper examines how technologists develop and sustain middleware applications over time by leveraging expertise and partnering with different research domains in order to achieve long-term infrastructural goals.

Producing Data, Producing Software: Developing a Radio Astronomy Research Infrastructure

The production and use of software pipelines is a key component of much modern scientific research. We present emerging findings from our qualitative, social science study of a radio astronomy group developing software pipelines as they produce a data processing infrastructure. This paper examines how these researchers co-produce data products and software pipelines to enact their research infrastructure. We investigate the work of co-producing data and software to illustrate that to better support data-intensive science, we need to understand the practices that enable and produce data products, software, and ultimately infrastructures.

Work Practices in Coordinating Center Enabled Networks (CCENs)

Coordinating Centers (CCs) are central bodies tasked with the work of coordination and operations management of a virtual organization whose purpose is to conduct multi-site research projects. We call these organizations Coordinating Center Enabled Networks (CCENs). This qualitative, interview-based study followed two CCs in the field of cancer epidemiology over seven months to answer the question: How does a CC facilitate the work of networked science in a CCEN? In order to answer the question of how CCs facilitate work, we first describe the complex ecology of CCEN work practices. We further discuss how various stakeholders engage in different work practices to facilitate scientific progress. Finally, we use the conceptual lenses of local articulation work and metawork together with the diversity of work practices to better understand what practices CCs actually coordinate.

Book Review The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures & Their Consequences

Rob Kitchin’s The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences is a timely volume that knits together research and perspectives on the twenty-first century data deluge from multiple scholarly communities connected to CSCW. The book’s aim is threefold. First, to examine in detail and reflect upon the nature of data and the assemblages they are a part of. Second, to plot how data assemblages are Bshifting and mutating with the development of new data infrastructures, open data and big data.^ Third and finally, the volume offers an interrogation of the implications of these Bnew data assemblages with respect to how we make sense of and act in the world.^ Scholars new and old in CSCWwill benefit from Kitchin’s in-depth examination of the many facets of long-term and emerging research in data studies. Research in CSCW has long examined the sociotechnical work of infrastructuring through studies of scientific collaboration—e.g., cyberinfrastructure and eScience studies (cf. Jirotka, et al. 2006; Ribes and Lee 2010)—and in healthcare informatics, among other domains. The Data Revolution synthesizes this work while incorporating perspectives that may receive less immediate attention in this journal.