Geoffrey C. Bowker

Promoting access to public research data for scientific, economic, and social development

Access to and sharing of data are essential for the conduct and advancement of science. This article argues that publicly funded research data should be openly available to the maximum extent possible. To seize upon advancements of cyberinfrastructure and the explosion of data in a range of scientific disciplines, this access to and sharing of publicly funded data must be advanced within an international framework, beyond technological solutions. The authors, members of an OECD Follow-up Group, present their research findings, based closely on their report to OECD, on key issues in data access, as well as operating principles and management aspects necessary to successful data access regimes.

Science friction: Data, metadata, and collaboration:

When scientists from two or more disciplines work together on related problems, they often face what we call ‘science friction’. As science becomes more data-driven, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, demand increases for interoperability among data, tools, and services. Metadata – usually viewed simply as ‘data about data’, describing objects such as books, journal articles, or datasets – serve key roles in interoperability. Yet we find that metadata may be a source of friction between scientific collaborators, impeding data sharing. We propose an alternative view of metadata, focusing on its role in an ephemeral process of scientific communication, rather than as an enduring outcome or product. We report examples of highly useful, yet ad hoc, incomplete, loosely structured, and mutable, descriptions of data found in our ethnographic studies of several large projects in the environmental sciences. Based on this evidence, we argue that while metadata products can be powerful resources, usually they must be supplemented with metadata processes. Metadata-as-process suggests the very large role of the ad hoc, the incomplete, and the unfinished in everyday scientific work.

Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment

This article presents Information Infrastructure Studies, a research area that takes up some core issues in digital information and organization research. Infrastructure Studies simultaneously addresses the technical, social, and organizational aspects of the development, usage, and maintenance of infrastructures in local communities as well as global arenas. While infrastructure is understood as a broad category referring to a variety of pervasive, enabling network resources such as railroad lines, plumbing and pipes, electrical power plants and wires, this article focuses on information infrastructure, such as computational services and help desks, or federating activities such as scientific data repositories and archives spanning the multiple disciplines needed to address such issues as climate warming and the biodiversity crisis. These are elements associated with the internet and, frequently today, associated with cyberinfrastructure or e-science endeavors. We argue that a theoretical understanding of infrastructure provides the context for needed dialogue between design, use, and sustainability of internet-based infrastructure services. This article outlines a research area and outlines overarching themes of Infrastructure Studies. Part one of the paper presents definitions for infrastructure and cyberinfrastructure, reviewing salient previous work. Part two portrays key ideas from infrastructure studies (knowledge work, social and political values, new forms of sociality, etc.). In closing, the character of the field today is considered.

Infrastructure and Organizational Transformation: Classifying Nurses’ Work

This paper describes an evolving classification system for understanding the nature of nursing work, the Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) developed at the University of Iowa. We describe the balancing act inherent in maximizing three dimensions of the system: comparability, control and visibility. As part of a series of studies on the relationship between classification, infrastructure, work and knowledge, we link NIC with other classification systems such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and its role in organizational coordination. We analyze some of the features of evolving infrastructure, and its potential impact on organizations and practice.

Out of machine age?: complexity, sociotechnical systems and actor network theory

Abstract This paper compares sociotechnical systems (STS) theory and actor network theory (ANT) as developed by Latour, Callon and Law. We examine how STS and ANT can be viewed as responses to rationalist/functionalist research on large sociotechnical systems and as extensions and elaborations of pragmatist/culturalist frameworks developed in sociology and anthropology. We reexamine, from an actor network perspective, Trist and Bamforth’s seminal article in which the concept of a sociotechnical system was introduced. We also discuss how STS ideas on interactive planning can be combined with concepts from ANT to investigate interdependent processes of invention and innovation in large sociotechnical networks.

Values in design

Focusing on socio-technical design with values as a critical component in the design process.

Information Infrastructures for Distributed Collective Practices

The history of this special issue of the CSCW Journal goes back to 1997 and a book entitled ‘‘Social Science, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide’’ (Bowker et al., 1997). The book concluded that an increasing number of researchers were electing to take up residence in the great divide in order to produce systems which were organizationally and socially sensitive. After more than two decades of effort, the early war stories of CSCW pitting the human, emotion-laden, contingent context of cooperative work (CW) against the formal, rational and potentially universal character of computer support (CS) were losing their appeal. Social scientists (primarily from sociology and anthropology; and attached either to research laboratories like PARC or universities) and computer and information scientists (primarily from software development, requirements engineering and artificial intelligence) had created a new form of partnership. Three conditions were evoked in order to explain the emergence of this new partnership (Turner, 1997). The first was that the CSCW community had largely moved away from a concern with normative social scientific questions. For example, efforts aimed at understanding how human and technical systems come together in computing systems were, in the 1960s, strongly anchored in concerns about automation (e.g., ‘‘deskilling,’’ stratification and job loss) but, by the middle of the 1990s, this concern had become a plank of accepted CSCW practice. No member of the CSCW community now doubts that the goal of in-depth investigations of the workplace is to develop easier-to-use systems that enhance working conditions rather than impoverishing them. To the

Instrumentalizing the truth of practice

4Isabelle Stengers suggests that the ‘truth’ of scientific findings is predicated upon a relationship of forces that are organized around it. ‘An interested scientist will ask the question: can I incorporate this “thing” into my research? Can I refer to the results of this type of measurement…In other words, can I be situated by this proposition, can it place itself between my work and that of the one who proposes it?’ (Stengers 1997, p. 83) Latour (1988) deals with this issue when he discusses Pasteur’s mobilization of forces around microbes. Microbes become ‘real’ scientific objects through the various interests (commercial and otherwise) that converge on them.

Modeling Distributed Knowledge Processes in Next Generation Multidisciplinary Alliances

Current research on distributed knowledge processes suggests a critical conflict between knowledge processes in groups and the technologies built to support them. The conflict centers on observations that authentic and efficient knowledge creation and sharing is deeply embedded in an interpersonal face to face context, but that technologies to support distributed knowledge processes rely on the assumption that knowledge can be made mobile outside these specific contexts. This conflict is of growing national importance as work patterns change from same site to separate site collaboration, and millions of government and industrial dollars are invested in establishing academic-industry alliances and building infrastructures to support distributed collaboration and knowledge. In this paper we describe our multi-method approach for studying the tension between embedded and mobile knowledge in a project funded by the National Science Foundations program on Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence. This project examines knowledge processes and technology in distributed, multidisciplinary scientific teams in the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), a prototypical next generation enterprise. First we review evidence for the tension between embedded and mobile knowledge in several research literatures. Then we present our three-factor conceptualization that considers how the interrelationships among characteristics of the knowledge shared, group context, and communications technology contribute to the tension between embedded and mobile knowledge. Based on this conceptualization we suggest that this dichotomy does not fully explain distributed multidisciplinary knowledge processes. Therefore we propose some alternate models of how knowledge is shared. We briefly introduce the setting in which we are studying distributed knowledge processes and finally, we describe the data collection methods and the current status of the project.

Enacting silence: Residual categories as a challenge for ethics, information systems, and communication

Residual categories are those which cannot be formally represented within a given classification system. We examine the forms that residuality takes within our information systems today, and explore some silences which form around those inhabiting particular residual categories. We argue that there is significant ethical and political work to be done in exploring residuality.