Marina Jirotka

Unpacking collaboration: the interactional organisation of trading in a city dealing room

It is has been widely recognised that whilst CSCW has led to a number of impressive technological developments, examples of successful applications remain few. In part, this may be due to our relative ignorance of the organisation of real world, cooperative activity. Focusing on share trading in a securities house in the City of London, we explore the interactional organisation of particular tasks and the ways in whcih dealers interweave individual and collaborative activity. These observations suggest ways in which we might reconsider a number of central concepts in CSCW and begin. to draw design implications from naturalistic studies of work and interaction.

Collaboration and Trust in Healthcare Innovation: The eDiaMoND Case Study

This paper presents findings from an investigation into requirements for collaboration in e-Science in the context of eDiaMoND, a Grid-enabled prototype system intended in part to support breast cancer screening. Detailed studies based on ethnographic fieldwork reveal the importance of accountability and visibility of work for trust and for the various forms of ‘practical ethical action’ in which clinicians are seen to routinely engage in this setting. We discuss the implications of our findings, specifically for the prospect of using distributed screening to make more effective use of scarce clinical skills and, more generally, for realising the Grid’s potential for sharing data within and across institutions. Understanding how to afford trust and to provide adequate support for ethical concerns relating to the handling of sensitive data is a particular challenge for e-Health systems and for e-Science in general. Future e-Health and e-Science systems will need to be compatible with the ways in which trust is achieved, and practical ethical actions are realised and embedded within work practices.

Supporting Scientific Collaboration: Methods, Tools and Concepts

This paper discusses the interrelationship between e-Science and CSCW in terms of key substantive, methodological and conceptual innovations made in both fields. In so doing, we hope to draw out the existing relationship between CSCW and e-Science research, and to map out some key future challenges where the two areas of research may become more closely aligned. In considering what may be required to draw the two more closely together, the paper focuses primarily on investigations that have been undertaken in two dedicated initiatives into e-Science, along with the key issues emerging from these studies.

From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth

Researchers in the social sciences are increasingly encouraged or obliged to deposit data in digital archives for greater transparency of research or for secondary use by other researchers. However, digital archives raise many ethical challenges at the institutional, disciplinary and personal level, and researchers can find themselves caught between conflicting requirements. This article considers the ethical challenges of qualitative data in particular showing what specific ethical challenges qualitative researchers face. There is generally a lack of policy or guidelines as to how to deal with digital data, or else there are conflicting requirements set by funding and academic institutions and by the law. In the face of this, researchers themselves need to be aware of the ethical and legal dimensions of their data, so that they are in the best position to enter into negotiations concerning whether and how it is archived. The options for archiving are outlined, and an interdisciplinary approach is recommended.

Post-genomic science: cross-disciplinary and large-scale collaborative research and its organizational and technological challenges for the scientific research process

We examine recent developments in cross-disciplinary science and contend that a ‘Big Science’ approach is increasingly evident in the life sciences—facilitated by a breakdown of the traditional barriers between academic disciplines and the application of technologies across these disciplines. The first fruits of ‘Big Biology’ are beginning to be seen in, for example, genomics, (bio)-nanotechnology and systems biology. We suggest that this has profound implications for the research process and presents challenges both in technological design, in the provision of infrastructure and training, in the organization of research groups, and in providing suitable research funding mechanisms and reward systems. These challenges need to be addressed if the promise of this approach is to be fully realized. In this paper, we will draw on the work of social scientists to understand how these developments in science and technology relate to organizational culture, organizational change and the context of scientific work. We seek to learn from previous technological developments that seemed to offer similar potential for organizational and social change.

On the Social Organisation of Organisations

This paper considers a range of theoretical approaches to the understanding of organisations and the implications these views have for the design of computer supported cooperative work systems. Organisations have often been seen as structures which can be divided into hierarchically ordered parts or as networks of informal relations. Organisational theorists have also considered organisations to resemble organisms with needs for survival in potentially hostile environments or as information processors, with decision-making as their most important characteristic. More recently, developments in the social sciences have suggested that radical reconceptualisations are necessary for the study of work settings. Consequently, these developments have attracted attention due to their potential to inform system design. This paper reviews some of these efforts and comments on some of the outstanding problems that have to be overcome if studies of everyday work settings are to inform the design of systems to support collaborative work.

Reinventing Research? Information Practices in the Humanities.

Researchers in the humanities adopt a wide variety of approaches to their research. Their work tends to focus on texts and images, but they use and also create a wide range of information resources, in print, manuscript and digital forms. Like other researchers, they face multiple demands on their time, and so they find the ease and speed of access to digital resources very attractive: some of them note that they are reluctant on occasion to consult texts that require a trip to a distant library or archive. Nevertheless, none of the participants in our study is yet ready to abandon print and manuscript resources in favour of digital ones. Rather, they engage with a range of resources and technologies, moving seamlessly between them. Such behaviours are likely to persist for some time.This is reflected also in how researchers disseminate their research. The overwhelmingly dominant channels are the long-established ones such as journal articles, conferences and workshops, monographs and book chapters. We found only limited use – except among philosophers - of blogs and other social media. We noted the doubts expressed in other fields about quality assurance for users of such media, but also concerns about how best to present material that will be read by non-academic audiences.A key change in humanities research over the past 10-15 years has been the growth of more formal and systematic collaboration between researchers. This is a response in part to new funding opportunities, but also to the possibilities opened up by new technology. Over recent years there has also been a shift from the model under which technology specialists tell researchers how to do their research to more constructive engagement. Like other researchers, scholars in the humanities use what works for them, finding technologies and resources that fit their research, and resisting any pressure to use something just because it is new.But there is little evidence as yet of their taking full advantage of the possibilities of more advanced tools for text-mining, grid or cloud computing, or the semantic web; and only limited uptake of even simple, freely-available tools for data management and sharing. Rather, they manage and store information on their desktops and laptops, and share it with others via email. Barriers to the adoption and take up of new technologies and services include lack of awareness and of institutional training and support, but also lack of standardization and inconsistencies in quality and functionality across different resources. These make for delays in research, repetitive searching, and limitations on researchers’ ability to draw connections and relationships between different resources.

Surveying the scene: technologies for everyday awareness and monitoring in control rooms

Abstract Recent technologies to support collaborative work have sought, in various ways, to enhance an individuals awareness of anothers activities. Through a range of diverse technologies developers have endeavoured to provide users with capabilities that allow them to monitor, either passively or actively, what others are doing. In this paper we aim to examine awareness by analysing a setting where one of the responsibilities of the staff is to oversee, through a set of technologies, a complex environment in order to monitor the various spaces and locations in the local domain, the individuals who move through these spaces, and the events that occur in it. We outline the resources they utilise to make sense of what personnel see on the screens and to initiate collaborative action with colleagues. We conclude by discussing how such analyses can inform the design of novel systems which aim to support awareness and monitoring of environments. More critically we draw on this study to reconsider the conception of awareness utilised within Computer Supported Cooperative Work and other fields where technological solutions are being proposed to support individuals to monitor, whether peripherally or not, locations, activities and other individuals in digital environments.

Tasks and social interaction: the relevance of naturalistic analyses of conduct for requirements engineering

Methods for requirements elicitation have emphasized techniques for their elicitation and representation. The conception of tasks embodied in these methods is often vague or left implicit and generally characterized in individualistic terms. The authors draw from empirical materials to reveal the social and collaborative nature of task that is also overlooked in participative design or in attempts to elicit multiple viewpoints of an activity. Exploring the socio-interactional nature of activities leads to some radical implications for the technological design. An approach that utilizes ethnographic studies of real-world settings with detailed analysis of interactions of the participants may make an important contribution to the development of requirements method.<<ETX>>

Embedded interaction: The accomplishment of actions in everyday and video-mediated environments

A concern with “embodied action” has informed both the analysis of everyday action through technologies and also suggested ways of designing innovative systems. In this article, we consider how these two programs, the analysis of everyday embodied interaction on the one hand, and the analysis of technically-mediated embodied interaction on the other, are interlinked. We draw on studies of everyday interaction to reveal how embodied conduct is embedded in the environment. We then consider a collaborative technology that attempts to provide a coherent way of presenting life-sized embodiments of participants alongside particular features of the environment. These analyses suggest that conceptions of embodied action should take account of the interactional accomplishment of activities and how these are embedded in the material environment.