Human Social Dynamics:

1
Florence Millerand LCHC/Science
Studies University of California, San Diego La
Jolla, CA 92093, USA 1.858.534.6828 fmillera_at_ucsd.
edu
David Ribes Sociology/Science Studies University
of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093,
USA 1.858.534.4627 dribes_at_ucsd.edu
Karen S. Baker Scripps Institution of
Oceanography University of California, San
Diego La Jolla, CA 92093 USA 1.858.534.2350 kbaker
_at_ucsd.edu
Geoffrey C. Bowker Center for Science, Technology
Society Santa Clara University Santa Clara, CA
95053 USA 1.408.551.6058 gbowker_at_scu.edu
Human Social Dynamics Interoperability
Strategies for Scientific Cyberinfrastructure
Introduction
Care with multiple stories
BDEI HSD
The Comparative Interoperability Project
(2004-2007) initiates a situated social and
organizational comparison of three scientific
information infrastructures deploying different
approaches to data interoperability. While the
issue of interoperability remains addressed
primarily as a technical one e.g. in terms of a
strategic choice of technical standard for data
coding (e.g. classifications, metadata,
ontology), we consider interoperability
strategies as specific configurations of
technical commitment, community involvement, and
organizational structure. These strategies,
implicit or explicit in project visions,
represent a critical factor in subsequent
development. In other words, while deploying a
particular interoperability strategy in terms of
technical direction, an information
infrastructure project also unfolds strategies of
community mobilization and organizational
arrangement.
EML is not yet successful since it requires
local re-development activities.
EML is successful since it has been adopted
by the IT and domain science community.
(The enactors point of view)
(The developers point of view)
Infrastructuring
Particular technical solutions bring particular
cognitive divisions of labor. On tologies in GEON
are creating interfaces between domain scientist
representatives and information technologists
while metadata wihin LTER creates interfaces
between information managers and domain
scientists.
Care with framing the questions
Why Technologists Need Social Scientists /
or Why Social Scientists Need Technologists
Traditional Technical View
Cyberinfrastructure is the coordinated aggregate
of software, hardware and other technologies, as
well as human expertise, required to support
current and future discoveries in science and
engineering. The challenge of cyberinfrastructure
is to integrate relevant and often disparate
resources to provide a useful, usable, and
enabling framework for research and discovery
characterized by broad access and end-to-end
coordination. Final Report NSF SBE-CISE
Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure and the Social
Sciences, F. Berman and H. Brady, available at
http//www.sdsc.edu/sbe/
The Value of Technologist-Social Scientist
Partnerships
Long-term Sociotechnical View
Care with framing the approaches
Traditional Technical View
Interoperability is the unproblematic movement of
data and information across time,
hardware/software, visualization, disciplines
necessary for reuse of data and integration of
information. Achieving data interoperability is
understood here as a process that aims at
information assemblage and sharing in order to
enable reuse by various people, across diverging
disciplines and across long periods of time.
Initial Report Comparative Interoperability
Project Configurations of Community, Technology,
Organization. D.Ribes, K.S.Baker, F.Millerand,
and G.C.Bowker. Joint Conference on Digital
Libraries, 2005. Available at http//interoperabil
ity.ucsd.edu
Long-term Sociotechnical View
Care with the units of analysis
Three case studies
GEON is a cyberinfrastructure for the US
geo-sciences aimed at providing scientific data
and resource sharing services to a broad range of
disciplines to ensure a more integrated picture
of earth processes (Keller, 2003).
Traditional Technical View
LTER is a federated network of biome sites with
an information infrastructure for ecological
sciences that aims at enabling inter-disciplinary
collaboration and preserving data for the
long-term (Hobbie et al., 2003).
Long-term Sociotechnical View
Ocean Informatics is a nascent initiative for the
ocean sciences based at UCS Scripps Institution
of Oceanography that aims at providing a set of
resources including shared scientific data and a
design environment for learning, tool sharing and
participatory design (Baker et al, 2005).
In summary there is a need for articulation work
Concepts, Methods, and Team
Traditional Technical View
Interoperability includes a broad range of work,
including coordinating collaborations between
diverse expert communities, building consensus on
technical directions, securing consent from the
domain, aligning interfaces with already existing
community practices or training user populations.
This kind of work is common to even the most
technically centered interoperability endeavor,
but it remains difficult to credit this crucial
work and often remains beyond discursive capacity
of a community.
Long-term Sociotechnical View
The CIP project considers a collaborative
interdisciplinary team as both an
interoperability strategy. The collaborative
participants and communities are requisite for
posing as well as addressing contemporary
cyberinfrastructure issues. Our team purposely
includes science studies, historian of science,
sociology, communication studies, environmental
science, information management, and communities
of practice expertise.
Considering interoperability strategies
cyberinfrastructure
Social Informatics
While deploying interoperability strategies (as
technical direction, community mobilization, and
organizational structure) scientists,
technologists, data and information managers are
actively engaged in definition and design, so
that a major part of their work consists
precisely in the stabilization of these
distributions, embedding them into technical
artifacts, organizational arrangements and
community representatives. An understanding of
cyberinfrastructure as a process in addition to
configurations allows for an analysis with a
multi-dimensional understanding of its dynamic
features.
Our research does not seek to produce a new
sphere of social action within
cyberinfrastructure but rather to identify and
enable action within already existing
socio-technical work.
Our research approach makes use of the analytical
frames of grounded theory and action research
drawing on methods of ethnography and
collaborative design. Our study makes use of
ethnographic methods such as interviews, document
analysis, participant observation, and community
collaboration in order to develop a comparative
perspective through cross case analysis (Strauss,
1987). We seek an expanded vocabulary for
interoperability of data and communities as well
as for the roles of technology and participants
supporting information environments. We use
our particular project configuration of
interdisciplinary participants to address
interoperability strategies and seek
opportunities to contribute to the communities
with which we work. We present examples here of
work done in collaboration with the communities
with which we work.
With strategic use of collaborative design, a
mutually informative dynamic is created
influencing practices of social science and
environmental science - an alternative to more
traditional concepts of intervention.