This project is an interdisciplinary training workshop designed to bring together graduate students and established scholars working at the "socio-technical" interface between computer science, human-computer interaction, design studies, management information systems, and cyber-social science. Dubbed the "Digital Societies and Social Technologies Summer Institute," the workshop contributes to ongoing efforts to build a "community of inquiry and practice" that can address the mixture of technical, social and organizational challenges that characterize today's increasingly digital workplaces. In particular, the 2013 DSST Summer Institute focusses on problems that are limiting the sociotechnical community's ability to build coherent interdisciplinary dialogues, develop collaborative research agendas, and nurture new generations of emerging scholars. The 2013 Institute will also equip participants with the cyberinfrastructure concepts, theories and tools needed to enlist computational and big-data research methods in pursuit of new and transformative agendas in sociotechnical design science. NSF funding allows 25 doctoral students to participate in the DSST Summer Institute program and become better integrated into the emerging DSST community.
Today's emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs) promise significant advances across many domains of social and scientific interest; however, these technologies stand at an uncomfortable intersection of multiple scholarly and policy fields, "useful to many but central to none." The DSST Summer Institute seeks to convene and reinforce a nascent community of social scientists, computer scientists, design researchers, and computational methods and data specialists, to begin building the missing intellectual and institutional infrastructure for sustained scholarship in this crucial but underdeveloped no-man's-land. Beyond raising awareness of advances in tools and techniques, the DSST Summer Institute will also develop interdisciplinary networks of sociotechnical scholars focused on critical ICT challenges and on realizing the transformative potential of emerging computational methods and big data resources within the ICT studies domain. In addition, the workshops will also serve an educational purpose, providing graduate students and other early-career researchers with training, feedback, and opportunities to build collegial and mentorship ties beyond their home departments. Moreover, beyond these direct contributions to strengthening the community for sociotechnical ICT Studies, the Summer Institute will also contribute to the infrastructure for computational and data-enabled science and engineering more generally, by enhancing understanding of the continuities and transformations that occur when work processes -- including scientific work practices -- move from physical to virtual settings.
