Recent years have seen the rise of new forms of large-scale distributed scientific enterprises supported primarily through advanced technological infrastructures such as supercomputers and high speed networks. This "cyberinfrastructure" is attracting significant investment from major funding agencies and substantial participation from domain scientists. Although its primary aims are to transform and accelerate scientific and engineering practice, relatively little research has focused on systematically studying the actual practices of cyberinfrastructure development and use or on examining the transformations that it is created to engender.
This project will make empirical and conceptual contributions to ongoing research in areas such as computer supported cooperative work, science and technology studies, and the study of cyberinfrastructure. Empirically, it will detail collaboration in cyberinfrastructure development, especially in relation to local concerns. Conceptually this project builds on the author?s previous research on collaboration in cyberinfrastructure in order to create a framework for understanding: 1) the incremental alignment and realignment of people, processes, and tools; 2) and how these alignments play out in: collaboration between distributed institutions; collaboration between disciplines; collaboration between the project itself and the scientific community; and collaboration within and between work groups.
Given that cyberinfrastructure is comprised not only of advanced computational technologies, but also of scientists and engineers, who are both developers and end users, this study will: - Investigate existing scientific and engineering practices; - Investigate how scientific and engineering practices are collaboratively transformed; - Identify patterns of collaboration (e.g., social networks, communication and management strategies) and relate those patterns to organizational and scientific outcomes.
Ethnographic methods will be used including participant-observation and semi-structured interviews. Qualitative social science methods are useful for understanding practice and how work processes change and develop over time. A nascent metagenomic cyberinfrastructure project will serve as the field site.
Broader Impacts: By contributing to a more sophisticated understanding of how cyberinfrastructure development is dependent on both technical and social transformation, this research will stimulate and support the future development of such efforts. To further enhance cyberinfrastructure, collaborations amongst institutions conducting work on social aspects of cyberinfrastructure will be established to more efficiently define common concerns. To make innovations more broadly useful, research will be presented at multi- and interdisciplinary conferences and published in formats that will be useful to policy-makers.
