This is funding to support the "Digital Societies and Social Technologies Summer Institute" (DSST-SI), a five-day interdisciplinary training workshop designed to bring graduate students and young faulty together with established scholars working at the socio-technical interface between computer science, human-computer interaction, design studies, management information systems, and cyber-social science. The Consortium will enhance the scientific workforce in this emerging research area by developing a group of promising young researchers interested in socio-technical research and building a "community of inquiry and practice" that can address the mixture of technical, social and organizational challenges that characterize today's increasingly digital workplaces.
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 the 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. NSF funding allows 30 doctoral students and early faculty to participate in the DSST Summer Institute program and become better integrated into the emerging DSST community.
In particular, the 2014 DSST Summer Institute will focus 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 2014 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. 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.
