Epstein / Ribes - NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (prop #6457371, Feb 2005) Project Summary This project takes the development and deployment of GEON as its object. GEON, the 'geo-sciences network,' is an American cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth sciences - a five year National Science Foundation (NSF) project with the goal of providing computing, data interoperability and visualization resources for the broader geo-sciences. To date GEON is the most ambitious project of its kind, drawing together such diverse disciplines within the earth-sciences as geophysics, paleobotany, seismology, and geochemistry to name only a few. GEON is only one of many already initiated or planned cyberinfrastructure under the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Program (ACP) . Through shared infrastructure, computer science expertise, and information technologies the impact of GEON stretches beyond the geo-sciences to the larger goal of science informatization. Cyberinfrastructure generally, and GEON specifically, is as much a bottom-up activity as top-down. In the case of GEON the NSF provides the encouragement and multi-million dollar funding 'from above', but the socio-technical structure of GEON itself was proposed, designed and enacted by practicing scientists 'from below'. How can we understand the conjunction and enaction of these two trajectories: state funding, and geo-science/IT construction and deployment? This project seeks to follow the practices of information technologists and geo-scientists from below and the policy action from above in order to understand the resulting transformations in the organization and practice of science. What are the consequences of mobilizing the geo-scientific community in its own technological transformation to meet the larger goals of the ACP? From GEON's inception in 2002, Ribes (co-PI) has been an ethnographic participant observer of the negotiations between geo-scientists and information technologists. This research proposal requests the resources to complement the already proceeding research by tracing GEON's development 'from above': NSF funding and support, and geoscience's vision of an informaticized science of the earth. Funds will be used to support travel for archival research on the ACP and to conduct interviews with significant 'macro-scale' actors which have provided political and financial support for the GEON cyberinfrastructure.
Intellectual Merit Within the field of science and technology studies this research project seeks to address the intersection of four themes of growing importance which have thus far been taken separately within the field, and which cross traditional notions of 'scale,' but which in GEON appear simultaneously: i- standardization and classification, ii- users and design, iii - the organization of science and changes of practice in relation to information technologies; and iv- science and the state.
Broader Impact In a broader sense this study contributes to the successful development and unfolding of contemporary information infrastructures. Calls from within computer science itself have pointed to the need for a greater research involvement of social science in the production of these large-scale infrastructures. 'Cyberinfrastructure' is already framed as an organizational and institutional endeavor and offers an inviting site for building relationships with science studies. Finally this study will seek to offer practical, conceptual and analytic resources for practicing scientists themselves who are currently facing greater transformation through informatization.
