Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Who’S Got The Data? Interdependencies In Science And Technology Collaborations, Christine L. Borgman, Jillian C. Wallis, Matthew S. Mayernik

Christine L. Borgman

Science and technology always have been interdependent, but never more so than with today’s highly instrumented data collection practices. We report on a long-term study of collaboration between environmental scientists (biology, ecology, marine sciences), computer scientists, and engineering research teams as part of a five-university distributed science and technology research center devoted to embedded networked sensing. The science and technology teams go into the field with mutual interests in gathering scientific data. “Data” are constituted very differently between the research teams. What are data to the science teams may be context to the technology teams, and vice versa. Interdependencies between …

Data, Data Use, And Scientific Inquiry: Two Case Studies Of Data Practices [Presentation Slides], Wynholds A. Laura, Jillian C. Wallis, Christine L. Borgman, Ashley Sands, Sharon Traweek

Christine L. Borgman

Powerpoint Presentation from the 2012 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL).

Wynholds, L. A., Wallis, J. C., Borgman, C. L., Sands, A., & Traweek, S. (2012). Data, data use, and scientific inquiry (p. 19). ACM Press. doi:10.1145/2232817.2232822

Data, Data Use, And Inquiry: A New Point Of View On Data Curation, Jillian C. Wallis, Laura A. Wynholds, Christine L. Borgman, Ashley E. Sands, Sharon Traweek

Christine L. Borgman

Data are proliferating far faster than they can be captured, managed, or stored. What types of data are most likely to be used and reused, by whom, and for what purposes? Answers to these questions will inform information policy and the design of digital libraries.

We report findings from semi-structured interviews and field observations to investigate characteristics of data use and reuse and how those characteristics vary within and between scientific communities. The two communities studied are the researchers at the Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS) and users of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data. We found that …