Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Ups And Downs Of Knowledge Infrastructures In Science: Implications For Data Management, Christine L. Borgman, Peter T. Darch, Ashley E. Sands, Jillian C. Wallis, Sharon Traweek

Christine L. Borgman

The promise of technology-enabled, data-intensive scholarship is predicated upon access to knowledge infrastructures that are not yet in place. Scientific data management requires expertise in the scientific domain and in organizing and retrieving complex research objects. The Knowledge Infrastructures project compares data management activities of four large, distributed, multidisciplinary scientific endeavors as they ramp their activities up or down; two are big science and two are small science. Research questions address digital library solutions, knowledge infrastructure concerns, issues specific to individual domains, and common problems across domains. Findings are based on interviews (n=113 to date), ethnography, and other analyses of …

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 …

Research Data: Who Will Share What, With Whom, When, And Why?, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

The deluge of scientific research data has excited the general public, as well as the scientific community, with the possibilities for better understanding of scientific problems, from climate to culture. For data to be available, researchers must be willing and able to share them. The policies of governments, funding agencies, journals, and university tenure and promotion committees also influence how, when, and whether research data are shared. Data are complex objects. Their purposes and the methods by which they are produced vary widely across scientific fields, as do the criteria for sharing them. To address these challenges, it is necessary …

The Data Conservancy: Science-Driven Information Science, Christine L. Borgman, Carole L. Palmer

Christine L. Borgman

The Data Conservancy –which is a National Science Foundation funded Datanet project with a diverse array of partners – embraces a shared vision: data curation is not an end, but rather a means to collect, organize, validate, and preserve data to address grand research challenges that face society. Key to the data conservancy approach is information science research on the data practices of the science domains. Three teams are conducting social studies of individual science domains. Prof. Carole Palmer of the University of Illinois will report on their comparative studies of multiple biosciences domains. Prof. Christine Borgman of the University …

Scholarship In The Digital Age: Blurring The Boundaries Between The Sciences And The Humanities (Keynote), Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

As the digital humanities mature, their scholarship is taking on many characteristics of the sciences, becoming more data-intensive, information-intensive, distributed, multi-disciplinary, and collaborative. While few scholars in the humanities or arts would wish to be characterized as emulating scientists, they do envy the comparatively rich technical and resource infrastructure of the sciences. The interests of all scholars in the university align with respect to access to data, library resources, and computing infrastructure. However, the scholarly interests of the sciences and humanities diverge regarding research practices, sources of evidence, and degrees of control over those sources. This talk will explore the …