Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Scholarship In The Networked World: Big Data, Little Data, No Data, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

Scholars are expected to publish the results of their work in journals, books, and other venues. Now they are being asked to publish their data as well, which marks a fundamental transition in scholarly communication. Data are not shiny objects that are easily exchanged. Rather, they are fuzzy and poorly bounded entities. The enthusiasm for "big data" is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data and of data practices across the disciplines. Data flows are uneven– abundant in some areas and sparse in others, easily or rarely shared. Open access and open data are contested concepts that are often conflated. …

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 Scientific Inquiry: Two Case Studies Of Data Practices, Laura Wynholds, Jillian Wallis, Christine Borgman, Ashley 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 researchers at the Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS) and users of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data. The data practices 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 …

Who Is Responsible For Data? An Exploratory Study Of Data Authorship, Ownership, And Responsibility, Jillian Wallis, Christine Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

Data repositories rely on the deposit of materials from the communities they serve, forming a chain of stakeholders from the data creator to the repository and data user. Top-down policies that describe the responsibilities of the depositing scientists and other stakeholders are drafted accordingly. But we see very little deposit of scientific data beyond the Big Sciences or communities for whom deposit is required by publications. As part of an ongoing data practices study, we asked scientific researchers about who would be responsible for the data collected. It is clear that researchers are not talking about who is responsible for …

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 …