Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Knowledge Infrastructure Of Astronomy, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

Big data, data-intensive science, and eScience are contemporary terms to describe research fields that generate, manipulate, and manage large volumes of data. Astronomy was among the first data-intensive fields, hence many other domains wish to learn from the experience of astronomers. Their knowledge infrastructure – an ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects, and relationships – has accumulated over millennia. Over the last several decades, the practice of astronomy has transitioned from analog to digital technologies. In turn, the broad adoption of common tools, standards, and technologies has enabled astronomers to construct infrastructure components such as the Astrophysics Data …

Data Scholarship In The Humanities, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

No abstract provided.

Big Data, Little Data, Open Data, And Scholarship, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

The enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges for stewardship. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. They are a lens to observe the rapidly changing landscape of scholarly work in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Inside the black box of data is a plethora of research, technology, and policy issues. Data are best understood as representations of observations, objects, or other entities used as evidence of phenomena for the purposes of research or scholarship. Rarely do they stand …

Research Data, Libraries, And Croatia, Christine Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

No abstract provided.

Keynote: Data, Data, Everywhere, Nor Any Drop To Drink (Slides), Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

The Research Data Alliance is convening researchers, policy makers, funders, repository managers, librarians, archivists, publishers, open data activists, and other stakeholders to address the stewardship of the world’s research data assets. Overarching issues are becoming clear: the need for coordination among stakeholders, economic challenges to the sustainability of archives, and misaligned public policies for open access to publications and data. The practice and policy issues on the ground are much less well understood, however. Norms for the acquisition, release, and reuse of data –and the very definition of data – vary widely between research domains, and motivations to share data …

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

Christine L. Borgman

No abstract provided.

Keynote Address: "Local Or Global? Making Sense Of The Data Sharing Imperative", Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

Christine Borgman, PhD, is Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She spoke about the transition from viewing data as byproducts of scholarly research to viewing them as essential scholarly capital to be managed, shared, and leveraged.

Big Data, Open Data: Finding A Needle In A Digital Haystack, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

Slides posted: https://cha.house.gov/2014-legislative-data-and-transparency-conference

Keynote: Big Data, Big Opportunities, Christine Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

The enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges for stewardship. Inside the black box of data are a plethora of research, technology, and policy issues. Data are not shiny objects that are easily exchanged. Rather, data are representations of observations, objects, or other entities used as evidence of phenomena for the purposes of research or scholarship. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. They are a lens to observe the rapidly changing landscape of scholarly work in the sciences, social sciences, …

Data, Metadata, And Ted, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext” and developed Xanadu in a universe parallel to the one in which librarians, archivists, and documentalists were creating metadata to establish cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world. When these universes collided, comets exploded as ontologies proliferated. Black holes were formed as data disappeared through lack of description. Today these universes coexist, each informing the other, if not always happily: the formal rules of metadata, the chaos of crowdsourcing, the complex paths of linked open data, and copious efforts to establish best practices for the citation of complex objects such as research data. …

The Roles Of Data Citation In Data Management, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

NISO Virtual Conference: Dealing with the Data Deluge: Successful Techniques for Scientific Data Management http://www.niso.org/news/events/2014/virtual/data_deluge/ One of the continuing barriers to managing data for reuse is that authors rarely cite the data they use. The problem is manifold. Many stakeholders with competing interests are concerned with data citation, including authors, publishers, funding agencies, universities, libraries, repositories, and commercial and public interest groups. Goals and practices for citation mechanisms vary accordingly, such as credit, attribution, discovery, licensing, access, curation, and reuse. The problem of data citation is not simply a technical matter of mapping bibliographic citation methods. Rather, it is a …

The Data Dance, Christine Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

Despite first appearing in an academic publication only in 2003, the term “big data” has swiftly become central to technology and social science. While bearing deep histories, big data is clearly linked to developments in computational storage, algorithmic analysis, mobile devices, and online sociality. But big data is also debated in the blogosphere, portrayed in mass media, discussed in everyday life. The goal of this workshop is to take these multiple meanings and practices of big data seriously by placing them in conversation with ethnographic methods. Big data has sometimes been said to imply the “death of ethnographic methods” because …

The Role Of Data Citation In Scholarly Communication, Christine Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

No abstract provided.

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

Christine L. Borgman

The enthusiasm for “big data” is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship. Inside the black box of “data” is a plethora of behaviour, technology, and policy issues. Publish or perish remains the clarion call of today’s scholars. Now they are being asked to release 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. Data flows are uneven – abundant in some areas and sparse in others, easily or rarely shared. Open access and open data are contested …

Phd Seminar On Research Methods And Design, Christine Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

This is the core course in social science research methods and research design for PhD students in information studies. It follows 291A, Theoretical Traditions In Information Studies. Graduate students in Information Studies or related fields (education, communication, public policy, management, psychology, etc.) who have not taken 291A but who have extensive background in epistemology or research methods may enroll with instructor’s permission. Also prerequisite is at least one course in descriptive and inferential statistics.

The course is conducted as a workshop, drawing upon students’ research projects as cases. We will survey quantitative and qualitative research designs and address research ethics …

Data, Data Practices, And Data Curation, Part Ii, Christine Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

In today’s technology-intensive research environments, petabytes of data may be produced in a matter of days, weeks, or months. Those data may be lost in a similar amount of time if they are not captured, curated, and marked up in ways that allow for discovery and reuse by others. Datasets large and small can be very useful not only to researchers, but also to students, to the general public, and to policy makers. Among the classes of data of broad general interest are scientific records of the climate, the skies and galaxies, plant and animal species, social and economic observations, …

Ship Space To Database: Scientific And Social Motivations For A Database To Support Deep Subseafloor Biosphere Research, Peter Darch, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

What motivates the building of databases by scientific collaborations? In this paper, we argue that not only are databases being built to support scientific work per se, but also with the intention of performing a variety of social functions. To explore this, we present findings from a longitudinal ethnographic case study of a large, multidisciplinary, distributed scientific project studying subseafloor microbial life. A critical element of this project’s Data Management Plan is the construction of a data portal. We found a range of factors motivating not only the very construction of this portal, but also the inclusion of particular features. …

Ann O'Brien Memorial Tribute, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

No abstract provided.

Data, Data Practices, And Data Curation, Part I, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

In today’s technology-intensive research environments, petabytes of data may be produced in a matter of hours, days, or weeks. Those data may be lost in a similar amount of time if they are not captured, curated, and marked up in ways that allow for discovery and reuse by others. Datasets large and small can be very useful not only to researchers, but also to students, to the general public, and to policy makers. Among the classes of data of broad general interest are scientific records of the climate, the skies and galaxies, plant and animal species, social and economic observations, …

The Ups And Downs Of Knowledge Infrastructures In Science: Implications For Data Management, Christine L. Borgman, Peter 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 …