Social scientists, documents and cyberinfrastructure: the cobbler's children or the missing masses?

A limited understanding of the distributed work practices of social scientists impedes current efforts to develop cyberinfrastructure (CI) that meets the needs of these scholars. In this paper we review literature on the theory, organization, collaborative practices, and epistemic cultures of the social sciences to summarize fundamental characteristics about the nature of their work practices. Building off these insights, we advance a document-centered articulation of social scientists' distributed work practices derived from a pilot study of scholars in the field of information studies. We use a mixed-methodological approach involving the mapping of digital and physical documents, automated tracking of desktop and online repositories, participant-generated images of physical documents and desktop, behavioral queries, along with interviews and participant observation. Our findings suggest that an approach focused on documents offers a tangible entree into understanding the distributed work practices of social scientists. This study aims to help further discussion surrounding the uptake of CI in the social sciences and the role of academic disciplines in the design of CI tools and projects.

[1]  Karen Ruhleder,et al.  Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces , 1996, Inf. Syst. Res..

[2]  Ralph Schroeder,et al.  Social Science Approaches to e-Science: Framing an Agenda , 2007, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[3]  Tony Becher,et al.  Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines , 2001 .

[4]  R. Collins,et al.  Why the social sciences won't become high-consensus, rapid-discovery science , 1994 .

[5]  R. Whitley.  The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences (Second Edition: with new introductory chapter entitled 'Science Transformed? The Changing Nature of Knowledge Production at the End of the Twentieth Century') , 1984 .

[6]  Ann Zimmerman,et al.  A Theory of Remote Scientific Collaboration , 2008 .

[7]  Carsten S. Østerlund.  Documents in Place: Demarcating Places for Collaboration in Healthcare Settings , 2008, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[8]  C. Bazerman.  What Written Knowledge Does: Three Examples of Academic Discourse , 1981 .

[9]  A. Rosenberg.  Philosophy of Social Science , 2018 .

[10]  J. Fleck.  Learning by trying: the implementation of configurational technology☆ , 1994 .

[11]  Christine Hine.  Computerization Movements and Scientific Disciplines: The Reflexive Potential of New Technologies , 2006 .

[12]  Steve Sawyer,et al.  From Findings to Theories: Institutionalizing Social Informatics , 2007, Inf. Soc..

[13]  A. Beaulieu,et al.  Imagining e-science beyond computation , 2006 .

[14]  Bridgette Wessels,et al.  Situated Innovation of e-Social Science: Integrating Infrastructure, Collaboration, and Knowledge in Developing e-Social Science , 2007, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[15]  Lokman I. Meho,et al.  Modeling the information-seeking behavior of social scientists: Ellis's study revisited , 2003, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[16]  E. Pieri,et al.  SOCIOLOGY OF EXPECTATION AND THE E-SOCIAL SCIENCE AGENDA , 2009 .

[17]  M. Merz.  Embedding Digital Infrastructure in Epistemic Culture , 2006 .

[18]  S. Traweek,et al.  Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists , 1988 .

[19]  W. Wulf,et al.  Collaborative Research across Disciplinary and Organizational Boundaries , 2008 .

[20]  P. Halfpenny,et al.  An action-oriented ethnography of interdisciplinary social scientific work , 2007 .

[21]  K. Knorr-Cetina,et al.  Epistemic cultures : how the sciences make knowledge , 1999 .

[22]  S. Shapin.  Laboratory life. The social construction of scientific facts , 1981, Medical History.

[23]  Rob Procter,et al.  Case Studies of e-Infrastructure Adoption , 2009 .

[24]  Stephen Turner,et al.  The Philosophy of Social Science , 1961, The Review of Politics.

[25]  Diane H. Sonnenwald,et al.  Exploring new ways of working using virtual research environments in library and information science , 2009, Libr. Hi Tech.

[26]  William H. Dutton.  Reconfiguring Access to Information and Expertise in the Social Sciences: The Social Shaping and Implications of Cyberinfrastructure ∗ , 2007 .

[27]  D. Smith.  Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling , 1990 .

[28]  Anne Beaulieu,et al.  E-research as Intervention , 2009 .

[29]  Christine Hine,et al.  New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-science , 2006 .

[30]  Marisa Ponti.  Actors in Collaboration: Sociotechnical Influence on Practice-Research Collaboration , 2010 .