File under: Brilliant turns of phrase by jaded academics

From a good friend, colleague, and co-author - Charlie Kaylor

"Student presentations are the Ninth Circle of Hell. All movement ceases except the slowly fanning wings of Satan."

Nihil nimus ("nothing in excess")

Boice, Robert. (2000) Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus. Allyn & Bacon Publishers. Needham Heights, MA. ISBN 0-205-28159-1.

On the train ride to and from Wisconsin last week, I made it through a book that had been recommended by Steve Jackson. He had said that despite the obvious audience targeting of the title, it was a useful book for doctoral students as well. I'm usually somewhat skeptical of self-help productivity books (placing them in the same conceptual genre as fad diet books); however, this one seemed solid - enough for me to put in some time and energy practicing the principles Boice preaches. Why? Two main reasons. First, faculty productivity and new faculty experiences are Boice's academic career foci, and the frank discussion of his research methods in generating this book, as well as providing research results, is convincing. Second, if this process actually works, I can't afford not to adopt this kind of production cycle.

I heard a number of times before that academics who write diligently for 20 minutes per day are, in the long run, far more productive and publish vastly more than those who wait for their muse and occasionally write in long, manic episodes (which has historically been my favored mode of production.) I realize that Boice's research was likely one of the sources of this statement.

While the book is highly repetitive (which, I suppose, promotes the age-old formula of "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then remind them of what you just told them), it forces you to automatically engage one of Boice's first principles of slowing down, waiting, and letting things come naturally. It's worth getting through some of the more pedantic prose to get at the useful information in the book. Fortunately, he distills the lessons at the end of each chapter and section. The sections are laid out in a sequence that should be not at all surprising for academics: teaching, writing/research, and service. It helps to have these three presented together, since balancing them is one of the most difficult aspects of academic life.

In short, he applies the same general template to all three areas, with some customizations for each of the activities. The general advice is:

• Wait


• Begin early


• Work in brief, regular sessions


• Stop


• Balance preliminaries with formal work


• Moderate overattachment and overreaction


• Moderate negative thoughts


• Moderate emotion


• Let others do some of the work


• Limit wasted effort

I won't go into detail on all of these (because you should buy the book for yourself). While it is easy to look at this list and criticize for its seeming obviousness, the explanations of each with accompanying practical exercises and supporting research-based evidence for efficacy are invaluable.

The one shortcoming I did detect in Boice's method comes not from following his process itself, but what happens when we scale up a level. For example, consider both a junior faculty member and a doctoral student who are working together and both following Boice's process. The faculty member is advised not to spend more than 10 minutes with any student, and focus on her own work. The student is encouraged to let someone do some of the work for him in the role of a mentor, which arguably requires more than 10 minutes of faculty involvement. Boice's method is likely to help individuals, as long as they are not situated in a community of scholars who are all following the same principles.

Recap of the e-Social Science Conference

A full week has passed since the conclusion of the Third e-Social Science conference that was hosted here at the University of Michigan. That's about enough time to put down some of the reflections from the event, I suppose.

Starting with the doctoral colloquium: This was one of the highlights of the event for me. As I mentioned in my last post, it was exciting to see the research of others who are playing in the same sandbox. It was clear to all of us in the room that there is a lot of potential synthesis among our different projects, and we're all excited to see those connections realized over time. It fit in well with my activities of the summer (going to a number of European events) to see yet more connections being made between North American and European scholars. That doesn't happen nearly enough. That said, this conference's national makeup was almost exclusively from the United States and United Kingdom, which is arguably the relationship that needs the least fostering. The day was facilitated by Julia Lane and Mark Birkin, with opening and closing keynotes by Mike Batty and Nosh Contractor, respectively. Julia, completely enjoyable (and I appreciate her background as a microeconomist), pulled off something I have never seen before - keeping 20 research presentations on time and moving consistently. I think part of this was her occasional economist's "stare of doom" when someone approached the 10 minute mark, and the other was deciding not to have any discussion or feedback at the end of each short talk. Someone in the group said, "Couldn't we just have five minutes of discussion?" Please...PhD students have enough trouble framing a question in five minutes. Forget about a PhD student being able to answer one in that period. No, Julia was right on the money with the cat herding. Mark gave some great and insightful wrap-up comments at the end of the day, drawing together some common themes, classifications, and framings of the group's collective work. Frankly, I was excited (and a bit flattered) when he referred to my work on OEP choreography as "deep theoretical work." Trust me, the excitement passed quickly as I realize how much work there is yet to be done on it.

The end of the day event featured SI's own Dr. Dan Atkins, current director of the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure. The "Understanding Infrastructure" report that Paul, Steve, Geof, and I wrote earlier this year got some amazing air time during the talk. In a previous post, I was a bit self-denigrating about the fact that I was the least significant writer out of that group. But, one of the main points Dan made at the end of the talk happened to be the one point that I insisted be included in the report, and for which I feel some primary ownership. Specifically (and representing a major change from the cyberinfrastructure rhetoric up to this point), Dan has left behind the language of "building" cyberinfrastructure and stated (as I've been saying all along), "Cyberinfrastructure is too complex to be built. Instead, we create opportunities and environments where it can be fostered and encouraged to develop." That felt like one of the biggest victories I've had in graduate school thus far. When Dan changes the way he speaks about CI, the rest of the scientific community tends to move in that direction. I know I'll likely never be credited with that idea, and I'm betting Dan doesn't even know (or particularly care) that I originated it. That's fine. I'm just thrilled to see a change in what I saw as a dangerous path for the CI agenda to be treading. I truly believe that this shift in linguistic habitus and re-orientation to what I see as the "complexity view" of CI will have subtle, but powerful effects on the way scholarship is constructed around CI and CI studies.

Of note, Dan, in closing, made the challenge to “Just Do It.” One of the issues moving forward that he cited was the need to train reviewers who can look across the traditional boundaries and historical ways in which NSF grants have been assigned. Perhaps it is the push of being part of the upcoming generation. Perhaps it is an advantaged point of being a natively trained interdisciplinarian. Perhaps it is a personal sense of ambition. But – why is it not apparent that we, the new generation who experience e-Social Science as a primary environment (rather than a shift from “the other”), are excellent candidates both to be trained as these new reviewers, as well as tapped as sources of perspectives on integrated scholarship that can educate our progenitors in the ways the world has transformed not only disciplines, but people. In my opinion, NSF should design (with some of us) and run sets of workshops for current PhD students to fast-track them into becoming reviewers for interdisciplinary grant proposals, perhaps paired with an experienced reviewer as a mentor, but not in a role where the lines of power exclusively position us as deferential; rather, as partners who are ramping up in one area of skills, but are the natural experts and sources of legitimate perspective in another area of interpretation.

Monday was the main event. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend a large portion of it due to responsibilities as the Student Volunteers chair. Note to self: if you want to attend everything, don't take on administrative responsibilities that require students to show up on time and actually do something. Now, by and large my student volunteers were fantastic. Most of them showed up and were troopers. A few had to cancel at the last minute due to unforeseen and unavoidable circumstances. At least they called me as soon as they knew. Then there were those who simply didn't show up. This happened both with masters as well as doctoral students. Seriously disappointing. Tom Finholt and I later had a discussion about what we both see as a problem with a "culture of responsibility" that has some deep and insidious roots at SI. I wish I could have seen Roberta Balstad's opening plenary on Monday. One of my colleagues told me later that someone asked a question and referenced something I had written, but couldn't remember what. Very cool. I think I may have found a good conference for my work and will consistently attend this one in the future.

The one session I did attend was as a last-minute fill-in as a session chair. Interesting work on boundaries and enablements in e-Social Science. In this session, I got to see Rob Procter, the director and founder of the UK's National Center for e-Social Science. Rob is truly an amazing guy - critical intellectual, organizational visionary, and clearly someone who makes things happen. He shared the back story (although I suspect, like most publicly told back stories, had its fair share of sensemaking and linearization) of NCeSS and the basis for a high-level requirements exercise and initial proof-of-concept projects that led to the organization. Since I'm interested in how interdisciplinary work is started, negotiated, and executed, Rob's talk was of particular interest.

The evening's banquet was interesting in many ways. During cocktails, I was chatting with a woman from UC-Boulder who isn't part of this community, and was "dragged by someone with whom I'm collaborating." She sighed and said that after two days of workshops and talks, she still wasn't clear on what e-Social Science is. That's a bit troublesome. Are we really that bad at communicating what we're doing? Are we internally that unclear or far from a converged or articulated statement? Probably, if this intelligent person who was clearly paying attention and spent two days thinking about it couldn't see what it is. I took a stab in an attempt to help. I told her that e-Social Science really can be one of two things, depending on whether the "e-" or the "Social Science" is the object in question, and that whichever one you choose as the foreground, the other becomes the background or framing. If you choose "Social Science" as the object, it's about conducting actual social science in a CI environment, and utilizing the tools that are included in the "e-" such as advanced visualization, computation, distance collaboration, and information dissemination. If "e-" is the object, it's about understanding the social sciences themselves (as disciplinary boundaries, communities of practice, and performative acts, etc.) are being transformed by CI, ICTs, etc. Basically, what is the transformative power of "e-" on the social sciences. She got a nice light bulb going off over her head and said, "Oh. That's it? Why could that have been said at the beginning?" Now, I may have led her completely astray. If so, she'll figure it out at some point when someone more authoritative corrects her, or the community actually publishes something succinct, parsimonious, and clear about what it is that we do. Until then, I'm advancing my own brand as

• e-Social Science: studies the transformative effects of ICTs and CI on the Social Sciences as disciplines and practices.


• e-Social Science: is the normal conduct of social science research using available ICTs and CI tools and augmentations.

The evening's speaker, Carole Goble, was a rarity - concurrently insightful and hilarious. I've never seen "science stand-up comedy", but this was it. I saw in her talk a lot of the same language I'm using in my own work, and realized that the OEP work I'm doing underlies most of the things I heard presented at the conference. I hope I can pull this off, because if I can, I think it will be pretty cool.

Tuesday morning was probably the strongest reaction I had at the conference. It was a five-person panel organized by my advisor to talk about the differences between e-Social Science and "traditional" Social Science. I think this is an unnecessarily artificial line to draw, but that is immaterial for the purposes of the panel. All in all, I was frustrated throughout the panel, starting with the opening message of "We think that in order for e-Social Science to be successful, we need to stop reproducing the view and philosophies of the traditional." I couldn't help but think as I stared at the front of the auditorium, "How is a panel of five middle-aged, white, male, tenured academics not reproducing something?" The main diversity in the panel was institutional. I was sitting next to Sophia Liu, a fantastic up-and-coming researcher at UC-Boulder. We exchanged a number of glances firmly rooted in a shared sense of "Are these people SERIOUS? This isn't new, or even interesting!"

After the panel, I listened and eavesdropped intensely and noticed something I think is important. People either loved or hated the panel, no middle ground (if they were paying attention and not just checking email, surfing, or playing WoW/CoH/CoV/SL.) Where the difference landed, and it was pretty clear to me, was that people who are trained in a single, well-established, high-paradigm field thought it was great and insightful. Those who are strong and trained interdisciplinarians found it to be lacking. Now, this also was consistent among age groups and relative progress in career path. Colleagues from the doctoral colloquium as well as senior faculty who were single-discipline trained (not to be equated with single-discipline practice. Most people at the conference are involved in interdisciplinary work to varying degrees) found the panel enlightening and useful.

Another observation about the e-Social Science rhetoric is that there seem to be no standards for when “Social Science” is invoked as a cohesive and singular object, and positioned to take on any of a number of unsubstantiated attributes, and when it is disassembled into conveniently parsed exemplars to prove some point, and disavows the remaining constituents of the social sciences that do not conform (“Well – those fields are different. Let me articulate [however arbitrarily] why that is.”) It seems to go something like this:
“Social Science is….”
“but my social science is special…”
“and e-Social Science has the potential to be…”
“but my e-social science is an exception, and must be approached with more care.”

I don't think we can have it both ways. We have to be better than that. It's going to be hard, but it's simply going to be necessary.

Tuesday wrap up was fine and mostly pro-forma. It was nice to have a closing lunch with everyone from the doctoral colloquium to catch up on what we all thought. Much of the talk swirled around the morning panel, and the reactions were varied - mostly along the line I had discerned earlier. Like I mentioned before, the panel was probably the most frustrating and disappointing part of the conference for me, but it was also by far the most useful, as it brought into view what is likely an important categorical variable in my own work.

Coming to a close, it was a great conference for many reasons. I made some great contacts, got some fantastic feedback on my papers, presentations and poster, realized some strengths and challenges within this community...and most of all for myself, realized that my own research is interesting and relevant, and that people outside of SI seem to find value and insight in it. It's a bit of support and validation I don't get in my own department, and definitely needed to make the next jump. That alone made the conference worth attending.

Reporting live from the e-Social Science Doctoral Colloquium

Finally. After attending a steady stream of conferences, doctoral summer schools and colloquia, NSF and other sponsored symposia and workshops, et cetera - all of which left me with the impression that cyberinfrastructure/e-science research is focused solely on computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians - all the high-paradigm sciences...there has been a change of pace.

Today, I get to spend a full day in a room of other social scientists who are thinking about these issues (cyberinfrastructure, cyber-enabled discovery and innovation, social examinations of online science-based work, network dynamics in research, and a host of other cool and engaging topics that don't make me fall asleep), and my faith has been restored. True, it remains to be seen how much of the funding pie the people in this room capture over time. Still, knowing that there is a group of people out there, at the same stage I am, and who will likely be some fantastic contemporaries, collaborators, and friends over the course of a career - this is what I needed right now, just as disillusionment was about to ossify.

A statement from the CDI conference

I had a "double take" moment when this came out of a conference speaker's mouth, but I'll have to think about it...

"Teaching is to research as confession is to sin. You really can't do one without the other."

More precisely, you really can't deliver the former with any credibility until the latter has been given form.

CI, CDI, and myopic disciplinarity

I'm currently attending the NSF Symposium on CDI (Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. We're coming to a close on the first morning's panel, and I'm already frustrated with the absent voices of the social science and humanities in this discussion. Even during the Q&A period, several audience members have started off their questions with, "I know that all of us here are computer scientists..."

The stated objective of the CDI agenda is to enhance American competitiveness by enabling innovation through the use of computational models, methods, and tools. Interestingly, one question arose about the comparative visions of CDI and Cyberinfrastructure (CI).The answer was that they are complementary. One of the CDI director’s goals is to maximize the utility of investments in CI. Projects that come out of CDI will both use and develop CI. “We see CI as the deployment of the things CDI creates.”

I can live with the idea that "cyber-enabled" has a strong computational component, and that there are particular fields or disciplines that are already computational in nature, or are easily expressed in ways that are manipulable by computing technologies. What I can't live with is the sense of dread that I get when I listen to the discussion, and hear the door being slammed on the social sciences and humanities. It's not that the computer scientists don't care (though I suspect that they don't)...these non-quantified fields never even occur to them as relevant. (To be fair, though, I think that the social sciences and humanities, by and large, have the same ignoring or dismissive attitude toward engineering and the natural and physical sciences in terms of relevance. The small community of social science and humanities scholars who are thinking about cyberinfrastructure and CDI haven't yet convinced their constituent communities of the on-the-ground importance, the connection to funding, and the fact that there is an important poker game happening and they are not at the table.

It seems that the larger humanities and social science communities, if they are paying attention to CI and CDI at all, are much like Frank Rhodes' quote about the future of the research university - “I wonder at times if we are not like the dinosaurs, looking up at the sky at the approaching comet and wondering whether it has an implication for our future."

I guess what I'm saying here is that I'm disenchanted with the attention, development, and resources - in short, the privilege - that the computer, natural, and physical sciences receive in the cyber-enabled world. The social sciences and humanities make noise that that they are not just relevant, but important to CI and CDI - but we must face the harsh reality that the social scientists and humanities scholars are not remediating themselves, not changing or evolving, and certainly not taking an active role in shifting the topology of CI- and CDI-based technologies to be more relevant to their own fields, data, and scholarship. And even if they are trying, they are not doing it quickly enough. They (we?) are being left behind, orphaned by the academic and reearch infrastructure that they are relying on to protect them.

Smile...you're on research camera

I've run into an interesting element of putting my research into practice lately. Part of the oral history project I'm running called for videotaping my interviewees. I had a number of interviews set up in the San Francisco Bay area, and I've been lugging the video equipment around everywhere I go. It hasn't come out of the carrying case yet.

I expected that some people would be a bit squeamish about being videotaped. Most people are afraid of how they look and sound. Still, they get over it, and I've done video-based research in the past. Quite a bit, actually, before I came to graduate school. I've got a lot of techniques for cajoling participants into letting me turn on the camera, after which they promptly forget that they are being taped at all.

This time, though, every technique I have up my sleeve failed. Why? It wasn't about the self-consciousness this time.

The subject about which I am interviewing is fairly new on the academic and research scene, and is in a state of rapid change and development. The people whom I have set out to interview are largely responsible for its advancement either in industry or academia. The main objection to the taping is that these people are sensitive to go on record and make a commitment or solid statement. They're fine with non-attributable statements, but as soon as their name is to go on it, they back away (even though they are ostensibly leading the movement in different capacities and to varying extents.) Frankly, I don't think I could have predicted or foreseen this, but it's an interesting revelation nonetheless.

I'm going to have to think about how to give people like this incentive to provide video interviews and feel comfortable that their statements aren't going to come back to bite them later.

Adventures with the IRB

Of course, when I was designing the dissertation research (as well as some research I am doing on IBM and the emerging Service Research and Service Science, Management, and Engineering agendas), the topic of IRB approval came up. When I went to the UM eResearch website and started an application for the IBM project, it became quicly apparent that I had no idea how to answer most of the questions. This is definitely not because I have no experience in research design or filling out the forms - I do. Rather, it was because the questions ask in the IRB application didn't even seem to have relevance to the projects or methods I am using to conduct them.

I spoke with a colleague who is involved with the Behavioral Sciences IRB group at UM to ask for guidance and advice. She pointed out that what I am proposing sounded like the methods being used fall into the category of "oral history", and that a 2003 agreement among the Association for Oral History, the U.S. Department of Human Research Protection, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had concluded that oral history does not fall under the understood definition of "research" that needs review. As a result, it was decided that oral history projects are excluded from IRB review (which is a different category than "exempt", which still requires an IRB application and review), as long as the appropriate provosts, deans, chairs, and directors are notified and approve the research.

Why isn't oral history considered research? For the types of research the IRB plays a major role, the point of the inquiry is to generate results, theories, or concepts that can be generalized and are designed to have predictive power. Oral histories (which are more akin to journalism, which is also excluded from IRB) aim to collect and analyze the particulars of people, places, dates, and events related to a specific historical vector (or set of vectors). The intention is not to predict the future, but to understand the past. Not to generalize, but to contextualize. Even thinking about it with a modicum of common sense (as well as research sense), it would be impossible to construct a historical account of any value if one could not refer to the roles of identified people, places, or statements with attribution.

I read over all of the links and resources this colleague sent, and constructed a letter with printouts of the relevant documents. These were then sent to the seven key people who would need to provide approval. All seven gave approval, and these notes were placed in my doctoral student file.

The next step was generating an informed consent document that makes clear the parameters of the study. Even though IRB is not involved in moderating the project, it is still important to provide and collect informed consent. I tried to be as explicit as possible about the nature of the project, the fact that it falls outside of IRB review and what this means, and how I envision participation playing out. A link to the approved Informed Consent Form that can be used as an example and template for non-IRB projects appears below.

The point of this entry? Just to keep an accurate record of what steps I needed to follow in approaching this kind of research. Possibly, it can help others that come after who run into the same set of issues. If you have further questions about my experience with living outside the IRB, and how the story unfolds, feel free to email.

Links

• Oral History Excluded from IRB Review - article


• Oral History Association Evaluation Guidelines


• UM Human Protections Research Manual - see bottom of page 42


• UM Behavioral Science Informed Consent Template


• Sample Informed Consent form for non-IRB project

What is infrastructure? What isn't?

I gave a presentation at a conference recently entitled "Building" Cyberinfrastructure. There were a number of great questions posed by my colleagues during the Q&A session at the end, but something was nagging me. I realized what it was later while chatting with one of the faculty who had attended the talk - most of the people in the room have a different concept of what infrastructure actually means. How could something like infrastructure have been a subject of study for so long, and still be so far away from closure as a term of art? The faculty member commented that I've probably spent more time thinking about the nature of infrastructure than the typical person in my audience. Thus, it became obvious to me that if I am to write a dissertation (and launch a career) that addresses infrastructure, I am going to have to be both careful and explicit in my terms.

I realized that my views on what infrastructure is and isn't have changed radically in the past two years. I owe that transformation almost entirely to Paul Edwards. I took a course with Paul in Winter 2006 entitled "Systems, Networks, and Webs: The History and Theory of Infrastructure". Over the course of the semester, Paul constantly challenged my assumptions and use of the term. The point that he drove into my head over and over is that infrastructure is vast, complex, heterogeneous. The term "infrastructure" is employed carelessly most of the time, and is usually invoked when people actually mean "system" or "network". The origination of these terms in the way I will choose to employ them is derived primarily from the work of Thomas Parke Hughes.

The complicated, ever-present systems that undergird the operational existence of society have come to be studied as "infrastructure'', a compound of the Latin infra-, meaning "below'' and structus or struere, meaning "to build or assemble.'' There are several accounts for the introduction of the term, some claiming its use in 19^th century France and others marking 1927, when the American military culture began to use the term to describe the interconnection of roadways, electrical resources, waterways, etc. Despite the origins, the term generally refers to the heterogeneous interconnection of systems that support the fluidity of services and interactions that are the attention of everyday matters. It is because of this supporting nature that the infra- tag is important. Infrastructure lies below the attention of those who use it. It is typically transparent, only becoming visible when it does not function properly.

There are several canonical pieces describing the development of infrastructure that I'm not going to repeat here, but a good summary can be found in two other recent pieces generated by Paul Edwards, Steve Jackson, and Geof Bowker. (My name appears on them as well, but I freely admit that my written contributions were comparatively minimal.) The first is a NSF Workshop Report on Cyberinfrastructure, and the other (written entirely by Steve Jackson) is a derivative article published in First Monday. The best place to look is in the section entitled "Infrastructural Dynamics".

In short, though, I believe that we can view systems with clearer and cleaner senses of jurisdiction, of sovereignty, of control. One can see without much effort where a system ends and the rest of the world begins. Infrastructure does not embody this relative simplicity. Boundaries and edges are hazy, if they are visible at all. Control is decentralized, complex¹, and the hybrid product of various agendas, tensions, and histories.

As I go on, I'm going to need to become more concise about how I express the categorization of systems, networks, inter-networks or webs, and full-out infrastructures. It's difficult to rely on something that sounds conspicuously similar to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's 1964 "Casablanca test" definition of pornography stating, "I know it when I see it."

And there are the problems. Apparently not everyone calls the same things "infrastructure". More importantly, we are not supposed to be able to see infrastructure, so how could we ever know it?


¹It is important to draw yet another distinguishing line for this term, which is similarly over-applied in the academic literature. Complex is not the same as merely complicated. Complexity suggests that there are patterns, behaviors, enactments, or actions at one level of scale that would not be predictable by examining other levels of scale. The typical term for this is emergence. Complicated systems exhibit linear qualities. Complex systems exhibit non-linear qualities in addition.

The Beast in Progress

This post probably won't make much sense without a decent background in infrastructure studies, or a passing (at least) familiarity with the idea of cyberinfrastructure. I'm not going to provide those here. They'll be discussed ad nauseum in future posts. This really is simply a first place to put down where I am now with the dissertation outline.

Here it is in all of its amorphous, unpolished glory.

1. Can we "build" cyberinfrastructure?
   What is the nature of cyberinfrastructure and its essential attributes such that it comes into existence
   
   1. Claim that it is in existence (which requires some form of existence proof).
   
   
   2. Stories about how it happened (which is largely addressed in part III)
      • My job is to tell the story vs. a story (constructing something authoritative).
      
      
      • My contribution is to bring discipline to a topic that is still developing, a story in medias res.



2. Addressing the OEP (Ontological, Epistempological, Phenomenological) Problematic of Infrastructure Studies
   When we speak of infrastructure, we have taken the product of historical forces, path dependencies, and heterogeneous processes that have sunk below the level of individual and sociocultural cognition, and resurrected it as a bounded object for our deconstruction. This is not without its own consequences or problems. What makes examination difficult is managing the complex choreography of OEP. This process has been captured in different forms and in different disciplines over time.
   
   
   
   • The story of Plato's cave - only seeing shadows on the wall, but needing to understand the object that casts them.
     
   • Aristotle's Categories - an early and foundational taxonomy to provide structure, a tool to attempt choreography.
     
   • Formal metaphors rising out of mathematics.
     
     
     • Orthographic projections - understanding the surface (static) features of a multidimensional object by projecting it into lower planes.
     
     
     • The Divergence Theorem in vector calculus - reconstructing an object (the volume and dynamic features) by decomposing integrated volume into a function of surface features.
   
   
   • Husserl's examination of meaning and object, and the presentation of cyberinfrastructure as a "situation of affairs".
   
   
   • Heidegger's treatment of being-in-the-world, and the consequences of understanding things as present-at-hand (the focused and prescient object of examination) vs. ready-to-hand (functional, operational, and transparent).
   
   
   • Bowker, Star, and Ruhleder's framework of "infrastructural inversion", which aims to make the transparent visible.
   
   
   • Latour's Actor-Network Theory, which generates a robust qualitative description of infrastructures, but often falls short in practice of capturing both the nature of the object and the complexity of relationships and processes it contains.
   
   
   
   Each of these approaches (and doubtless there are others), in my interpretation, is related to management the OEP choreography and acknowledges the underlying problematic of describing objects of complexity (and yes, I am drawing the distinction between complex, and merely complicated). How do we draw upon or integrate these previous interpretive frameworks to develop a new understanding of infrastructure/cyberinfrastructure?


3. Historical case study - NSFNET to Cyberinfrastructure
   
   The current state of cyberinfrastructure can be built out of a story that has been told a number of times, and in a number of ways - the rise of the Internet. With rare exception, these stories concentrate on the commercialization and privatization of the Internet, and ignore the continuation of the technology as a platform for scientific and technological research. Some of this history can be inferred from studies in collaboratories and CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), but has rarely been approached from historical, STS, or complex systems perspectives. I am pursuing access to interview most of the available key players in the rise of the Internet from the ARPANET and NSFNET eras, through to the present instantiation through the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure. I plan to use these interviews, as well as analyze relevant archives and documents, to understand the following:
   
   
   
   • How did political forces shape the sociotechnical topology of cyberinfrastructure?
   
   
   • What are the consequences of this sociotechnical configuration for different research disciplines and their continued legitimacy within the cyberinfrastructure research framework, and further, their standing among the sciences as a whole?
   
   
   • How can organizations approach crafting policy to ensure the protection and benefit of ALL research sectors within the cyberinfrastructure-based enterprise?

Fledgling Post

I've kept blogs in various forms for a number of years. I think LiveJournal was my first foray back in 2001. None of them really stuck for me. Then again, I didn't particularly see much point in rehashing the minutae of my day, nor did I really feel like consistently putting up my personal life for validation by people I've never met.

This will be something different, I think.

So many other doctoral student colleagues are enjoying a lot of success in receiving feedback on their research-in-progress by keeping research blogs. I've reached the point where I need to put my own out there and get some pushback to propel my thoughts. Here's hoping that this blog will have a bit more persistence than those in the past.

Yeah...that's pretty much the deal here. My half-baked thoughts about what I'm thinking, reading, writing, seeing, and considering will end up here. If I'm lucky, there will be some elements that make it into my dissertation. Perhaps this will, in its whole, be nothing more than what my advisor tags "intermediate product". Nevertheless, it's yet another strategy to get from here to there. (Translation: often stuck to finished dissertation).

Oh yeah...one more thing...the title of the blog. No, "dasein" is not a spelling error of "design". Part of the argument that I am trying to mount (and it is pretty clumsy at this point) involves a lot of Heidegger and his concept of "dasein" or "being" as applied to studies of infrastructure and cyberinfrastructure. More on that to come.

Feel free to comment away. Push me. Tell me where I'm going wrong. Tell me where I might have struck on something good. Just tell me something. :)