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?