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.