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.

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. :)