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The human infrastructure of cyberinfrastructure
Abstract
Despite their rapid proliferation, there has been little examination of the coordination and social practices of cyberinfrastructure projects. We use the notion of "human infrastructure" to explore how human and organizational arrangements share properties with technological infrastructures. We conducted an 18-month ethnographic study of a large-scale distributed biomedical cyberinfrastructure project and discovered that human infrastructure is shaped by a combination of both new and traditional team and organizational structures. Our data calls into question a focus on distributed teams as the means for accomplishing distributed work and we argue for using human infrastructure as an alternative perspective for understanding how distributed collaboration is accomplished in big science.
... CI has gained more interest in recent years because of the growth in quantities of data collected in science, interdisciplinarity in research, the establishment of a range of locations around the world where cutting-edge research is performed, and the spread of advanced technologies [96]. Due to the various components required, CI systems are expensive, with the cost of a supercomputer alone being upwards of US$90 million. ...
... CI has been applied in scientific disciplines ranging from biomedical to geospatial and environmental sciences. One such project is the distributed CI called the Function Biomedical Informatics Research Network (FBIRN), a large-scale project in the area of biomedical research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) [96]. CI has also been applied in geospatial research with a range of initiatives under the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). ...
Plant phenomics has been rapidly advancing over the past few years. This advancement is attributed to the increased innovation and availability of new technologies which can enable the high-throughput phenotyping of complex plant traits. The application of artificial intelligence in various domains of science has also grown exponentially in recent years. Notably, the computer vision, machine learning, and deep learning aspects of artificial intelligence have been successfully integrated into non-invasive imaging techniques. This integration is gradually improving the efficiency of data collection and analysis through the application of machine and deep learning for robust image analysis. In addition, artificial intelligence has fostered the development of software and tools applied in field phenotyping for data collection and management. These include open-source devices and tools which are enabling community driven research and data-sharing, thereby availing the large amounts of data required for the accurate study of phenotypes. This paper reviews more than one hundred current state-of-the-art papers concerning AI-applied plant phenotyping published between 2010 and 2020. It provides an overview of current phenotyping technologies and the ongoing integration of artificial intelligence into plant phenotyping. Lastly, the limitations of the current approaches/methods and future directions are discussed.
... These infrastructures encompass not only physical structures and technological systems, but also individuals, organizations, and other social groups like teams and networks. Lee et al. (2006) argue that this "human infrastructure is integral to the painstaking process of creating a data sharing infrastructure," though it is "both dependent and constrained by conventions of practice, existing standards and the organizations that created them" (2006, p 490). Lee et al. describe this human infrastructure in the context of distributed scientific research, but the development of born-digital archiving workflows is similarly shaped at this confluence of social, technological, organizational, and professional factors. ...
The documentation of archival workflows plays an important role in digital curation practice. Capturing the various steps, tools, people, and software involved at different stages, workflow documentation visually represents complex activities, and at times, invisible labor. In this article, we reflect on findings from the OSSArcFlow project, a three-year, grant-funded initiative to investigate and document workflow activities of 12 cultural heritage institutions using three open-source software systems. Building on previously published research on documentation of current digital curation practices, this article reflects on the challenges the project team encountered in modeling archivists’ aspirations for their workflows. While current practices could be accurately represented in linear process models, archivists’ aspirations for how they might advance digital curation practices extended beyond adding or changing discrete workflow steps and often involved sociotechnical factors that could not be easily mapped. This article presents a taxonomy of archivists’ aspirations for their born-digital archives, grouping these goals together around major themes that emerged throughout the research. Our findings show that workflow documentation is an essential artifact in helping archivists to understand gaps and challenges in their current workflows and to imagine the further development of digital curation tools, systems, and practices. Project participants especially benefited from engaging in this reflection on workflow documentation as part of a community of practitioners, with the opportunity to compare across institutional contexts.
... For example, participants were concerned about how their gender selection on a dating app might impact their safety; if they were trans but could not formally self-describe, people might react violently upon disclosure. In medical scenarios, participants were uneasy about how their responses might lead to poor treatment or lack of respect by medical ofcials-a sort of "human infrastructure" [55]. ...
... If care is, as theorists have argued, about the ongoing practices needed for maintaining and sustaining the relations that give shape to daily life [15], then part of the art of staging critical interdisciplinary encounters is encouraging such relations amongst participants. Informal networks and social ties have been recognized as critical to the function of the largescale knowledge infrastructures needed for flood risk modeling [51], and other research has noted the importance of the biographies and life experiences of technical experts in organizational change and knowledge management [43]. ...
... Infrastructuring refers to ongoing efforts to align these elements (Pipek and Wulf, 2009) as new workplace cultures emerge entangled with new technological infrastructures. Thus, human and organizational arrangements share properties with technological infrastructures (Lee et al. 2006;Tang et al. 2015). Data were gathered in a regional Swedish healthcare practice to explore the physician perspective on the role of human infrastructures in maintaining information integrity, i.e., accuracy, safety, legality, and privacy. ...
Digital work is bringing significant change to all professions, as established work settings are replaced by remote work and digital teamwork and collaboration. Healthcare is one area where digital technology is a growing influence on professional work, roles, and relationships. This thesis explores some implications of digital work related to how physicians experience digital technologies in daily work and learning, and how they view their roles and expertise in relation to digitally engaged patients. The data comes from interviews, focus groups, and a survey of Swedish physicians. The findings suggest that digital work can be understood as a process of coping with contradictions, where physicians reconfigure professionalism through ongoing efforts to embrace the new forms of work without sacrificing core values. The thesis concludes with guidelines to address the transformation of professional roles and responsibilities, the new qualities and competencies required for digital work, and the need for interdisciplinary research and diverse perspectives towards the goal of appropriate design of sociotechnical medical systems.
Researching and designing Internet infrastructure solutions in rural and tribal contexts requires reciprocal relationships between researchers and community partners. Methodologies must be meaningful amid local social textures of life. Achieving transdisciplinarity while relating research impacts to partner communities takes care work, particularly where technical capacity is scarce. The Full Circle Framework is an action research full stack development methodology that foregrounds reciprocity among researchers, communities, and sovereign Native nations as the axis for research purpose and progress. Applying the framework to deploy television white space infrastructure in sovereign Native nations in northern New Mexico reveals challenges for rural computing, including the need to design projects according to the pace of rural and tribal government workflows, cultivate care as a resource for overworked researchers and community partners, and co-create a demand for accurate government data around Internet infrastructures in Indian Country and through rural counties.
The unique breed of particle physicists constitutes a community of sophisticated mythmakers--explicators of the nature of matter who forever alter our views of space and time. But who are these people? What is their world really like? Sharon Traweek, a bold and original observer of culture, opens the door to this unusual domain and offers us a glimpse into the inner sanctum. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674063488
Building ontologies involves taking a domain knowledge, formalizing this knowledge into a machine computable format, and encoding it in an ontology language. But what does this mean in practice? In the actual work of building ontologies a specialist will often find that domain knowledges are not readily prepared for ontology building. Written sources such as textbooks and technical treatises are often not precise enough for transformation into logical operators, there may be competing accounts of the same phenomena, overlapping taxonomies and standards, or outright contradictions. Similarly in consulting authorities in a domain, a programmer may find that these experts are not immediately able to state domain knowledge in the terms necessary for ontology building. In short, the experienced ontology specialist often finds that what participants in a domain consider their validated and structured knowledge is not readily compatible with knowledge representation. This paper draws on ethnographic observations of the broader process of building ontologies within the GEON project, a cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences. An initial conceptual understanding by the domain specialist of what is an ontology is crucial, but never sufficient.We describe a learning trajectory for ontology building, in which both domain and IT practitioners come to learn, through practice, the specification and transformation of domain knowlege into discourse accessible to knowledge representation. Coupled with this technical activity is the work of informing, and encouraging the participation, of a larger domain community. The product of the learning trajectory is not an ontology, but rather the practical ability for a IT specialists and domain experts to co-produce a community resource.
This book is the first effort to examine the changing nature of research in the physical sciences since World War II - from individuals or small groups to the gigantic team efforts of hundreds of scientists.
If they are successfully to carry out a research programme, astronomers need two crucial resources - access to telescopes, and sufficient time allocated on them to make observations and collect data. This paper employs the concept of the 'moral economy' - the unwritten expectations acid traditions that regulate and structure a community - as an analytical model to examine how astronomers and science managers allocate resources. I use the example of the Gemini 8-Meter Telescopes Project, a recently completed pair of large telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, as a vehicle to explore the moral economy of contemporary astronomy. Paying particular attention to the early years of the project (1987-92), I describe plans to build a new telescope facility for the entire US astronomy community, against the backdrop of the institutional, political and financial forces that shape national and international astronomy. By focusing on the process through which astronomers moved the Gemini telescope project from abstract blueprints and budgets into glass and steel, I examine themes such as access, equity, control and authority in contemporary science.
In this paper, I explore what we might mean by the phrase "crossing work practice boundaries by means of electronic communication". The focus is on the work practice boundaries, and the transformational effects of electronic communication on such boundaries. I begin by defining work practices with respect to the social world or activity system communities for whom such practices make sense. Taking up Strauss' suggestion that peripheries arouse more appropriate imagery for the variation and fluidity of social world boundaries, I propose a metaphor of boundary in terms of centres and peripheries, where peripheries can be characterized in a number of ways including: the degrees of commitment, the limits of communication and the levels of participation. Vignettes from three case studies illustrate some of the transformational effects of electronic communication on the relationships between a centre and its peripheries, on the external relationships among centres and their peripheries, and on the relationship of work practice boundaries to other boundary forms. In designing support for social worlds, a centre-periphery perspective could allow for more explicit account of the fluidity of work practice boundaries and the ways in which these might be affected by electronic communication.
