mbietz November 14th, 2008
The Scientific Collaboration on the Internet book has (finally) been published. Check out my chapter (with Gary Olson and Marsha Naidoo) on the work we did with international AIDS research collaborations.
From the MIT Press website:
Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientific collaborations were carried out by scientists in the same physical location—the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, for example, involved thousands of scientists gathered on a remote plateau in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Today, information and communication technologies allow cooperation among scientists from far-flung institutions and different disciplines. Scientific Collaboration on the Internet provides both broad and in-depth views of how new technology is enabling novel kinds of science and engineering collaboration. The book offers commentary from notable experts in the field along with case studies of large-scale collaborative projects, past and ongoing.
mbietz November 10th, 2008
Last week I went to someone else’s conference. I’ve been to a lot of conferences in my field, but I don’t often attend conferences so far outside my own domain. But as part of a cyberinfrastructure study that I’m working on, I went to the Metagenomics 2008 conference. I was happy to discover that I could follow the general idea of most of the talks (although, of course, I was usually baffled when speakers got to the highly technical details).
But as an outsider, I found myself frequently turning to the person next to me and asking, “Is this cool?” or, “Is (s)he anyone?” Understanding the science is a prerequisite, but in order to really be a member of the community, you have to know to whom or to what to pay heed. I’m at a conference in my own field this week, and last week’s experience has made me more sensitive to this phenomenon. Today I overheard someone explaining to a conference newbie why one session was likely to be more interesting than the other, and I realized that a) I completely agreed with him, and b) to know that required a lot of knowledge that wasn’t in the conference program.
mbietz September 19th, 2008
I’m organizing (with Charlotte Lee and David Ribes) a workshop at the upcoming CSCW 2008 conference. There’s still time to send a position paper! Here are the details:
Workshop on Designing Cyberinfrastructure to Support Science
At the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Saturday, November 8. San Diego, CA
Recent years have seen the rise of new forms of large-scale distributed scientific enterprises supported primarily through advanced information infrastructures. These advanced infrastructures are called “cyberinfrastructure,” although terms such as grid computing, collaboratories, and eScience are also commonly used. Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Cyberinfrastructure intersect in their aims to support collaboration within heterogeneous groups and across physical distribution. Furthermore the development of CI – or large-scale informational resources – is itself a form of collaborative work worthy of CSCW research. Continue Reading »