Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Infrastructuring for Cross-Disciplinary Synthetic Science: Meta-Study Research in Land System Science

  • Published:
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Traditionally infrastructure studies are post-hoc analyses of emergent phenomena. While acknowledging the contextual complexity of co-evolution, there has been a turn toward exploring these processes from a design perspective. In this paper we examine a new interdiscipline, Land System Science, whose scientific inquiry is predicated on a deep and ongoing integration of radically disparate data from across the natural, physical, and social sciences. We report the results of a three-and-a half year field study of meta-study practice. In doing so, we perform infrastructural inversion to foreground the backstage scientific work practice to identify points of infrastructure. We used these insights regarding breakdowns and workarounds to inform the design of GLOBE, infrastructural tools that support this community’s needs for communication, cooperation, and knowledge construction. Our insight comes from being embedded both with domain scientists and software developers. Through four cases, we highlight the scientists’ unique challenges, strategies developed to address them, and the system components designed to better support many of these tactics. Specifically, we address the difficulties of finding, standardizing, interpreting, and validating data. This advances the infrastructuring literature by illustrating how design can be used to engage a scientific community in active self-reflection.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8
Figure 9
Figure 10

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Baker, Karen S., Geoffrey C. Bowker, and Helena Karasti (2002). Designing an infrastructure for heterogeneity in ecosystem data, collaborators and organizations. In Proceedings of the annual National Conference on digital government research, Los Angeles, California, USA, 12-22 May 2002. Digital Government Society of North America, pp. 1–4.

  • Baker, Karen S., Steven J. Jackson, and Jerome R. Wanetick (2005a). Strategies supporting heterogeneous data and interdisciplinary collaboration: towards an ocean informatics environment. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 03–06 Jan 2005. New York: ACM press, p. 219.2.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker, Karen S., David Ribes, Florence Millerand, and Geoffrey Bowker (2005b). Interoperability strategies for scientific cyberinfrastructure: research and practice. In Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 42, no. 1.

  • Bietz, Matthew and Charlotte P. Lee (2012) Adapting cyberinfrastructure to new science: Tensions and strategies. Proceedings of the 2012 iConference. New York: ACM press, pp. 183-190.

  • Bietz, Matthew J., and Charlotte P. Lee (2009). Collaboration in Metagenomics: sequence databases and the Organization of Scientific Work. In I. Wagner, H. Tellioğlu, E. Balka, C. Simone, & L. Ciolfi (Eds.): ESCSW 2009. Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Vienna, 7–11 Sept 2009. London: Springer. pp. 243–262.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Birnholtz, Jeremy P., and Matthew J. Bietz (2003). Data at work: Supporting sharing in science and engineering. In GROUP 2003. Proceedings of the  International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work. New York: ACM Press. pp. 339–348.

  • Blake, Catherine, and Wanda Pratt (2006a). Collaborative information synthesis I: a model of information behavior of scientists in medicine and public health. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 57, no. 13, pp. 1740–1749.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blake, Catherine, and Wanda Pratt (2006b). Collaborative information synthesis II: recommendations for information systems to support synthesis activities. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 57, no. 14, pp. 1888–1895.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Borgman, Christine L., Jillian C. Wallis, and Noel Enyedy (2007). Little science confronts the data deluge: habitat ecology, embedded sensor networks, and digital libraries. International Journal on Digital Libraries, vol. 7, no. 1–2, pp. 17–30.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Borgman, Christine L., Geoffrey C. Bowker, Thomas A. Finholt, and Jillian C. Wallis (2009). Towards a virtual Organization for Data Cyberinfrastructure. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. New York: ACM Press. pp. 353–356.

  • Bowker, Geoffrey C (1994). Science on the run: Information management and industrial geophysics at Schlumberger 1920–1940. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  • Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star (1999). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  • Brown, Daniel G., Peter H. Verburg, Pontius Robert G. Jr., and Mark D. Lange (2013). Opportunities to improve impact, integration, and evaluation of land change models. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, vol. 5, no. 5, pp. 452–457.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Callon, Michel (1986). Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fisherman of St. Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.): Power, Action and Belief. A new Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge Sociological Review Monograph, pp. 196–229.

  • Charmaz, Kathy (2014). Constructing grounded theory (Second Edition). Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clarke, Adele E. (2005). Situational analysis: Grounded theory after the postmodern turn . Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

  • Claus Bossen, and Randi Markussen (2010). Infrastructuring and ordering devices in health care: medication plans and practices on a hospital Ward. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 615–637.

  • Edwards, Paul N.; Geoffrey Bowker; Steven Jackson; and Robin Williams (2009). Introduction: An Agenda for Infrastructure Studies. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, vol. 10, no. 5, 364-374.

  • Edward J. Hackett, John N. Parker, David Conz, Diana Rhoten, and Andrew Parker (2008). Ecology Transformed: The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and the Changing Patterns of Ecological Research. In G.M. Olson, A. Zimmerman, and N. Bos (Eds): Scientific Collaboration on the Internet. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 277–296.

  • Edwards, Paul N. (2010). A vast machine: Computer models, climate data, and the politics of global warming. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  • Edwards, Paul N.; Steven J. Jackson; Geoffrey C. Bowker; and Cory P. Knobel (2007). Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design. Retrieved from https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/49353.

  • Edwards, Paul N.; Matthew D. Mayernik; Archer Batcheller; Geoffrey Bowker; and Christine Borgman (2011). Science friction: Data, metadata, and collaboration. Social Studies of Science. vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 1–24.

  • Edwards, Paul N.; Steven J. Jackson; Melissa K. Chalmers; Geoffrey C. Bowker; Christine L. Borgman; David Ribes; Matthew Burton; and Scout Calvert (2013). Knowledge Infrastructures: Intellectual Frameworks and Research Challenges (Working Paper). Retrieved from http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/97552.

  • Ellis, Erle C., and Navin Ramankutty (2007). Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, vol. 6, no. 8, pp. 439–447.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ellis, Erle C., Timothy Finin, Wayne G. Lutters, Timothy Oates, and Penny Rheingans (2011). GLOBE: evolving new global workflows for land change science. NSF Grant 115210.

  • Faniel, Ixchel M., and Trond E. Jacobsen (2010). Reusing scientific data: how earthquake engineering researchers assess the reusability of colleagues’ data. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 19, no. 3–4, pp. 355–375.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Faniel Ixchel M., Eric Kansa, Sarah Whitcher Kansa, Julianna Barrera-Gomez, and Elizabeth Yakel (2013). The Challenges of Digging Data: A Study of Context in Archaeological Data Reuse. In JCDL 2013: Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Indianapolis, 22–26 July 2013. New York: ACM Press, pp. 295–304.

  • Gonzalez, Andrew, Bradley J. Cardinale, Ginger R.H. Allington, Jarrett Byrnes, K. Arthur Endsley, Daniel G. Brown, David U. Hooper, Forest Isbell, Mary I. O’Connor, and Michel Loreau (2016). Estimating local biodiversity change: a critique of papers claiming no loss of local diversity. Ecology, vol. 97, no. 8, pp. 1949–1960.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gooding, David (1982). Putting agency back into experiment. In A. Pickering (Ed.): Science as practice and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 65–112.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hey, Tony, Stuart Tansley, and Kristen Tolle (Eds.) (2009). The fourth paradigm: Data-intensive scientific discovery. Richmond: Microsoft Research.

  • Hanseth, Ole, and Kalle Lyytinen (2008). Theorizing about the Design of Information Infrastructures: Design Kernel Theories and Principles. Working Papers on Information Systems, vol. 4, no. 12, pp. 207-241.

  • Jackson, Steven J. (2014). Rethinking repair. In T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski, & K. Foot (Eds): Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  • Jackson, Steven J., Paul N. Edwards, Geoffrey C. Bowker, and Cory P. Knobel (2007). Understanding Infrastructure: History, heuristics, and cyberinfrastructure policy. First Monday, vol. 12, no. 6.

  • Karasti, Helana, Karen S. Baker, and Florence Millerand (2010). Infrastructure time: long-term matters in collaborative development. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 19, no, 304, pp. 377–415.

  • Karasti, Helena; and Karen S. Baker (2004). Infrastructuring for the long-term: ecological information management. In HICSS. Proceedings for the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, p. 10.

  • Karasti, Helena, and Anna-Liisa Syrjänen (2004). Artful infrastructuring in two cases of community PD. In PDC 2004: Proceedings of the eighth conference on participatory design: Artful integration: Interweaving Media, Materials and Practices. New York: ACM Press. pp. 20–30.

  • Karasti, Helena, Karen S. Baker, and Eija Halkola (2006). Enriching the notion of data curation in E-science: data managing and information infrastructuring in the long term ecological research (LTER) network. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 321–358.

  • Karl, Jason W., Jeffrey E. Herrick, Robert S. Unnasch, Jeffrey K. Gillan, Erle C. Ellis, Wayne G. Lutters, and Laura J. Martin (2013). Discovering ecologically relevant knowledge from published studies through Geosemantic searching. BioScience, vol. 63, no. 8, pp. 674–682.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Knorr Cetina, Karen (1999). Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

  • Kummerle, Tobias, Karlheinz Erb, Patrick Meyfroidt, Daniel Muller, Peter H. Verburg, Stephan Estel, Helmut Habel, Patrick Hostert, Martin R. Jepsen, Thomas Kastner, Christian Levers, Marcus Lindner, Christoph Plutzer, Pieter Johannes Verkerk, Emma H van der Zanden, and Anette Reenberg (2013). Challenges and opportunities in mapping land use intensity globally. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, vol 5, no. 5, pp. 484–493.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Latour, Bruno (1999). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

  • Latour Bruno, and Steve Woolgar (1979). Laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  • Lee, Jae W., Jianting Zhang, Anne S. Zimmerman, and Angelo Lucia (2009). DataNet: an emerging cyberinfrastructure for sharing, reusing and preserving digital data for scientific discovery and learning. AIChE Journal, vol. 55, no. 11, pp. 2757–2764.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liberati, Alessandro, Douglas G. Altman, Jennifer Tetzlaff, Cynthia Mulrow, Peter C. Gøtzsche, John P. A. Ioannidis, Mike Clark, P.J. Devereaux, Jos Kleijnen, and David Moher (2009). The PRISMA Statement for Reporting Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses of Studies That Evaluate Health Care Interventions: Explanation and Elaboration. PLoS Medicine, vol. 6, no. 7.

  • Lutters, Wayne G., and Susan Winter (2012). Virtual Organizations. In W. Bainbridge (Ed.): Leadership in science and technology: A reference handbook. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, pp. 334–343.

  • Magliocca, Nicholas R., Thomas K. Rudel, Peter H. Verberg, William J. McConnell, Ole Mertz, Katharina Gerstner, Andreas Heinimann, and Erle C. Ellis (2014). Synthesis in land change science: methodological patterns, challenges, and guidelines. Regional Environmental Change, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 1–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Margulies, Jared N., Nicholas Magliocca, Matthew Schmill, and Erle C. Ellis (2016). Ambiguous geographies: connecting case study knowledge with global change science. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 106, no. 3, pp. 572–596.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Martin, Laura J., Bernd Blossey, and Erle C. Ellis (2012). Mapping where ecologists work: biases in the global distribution of terrestrial ecological observations. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 195–201.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mayernik, Matthew S., Jillian C. Wallis, and Christine L. Borgman (2013). Unearthing the infrastructure: humans and sensors in field-based scientific research. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 65–101.

  • Monterio, Eric, Neal Pollock, Ole Hanseth, and Robin Williams (2013). From artefacts to infrastructures. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 22, no. 4–6, pp. 575–607.

  • Moore, Steven A. and Andrew Karvonen (2008) Sustainable Architecture in Context: STS and Design Thinking. Science & Technology Studies, vol. 21, no.1, pp. 29–46.

  • Newman, Greg, Andrea Wiggins, Alycia Crall, Eric Graham, Sarah Newman, and Kevin Crowston (2012). The future of citizen science: emerging technologies and shifting paradigms. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 298–304.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nicholas R. Magliocca, Erle C. Ellis, Timothy Oates, and Matt Schmill (2013). Contextualizing the Global Relevance of Local Land Change Observations. arXiv:1307.6889 [physics, Stat]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.6889.

  • Nielsen, Michael (2011). Reinventing discovery: The new era of networked science. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  • Parmiggiani, Elena, Eric Monteiro, and Vidar Hepsø (2015). The digital coral: infrastructuring environmental monitoring. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 423–460.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pine, Kathleen H., and Max Liboiron (2015). The politics of measurement and action. In CHI 2015: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM Press, pp. 3147–3156.

  • Pipek, Volkmar (2005). Negotiating Infrastructure: Supporting the Appropriation of Collaborative Software. International Reports of Socio-Informatics (IRSI), vol. 2, no. 1, p. 44.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pipek, Volkmar; and Anna-Liisa Syrjänen (2006). Infrastructuring as Capturing In-Situ Design. In Proceedings of the 7th Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems, Venice.

  • Pipek, Volkmar and Volker Wulf (2009). Infrastructuring: Toward an Integrated Perspective on the Design and Use of Information Technology. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 447-473.

  • Ribes, David, and Thomas Finholt (2009). The Long Now of Technology Infrastructure: Articulating Tensions in Development. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 375-398.

  • Ribes, David, and Charlotte P. Lee (2010). Sociotechnical studies of cyberinfrastructure and e-research: current themes and future trajectories. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 19, no. 3–4, pp. 231–244.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rolland, Betsy, and Charlotte P. Lee (2013). Beyond trust and reliability: reusing data in collaborative cancer epidemiology research. In CSCW 2013. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM Press, pp. 235–444.

  • Rudel, Thomas K. (2008). Meta-analyses of case studies: a method for studying regional and global environmental change. Global Environmental Change, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 18–25.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Star, Susan Leigh (1985). Scientific work and uncertainty. Social Studies of Science, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 391–427.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Star, Susan Leigh (1999). The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 377–391.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Star, Susan Leigh and Geoffrey C. Bowker (2002). How to Infrastructure? In L. A. Lievrouw & S. Livingstone (Eds.): Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Social Consequences of ICTs. SAGE, pp. 151–162.

  • Star, Susan Leigh, and Griesemer James R. (1989). Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 387–420.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder (1996). Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces. Information Systems Research, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 111–134.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Turner, Billy Lee II., Eric F. Lambin, and Anette Reenberg (2007). The emergence of land change science for global environmental change and sustainability. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, vol. 104, no. 52, pp. 20666–20671.

  • Verburg, Peter H., Karl-Heinz Erb, Ole Mertz, and Giovana Espindola (2013). Land system science: between global challenges and local realities. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, vol. 5, no. 5, pp. 433–437.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yarmey, Lynn, and Karen S. Baker (2013). Towards standardization. A participatory framework for scientific standard-making. International Journal of Digital Curation, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 157–172.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Young, Alyson L., and Wayne G. Lutters (2015). (Re)defining land change science through synthetic research practices. In CSCW 2015. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. New York: ACM Press, pp. 431–442.

  • Zimmerman, Ann (2007). Not by metadata alone: the use of diverse forms of knowledge to locate data for reuse. International Journal on Digital Libraries, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 5–16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the LSS community and the Global Land Programme for their support of this research. We would also like to thank our fellow GLOBE team members. This research has been supported by NSF award #115210 “GLOBE: Evolving New Global Workflows for Land Change Science.”

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human-Centered Computing, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, 535 W Michigan Ave, IT 587, Indianapolis, IN, 46202, USA

    Alyson L. Young

  2. Department of Information Systems, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Wayne G. Lutters

Authors
  1. Alyson L. Young
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Wayne G. Lutters
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alyson L. Young.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Young, A.L., Lutters, W.G. Infrastructuring for Cross-Disciplinary Synthetic Science: Meta-Study Research in Land System Science. Comput Supported Coop Work 26, 165–203 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9267-z

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9267-z

Keywords

Search

Navigation