New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-science

309 Pages·2006·4.947 MB·English

by  Hine C.M.

New Infrastructures
for Knowledge
Production:
Understanding E-Science
Christine Hine
University of Surrey, UK
Information Science Publishing
Hershey • London • Melbourne • Singapore
Acquisitions Editor: Michelle Potter
Development Editor: Kristin Roth
Senior Managing Editor: Amanda Appicello
Managing Editor: Jennifer Neidig
Copy Editor: Mike Goldberg
Typesetter: Diane Huskinson
Cover Design: Lisa Tosheff
Printed at: Integrated Book Technology
Published in the United States of America by
Information Science Publishing (an imprint of Idea Group Inc.)
701 E. Chocolate Avenue
Hershey PA 17033
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
E-mail: [email protected]
Web site: http://www.idea-group.com
and in the United Kingdom by
Information Science Publishing (an imprint of Idea Group Inc.)
3 Henrietta Street
Covent Garden
London WC2E 8LU
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Web site: http://www.eurospanonline.com
Copyright © 2006 by Idea Group Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced, stored or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechani-
cal, including photocopying, without written permission from the publisher.
Product or company names used in this book are for identification purposes only.
Inclusion of the names of the products or companies does not indicate a claim of
ownership by IGI of the trademark or registered trademark.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
New infrastructures for knowledge production : understanding E-science / Christine M.
Hine, editor.
p. cm.
Summary: "This book is offers an overview of the practices and the technologies that
are shaping the knowledge production of the future"--Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-59140-717-6 (hardcover) -- ISBN 1-59140-718-4 (softcover) -- ISBN 1-59140-
719-2 (ebook)
1. Internet--Technological innovations. 2. Computational grids (Computer systems). I.
Hine, Christine.
TK5105.875.I57N487 2006
306.4'5--dc22
2005032107
British Cataloguing in Publication Data
A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.
All work contributed to this book is new, previously-unpublished material. The views
expressed in this book are those of the authors, but not necessarily of the publisher.
New Infrastructures for
Knowledge Production:
Understanding E-Science
Table of Contents
Foreword............................................................................................ vi
Tony Hey, Microsoft Corporation
Preface............................................................................................. viii
Section I: Framing New Infrastructures:
What, Why, How, and for Whom?
Chapter I
Virtual Witnessing in a Virtual Age: A Prospectus for Social
Studies of E-Science ...........................................................................1
Steve Woolgar, University of Oxford, UK
Catelijne Coopmans, Imperial College London, UK
Chapter II
Computerization Movements and Scientific Disciplines:
The Reflexive Potential of New Technologies.................................. 26
Christine Hine, University of Surrey, UK
Chapter III
Imagining E-Science beyond Computation........................................ 48
Paul Wouters, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and
Sciences, The Netherlands
Anne Beaulieu, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and
Sciences, The Netherlands
Chapter IV
Interest in Production: On the Configuration of Technology-Bearing
Labors for Epistemic IT.................................................................... 71
Katie Vann, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences,
The Netherlands
Geoffrey C. Bowker, Santa Clara University, USA
Section II: Communication, Disciplinarity, and Collaborative Practice
Chapter V
Embedding Digital Infrastructure in Epistemic Culture.................... 99
Martina Merz, University of Lausanne & EMPA St. Grallen,
Switzerland
Chapter VI
Networks of Objects: Practical Preconditions for Electronic
Communication ............................................................................... 120
Beate Elvebakk, University of Oslo, Norway
Chapter VII
Challenges for Research and Practice in Distributed,
Interdisciplinary Collaboration ....................................................... 143
Caroline Haythornthwaite, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, USA
Karen J. Lunsford, University of California, Santa Barbara,
USA
Geoffrey C. Bowker, Santa Clara University, USA
Bertram C. Bruce, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
USA
Chapter VIII
Coordination and Control of Research Practice across Scientific
Fields: Implications for a Differentiated E-Science........................ 167
Jenny Fry, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK
Section III: Prospects for Transformation
Chapter IX
Cyberinfrastructure for Next Generation Scholarly Publishing...... 189
Michael Nentwich, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
Chapter X
On Web Structure and Digital Knowledge Bases: Online and
Offline Connections in Science ....................................................... 206
Alexandre Caldas, Oxford Internet Insitute, University of Oxford,
UK
Chapter XI
From the (cid:179)Analogue Divide(cid:180) to the (cid:179)Hybrid Divide(cid:180): The Internet
Does Not Ensure Equality of Access to Information in Science..... 233
Franz Barjak, University of Applied Sciences Solothurn
Northwestern Switzerland, Switzerland
Chapter XII
Gender Stratification and E-Science: Can the Internet Circumvent
Patrifocality?................................................................................... 246
Antony Palackal, Loyola College of Social Sciences, India
Meredith Anderson, Louisiana State University, USA
B. Paige Miller, Louisiana State University, USA
Wesley Shrum, Louisiana State University, USA
About the Authors........................................................................... 272
Index............................................................................................... 279
vi
Foreword
In 2001, the UK Government launched a 5-year, £250M “e-science” research
initiative. The term e-science was introduced by the then Director-General of
Research Councils, Sir John Taylor, to encapsulate the technologies needed to
support the collaborative, multidisciplinary research that was emerging in many
fields of science. Such e-science research covers a wide range of different
types and scales of collaboration. Particle physics, the community that devel-
oped the World Wide Web, now wishes to go beyond mere information sharing
using static web sites for their new experimental collaborations at the Large
Hadron Collider, now under construction at the CERN laboratory in Geneva.
These collaborations typically involve over 100 institutions and over 2,000 physi-
cists and engineers and are truly global in reach. Moreover, the physicists will
be dealing with petabytes of data—a far larger amount of scientific data than
scientists have hitherto had to manage, mine and manipulate. To handle such
data challenges, the physicists will require a much more sophisticated set of
shared computing and data services than currently offered by the World Wide
Web.
The astronomy and earth sciences communities have a similar global reach but
are more focussed on developing standards for interoperable data repositories
than on computing cycles. In contrast to these global collaborations, biologists,
chemists and engineers typically want to establish collaborations involving a
small number of research groups and data repositories. Their requirements are
for easy-to-use middleware that will allow them to set up secure and reliable
“virtual organizations.” Such middleware must assist researchers to routinely
vii
access resources and services at partner sites without having to memorize
multiple passwords or manually negotiate complex firewalls.
In addition to the basic middleware to build such secure virtual organizations,
these scientists require a powerful “Virtual Research Environment” that sup-
ports the needs of multidisciplinary research. Such an environment will consist
of a set of sophisticated tools and technologies that will ease the extraction of
information from data, and of knowledge from information. In the UK e-sci-
ence program, for example, researchers in many projects are exploring the use
of scientific workflows and knowledge management tools to support the scien-
tists. Some projects are also evaluating the use of semantic web technologies in
the context of these distributed collaborative organizations—the “Semantic Grid.”
It is also clear that these technologies will not only be useful to scientists and
engineers but also to the social sciences and humanities. There are now an
increasing number of projects exploring the way in which “e-science technolo-
gies” can be used to support social science and humanities research.
However, in addition to such work by practitioners of e-science, there is a
complementary need to explore the sociological implications of these new col-
laborative technologies. I am therefore particularly pleased to see the publica-
tion of this collection of articles that begins an examination of these broader
issues. I am convinced that such sociological issues will be as important as the
technical ones in determining the uptake of e-science technologies and tools by
the different research communities. I believe this collection will be an impor-
tant contribution to our understanding of the potential of the new distributed
knowledge infrastructure that is emerging.
Tony Hey
November 2005
viii
Preface
Widespread international attention has recently been given to development of
technologies to facilitate new ways of doing science. This book contributes to
this burgeoning interest by using sociological methods and theories to explore
the use of computers in scientific research. Specifically we analyze the in-
creasingly prominent uses of information and communication technology (ICT)
infrastructures for storing scientific data, performing analyzes and carrying out
collaborative work, often known in the U.S. as cyberinfrastructures and in the
UK as e-science. Led by data-intensive fields such as particle physics, as-
tronomy, and genetics, new infrastructures are being designed that promise to
allow scientific research to be conducted on a larger scale and with greater
efficiency than previously conceivable, and to explore ever more complex ques-
tions. It remains to be seen how far this model will generalize, to what extent
the models currently envisaged will translate to other disciplines and what the
impacts may be for more traditional approaches. This collection looks at these
innovations in the organization of scientific research, focusing on the factors
which shape their inception, promote their uptake, lead to variability in applica-
tion and result in the recognition of significant impacts. Our topic is, in short, the
social dimensions of ICT-enabled science.
Social studies of science have established a set of approaches to the study of
the scientific endeavour which explores processes of knowledge production as
they emerge through particular social, spatial and material arrangements. Sci-
ence and technology studies (STS) is an established field offering commentar-
ies on scientific and technical developments, spanning the full range from top-
level critique to detailed analysis and making contributions both to understand-
ing the process of designing and to design itself. There has at times been an
ix
uneasy relationship between STS and the practitioners of science. The attitude
of STS has sometimes been construed as anti-science, or as neglecting the
concerns of scientists altogether in its focus on contesting philosophical ac-
counts of scientific enquiry. This clearly does not exhaust the possibilities for
the engagement of STS with science. A more hopeful scenario could be drawn
from technology design, where approaches from STS have found popular ac-
ceptance. In technical spheres the relationship has often been less confronta-
tional: It has become common for companies developing mass market tech-
nologies to employ ethnographers, using broadly STS-informed approaches, to
inform their design activities. E-sciences, and more broadly the design of new
infrastructures for the conduct of science, provide the occasion to extend this
approach to the design of new technologies for science, allowing for STS to
develop a much more constructive engagement with scientific practice. This is
an unrivalled opportunity to demonstrate the relevance of social studies of sci-
ence for the conduct of science itself.
An STS-informed understanding needs to be high on the agenda for those fund-
ing and designing new infrastructures for science, in order that technical capa-
bilities be complemented with an in-depth understanding of social processes
and consequences and with a theoretical tool kit to comprehend diversity. Inno-
vation in the organization of scientific work should benefit from an enhanced
understanding of social process. Woolgar and Coopmans in the first chapter of
this book lay out a scope for the possible contributions that STS could make, but
they note that the engagement of STS with e-science issues is in its infancy.
That observation captures the motivation in putting this book together—to col-
lect together and make more evident the ongoing work in the field, consolidat-
ing its contribution and making it more visible both to e-science practitioners
and to the science studies community, beginning the work of forging relation-
ships between STS analysis and e-science practice.
In the process of putting together this book it has proved helpful to adopt a
fairly broad and flexible notion of appropriate technologies and situations to
include. The goal has been, in part, to use the STS tradition of scepticism in
order to question the way in which the e-science phenomenon is constituted.
Part of our job has been to pursue connections which might otherwise have
remained tacit between the current constitution of the phenomenon and the
prefiguring technologies and policies, and to imagine the ways in which it might
have been otherwise. A more practical reason for extending the scope of the
technologies that we consider is in order to acknowledge the heritage of work
on distributed, collaborative work and the foundations of scholarship on disci-
plinary practice and disciplinary difference. For e-science practitioners, it seemed
that one of the most useful things we could do would be to bring this prior work
into the domain of e-science and show how it can inform current dilemmas.
In the process there have inevitably been some omissions. Much of the existing
work that we have been able to include has focused on communication and the