Synergizing in Cyberinfrastructure Development

Abstract

This paper investigates the work of creating infrastructure, using as a case study the development of cyberinfrastructure for metagenomics research. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the role of embeddedness in infrastructure development. We expand on the notion of human infrastructure to develop the concepts of synergizing, leveraging, and aligning, which denote the active processes of creating and managing relationships among people, organizations, and technologies in the creation of cyberinfrastructure. This conceptual lens highlights how embeddedness is not only an important result of infrastructure development, but is also a precursor that can act as both a constraint and a resource for development activities.

A Trichordal Temporal Approach to Digital Coordination: The Sociomaterial Mangling of the CERN Grid

“…Thus, not only is coordination central to the technical operation of a grid but it is also a key dimension of supporting geographically dispersed, large-scale collaborative practices (Bietz et al 2010;Edwards et al 2007;Gerson 2008), becoming learned as a part of membership and linked with conventions of practice (Star and Ruhleder 1996). Despite these important developments there has been little focus on understanding digital coordination in the infrastructure literature (Grisot 2008), although the literature has recognized a number of other dimensions including being shared, open, sociotechnical, heterogeneous, and having an installed base (Hanseth and Monteiro 1998).…”

Sociotechnical Studies of Cyberinfrastructure and e-Research: Current Themes and Future Trajectories

“…The hands-on methods represented in this special issue are as diverse as those found in the broader fields that make up infrastructure studies (historical, ethnographic, documentary, and interview-based to name a few), but the methodologies (or theories of inquiry) have coalesced around a handful of approaches that seek to make knowable the complexities of CI. Often conducted by ethnographers that combine participant observation and documentary analysis, these studies can be of the daily meetings of practitioners (as with Monteiro 2010, this issue;de la Flor et al 2010, this issue;and Bietz et al 2010, this issue), interview-based studies (as with Kee and Browning 2010, this issue;Faniel and Jacobsen 2010, this issue;and Bietz et al 2010, this issue) or more virtually by tracking the vast streams of data created in these projects by emails, reports, published papers and online documentation (as with Karasti et al 2010, this issue). These are the moments of 'social shaping of technology' (Pinch and Bijker 1984) that later become black boxed, taken for granted and treated as inevitable.…”

“…A shorthand for this approach is infrastructural inversion (Bowker 1994), which refers to the focus on all the activities that hold together the functioning of infrastructure rather than those that it invisibly supports. For instance, the papers in this special issue that explore technical labor (whether of development or maintenance as in Karasti et al (2010) or Bietz et al (2010)) are inversions of the infrastructure, taking the enabling possibility as the focus rather than the activity that is supported (in this case, scientific work, as with de la Flor et al (2010, this issue) and Monteiro (2010, this issue)). …”

“…This necessitates what Stuart Brand has called thinking in the Long Now (Brand 1999;Ribes and Finholt 2007), a form of design that considers immediate needs while also incorporating future requirements and planning for emerging changes in technology and scientific practice. In this issue Bietz et al (2010) address this as a matter of thinking through the gap between intentional actions of design and the actuality of the emerging infrastructure. Thinking about sustainability necessitates the careful consideration of maintenance and breakdown.…”

“…As have noted, cyberinfrastructure is by no means devoid of a 'human infrastructure' that develops and maintains operations. In this issue Bietz et al (2010) elaborate this concept by theorizing the day-to-day work of building infrastructural relationships. But just as technical workers can become invisible in the smooth operation of infrastructure, so too can its technological components: how are the novel tools of collaboration, of data collection or visualization encouraging or discouraging different kinds of scientific organization, investigation or dissemination?…”