The human infrastructure of cyberinfrastructure

Narrative Networks: Patterns of Technology and Organization

“…As we have seen, new organizational forms can develop around these ensembles (Lee et al 2006). As ICTs continue to be incorporated in the way we work, we expect that new organizational forms and processes will continue to emerge.…”

Human-centered e-science: A group-theoretic perspective on cyberinfrastructure design

“…The many complexities of large scale data sharing and the growing mandate to design and build more usable, accessible and diverse CI tools are subjugated to the overarching goal of enabling, promoting and increasing effective collaboration in the sciences. At its core, scientific collaboration is primarily a social and organizational issue rather than a technological one [11,26,35]. Therefore, research in CI is in no small part concerned with the social and organizational issues of scientific collaboration and the ways in which CI tools may alleviate, burden or otherwise influence the work of scientists.…”

“…Lee et al [26] recently explored the "human infrastructure" of cyberinfrastructure to reveal how "human and organizational structures share properties with technological infrastructures." For Lee et al, human infrastructure constitutes the "people, organizations, networks" and arrangements that constitute them.…”

“…Informed by the work of Lee et al, our work focuses on small group interaction and how it relates back to the larger human infrastructures of CI. The work presented in this paper reviews the breadth of CI research and reveals both the centrality of groups and the utility of group theory in understanding how groups operate within the larger context of CI's human infrastructure [26]. We use McGrath's seminal theory of groups [2,28] as a critical lens for analyzing a large body of CI research through the lens of small group collaboration.…”

“…In order to develop this group perspective of CI research, we will use a handful of the central constructs of TIP theory to illustrate the nature of CI research conducted over the last 10 years. Through the lens of TIP theory, we will present a group or "human infrastructure" [26] centric view of CI research broadly conducted within the human-computer interaction (HCI), CSCW and computer engineering domains. By positioning the history of CI research as fundamentally concerned about groups, we aim to shed further light on the centrality of the social and the human in our investigations of the advanced technological systems of CI.…”