Who Killed WATERS? Mess, Method, and Forensic Explanation in the Making and Unmaking of Large-scale Science Networks

Abstract

Science studies has long been concerned with the theoretical and methodological challenge of mess—the inevitable tendency of technoscientific objects and practices to spill beyond the neat analytic categories we (or their actors) construct for them. Nowhere is this challenge greater than in the messy world of large-scale collaborative science projects, particularly though not exclusively in their start-up phases. This article examines the complicated life and death of the WATERS Network, an ambitious and ultimately abandoned effort at collaborative infrastructure development among hydrologists, engineers, and social scientists studying water. We argue in particular against the “forensic imagination,” a particular style of accounting for failure in the messy world of large-scale network development, and against two common conceptual and empirical pitfalls that it gives rise to: defaults to formalism and defaults to the future. We argue that alternative postforensic approaches to “failures” like the WATERS Network can support forms of learning and accountability better attuned to the complexities of practice and policy in the real world of scientific collaboration and network formation.

Knowledge infrastructures in science: data, diversity, and digital libraries

“…Consistent with others' findings, patterns of infrastructure building are associated more with rhythms of collaboration than with life cycles per se [70,71]. In these four projects, rhythms include stages of the project and of collaborative partnerships; the maturity of tools, standards, practices, methods, and protocols; data production; careers; and funding.…”

“…"Rhythms of collaboration" better captures the complexity of how data, practices, collaborations, and activities flow through any project [70,71]. Data collection may involve access to instruments, research sites, or people, and can be driven by sampling rates and other rhythms.…”

Anticipation Work

“…Many of these insights have emerged from a body of CSCW work around the challenges and complexities of large-scale collaboration and infrastructure development in the sciences [29], long central to CSCW research. Formative collaboration theory has arisen from the scientific spaces of the WORM genetics community (infrastructure [44]), the Department of Energy's CORE prototype (the collaboratory [51]), and the Stanford Research Institute (groupware [20]).…”

Build It, But Will They Come? A Geoscience Cyberinfrastructure Baseline Analysis

“…Divides between technologists and scientists have been documented in a wide range of geoscience settings (Mayernik, Wallis, & Borgman, 2013;Jackson & Buyuktur, 2014;Finholt and Birnholtz, 2006;Ribes and Finholt, 2008). These divides range from challenges in developing effective collaborative structures and aligning incentives, to difficulties in establishing leadership roles and determining who the relevant "community" actually is for a given cyberinfrastructure initiative.…”