Knowledge Infrastructures

The knowledge infrastructures of the sciences have been considered as human-made networks or ecologies of people, artifacts, and institutions that enable the production, calibration, storage, dissemination and re-use of data. Complementing these studies, this paper examines how scientists use the digitally mediated, shared availability of "natural" environments and objects for infrastructural purposes. Drawing on ethnography and informed by ethnomethodology, I focus on the uses of the sky in astronomical observation. Astronomical research is oriented to observing, and re-observing, sources on the sky, making it its topic. Yet, the sky is also an infrastructural resource, as it provides stable saliences that can be used alongside existing records for ordering work, diagnosing trouble with artifacts in data, and repairing data across diverse sites of practice. I consider a case in which such uses of the sky were new to researchers working in a novel domain, and one in which such uses were already established, but new to a student being inducted to its work. In both cases properties of the sky became salient through being mediated digitally. As existing records and new observations were made available to a single computational order, these data became accessible to what Melvin Pollner called mundane reason, wherein ceteris paribus clauses are used reflexively to maintain a world in common. Although the sky may appear to be an extreme case, I argue that other mediated environments and objects, and the reflexive practices through which these are engaged, have similar infrastructural uses in other disciplines.

This article provides a theoretical basis for reconsidering current discussions
on the relation between the body, technology, and enhancement. Using the
conceptual distinctions of model 1 (which is based on the notion of the unmediated
body and technology) and model 2 (which begins with the techno-body complex)
types of understanding of enhancement, and emphasizing a reappraisal of Vygotskian tradition for demarcating the role of mediating signs and tools in psychology,
I compare two existing controversies regarding enhancement: the various disputes
concerning technological enhancement in elite sports competition, and the recent
controversy about using digital technology for memory enhancement.
    The framework used for this comparison is the concept of regime, consisting of the following layers of criteria: (1) the nature of each specific domain where enhancement is defined and measured, (2) the structure of agencies or institutions concerned with the issue, and (3) the underlying value that implicitly affords such an effort toward enhancing our capacity. With regard to the elite sports regime, the focus is rather tightly structured, whereas for memory enhancement, the controversy is diffuse and widely distributed.
    The sharp contrast in these two regimes is shown to be deeply related to the different  types of understanding enhancement. In conclusion, this article suggests that the discussion on enhancement is a probe for the larger system of values, which inevitably  forces us to reexamine our own values with the help of the tentative conceptual scheme provided herein.

This issue of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (vol. 27, no. 2) is the second and final part of the three issues focusing on the topic of ‘Infrastructuring and Collaborative Design’. The first part of the special issue was published as a double issue (vol. 26, nos. 1-2) in 2017. Eight articles were published in the first part, and this second part includes four articles, making a total of twelve articles.

Amidst the wealth of journal special issues and edited books on (information) infrastructures (Edwards et al. 2009; Lee et al. 2010; Graham and McFarlane 2014; Monteiro et al. 2014; Appel et al. 2015; Karasti et al 2016; Harvey et al 2017; Jensen and Morita 2017), these special issues in Computer Supported Cooperative Work are the first to focus particularly on research that engages with a processual (in-the-making) perspective and/or design-oriented engagement with information infrastructures. We have developed this under the rubric of ‘infrastructuring’.

In this afterword to the special issues, we first introduce the remaining four articles, and then review the collection as a whole. Drawing on the special issue articles and existing literature, we discuss dimensions of infrastructuring relating to analytic, methodological and design issues. Further, we consider what this collection of articles tells us about the state of the art in CSCW’s understanding of Infrastructuring and Collaborative Design. We conclude by looking forward to the challenges and opportunities still on the horizon.

A socio-technical approach is taken to explore a digital archive of Australian Indigenous cultural heritage. The Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages is considered in terms of what it is currently doing and what it was intended to do. Two ethnographic stories focusing on user interactions and the outcomes of an online survey serve to evaluate the effectiveness of the Archive from the perspective of different users. This is then juxtaposed with a consideration of the original grant application, outlining what was envisaged for the project. This analysis serves to highlight some of the contingent relations and diverse socio-technical aspects of a specific knowledge infrastructure, as it allows multiple forms of interaction, new connections and generative activities as people discover, access and interact with the content now and into the future.

The Anthropocene requires the development of new forms of knowledge and supporting sociotechnical infrastructure. While there have been calls for both interdisciplinary and communityengaged approaches, there remains a need to develop, test, and sustain modes of Anthropocene knowledge production that effectively link people working at different scales, in different sites, with many different types of expertise. In this Perspectives piece, we describe one such approach to Anthropocene knowledge production, centered in short-term Field Campuses that bring together community actors in cultural institutions, media, and government agencies with external academic researchers, bringing cultural analysis into the work of characterizing and responding to the Anthropocene. We argue that it is important to build public knowledge infrastructure that allows people to visualize and address many intersecting scales and systems (ecological, atmospheric, economic, technological, social, cultural, etc.) that shape the Anthropocene at the local level.

For decades, the big science and little science dichotomy has served as a starting point for many analyses of scientific research and data practices, including studies used to inform the construction of scientific knowledge infrastructures. We challenge this dichotomy by presenting findings from longitudinal, qualitative case studies of data life cycles in two scientific domains, each centered around a large, distributed scientific collaboration. One is astronomy and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The other is the deep subseafloor biosphere and the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI). We show that some critical stages of the data life cycle in each domain unfold in big science contexts while other critical stages occur in little science contexts. Furthermore, these big and little science contexts shape each other dynamically. This challenging of the big and little science dichotomy has implications for the building of scientific knowledge infrastructures, including those supporting data management.

The Anthropocene requires the development of new forms of knowledge and supporting sociotechnical infrastructure. While there have been calls for both interdisciplinary and community-engaged approaches, there remains a need to develop, test, and sustain modes of Anthropocene knowledge production that effectively link people working at different scales, in different sites, with many different types of expertise. In this Perspectives piece, we describe one such approach to Anthropocene knowledge production, centered in short-term Field Campuses that bring together community actors in cultural institutions, media, and government agencies with external academic researchers, bringing cultural analysis into the work of characterizing and responding to the Anthropocene. We argue that it is important to build public knowledge infrastructure that allows people to visualize and address many intersecting scales and systems (ecological, atmospheric, economic, technological, social, cultural, et...

Archival data processing consists of cleaning and formatting data between the moment a dataset is deposited and its publication on the archive’s website. In this article, I approach data processing by combining scholarship on invisible labor in knowledge infrastructures with a Marxian framework and show the relevance of considering data processing as factory labor. Using this perspective to analyze ethnographic data collected during a six-month participatory observation at a U.S. data archive, I generate a taxonomy of the forms of alienation that data processing generates, but also the types of resistance that processors develop, across four categories: routine, speed, skill, and meaning. This synthetic approach demonstrates, first, that data processing reproduces typical forms of factory worker’s alienation: processors are asked to work along a strict standardized pipeline, at a fast pace, without acquiring substantive skills or having a meaningful involvement in their work. It reveals, second, how data processors resist the alienating nature of this workflow by developing multiple tactics along the same four categories. Seen through this dual lens, data processors are therefore not only invisible workers, but also factory workers who follow and subvert a workflow organized as an assembly line. I conclude by proposing a four-step framework to better value the social contribution of data workers beyond the archive.

This recently published book consists of three major parts on the various aspects of the practice of contemporary science and technology with reference to a variety of life sciences such as antibiotics research, chemical biology, natural products chemistry, structural biology and genomics and such data bases as chemical compounds as knowledge infrastructure. 
    The introduction discusses the outline of the development from laboratory studies to the wider issues involving both science policy and innovation practices.

    Part one deals with the microscopic aspects within laboratory practices, consisting of three chapters:
Chapter one, Research path analysis: on the micro-dynamics of research strategy. Chapter two, Laboratory as organization: the dynamism of meaning and coordination. Chapter three, The myth and reality of knowledge transfer: an interactive model of expertise in laboratory practices.

  Part two discusses the interface between laboratory practices with the wider social issues such as science policy and public data base construction:
Chapter four  is Resilience in scientific research;
Chapter five, Between laboratory and policy process;
Chapter six, Constructing failure in big biology,
Chapter seven, Value oscillation in knowledge infrastructure.

  Part three deals with more general issues related to contemporary scientific practices:
Chapter eight, Scientific misconduct as an organizational index of its healthiness;
Chapter nine,  Network of causation, related to the issue of understanding causation in a highly complex system;
Chapter ten,  Blade runner and memory devices;
Chapter eleven Between scientific and everyday experiment.

The last additional chapter is a linkage with my previous book, Ecology of Learning, with the title of Domesticating risk: emergency medicine viewed as the apparatus for crisis management.

Background & Purpose – Healthcare (HC) is an expensive investment facing
challenge to design, develop and implement a cost-effective knowledge management
system (KMS) that meets HC professionals’ expectations. Concepts like knowledge
management (KM) technical perspective, supply network framework, e-business
infrastructure and KM architecture are integrated to propose a quantifiable
transnational HC-KMS Model that can play a critical role to improve global patientcare
quality in a Transcultural society.
Design/methodology/approach –This theoretical research examines relevant theories
and reviews literature on HC KM, its frameworks and its infrastructures.
Findings – This paper develops a pragmatic, integrative, strategically viable and an
implementable transnational HC KM Model for a global HC Initiatives.
Research limitations/implications – This research provides an integrative,
conceptual transnational model grounded in theory and preliminary primary research
that needs to be tested further in real/simulated global transnational and transcultural
HC environments.
Practical implications – Global KM initiative is currently a main driving point to
launch a global HC industry. Hence, this research is a credible framework for a
pragmatic and successfully implementable HC KM model.
Originality/Value – This paper contributes a new transnational HC KM model
subsequent to pilot testing, within IT infrastructure and cultural aspect of global HC
The global HC KM model is an integration of models being: (1) HC KMS technical
perspective model, (2) knowledge intensive supply network framework model, (3) ebusiness
infrastructure and capabilities model, (4) knowledge-based decision support
(DS) architecture model and (5) e-business KM architecture model.
Keywords – Global HC Knowledge Management, Knowledge Management
Architecture, Knowledge Management Infrastructure, Knowledge Management
Framework.