Values into Infrastructure: an Ethnographic Archaeology of Distributed Computational Scientific Work

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project undertakes an ethnographic examination of the development of digital scientific infrastructure, following two scientific teams - environmental hydrology, and chemical engineering, as they build and implement computational models intended to provide layered access to specialists and broader audiences. These infrastructural models will allow users to access advanced tools for data mining, analysis, visualization, tutorials, and problem solving, using remote supercomputers, arguably constituting the scientific problem-solving environment of the 21st century. The goal of this research project is to develop an empirically and theoretically informed understanding of how ethical, epistemological and social and political values emerge in the interactions of various actors and agencies and get written into technical systems. The research proceeds by "infrastructural inversion," that is, by opening to observation and analysis computational and other elements that underlie knowledge development, but are usually hidden from view. It involves observing scientific practices at the respective laboratories of the environmental hydrology and chemical engineering teams, as well as those of the enabling technology teams working with them to create the infrastructure. The observations allow the researchers to outline an analysis of the disciplinary networks through which the contributors to the digital science infrastructure are moving, the technical and symbolic commitments that have become crucial to their work, and the justifications they provide for developing infrastructure in the particular ways that they do. Site visits will include formal and informal interviews with laboratory members about their specific practices and their contributions to the digital scientific infrastructures. The researchers will record, transcribe, code and analyze all the interviews, interlacing the analyses with analysis of the technical decisions being written into the infrastructure. Results will be reported at relevant scientific modeling conferences, at professional society meetings, in journals, and in a book.