Browsing by Subject "Reflexivity"

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    Journal Article
    Mediating Environments and Objects as Knowledge Infrastructure
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, 43570) Hoeppe, Götz
    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.
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    Journal Article
    Studying Infrastructuring Ethnographically
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 27, No. 2, 43191) Karasti, Helena; Blomberg, Jeanette
    This paper is motivated by a methodological interest in how to investigate information infrastructures as an empirical, real-world phenomenon. We argue that research on information infrastructures should not be captive to the prevalent method choice of small-scale and short-term studies. Instead research should address the challenges of empirically studying the heterogeneous, extended and complex phenomena of infrastructuring with an emphasis on the necessarily emerging and open-ended processual qualities of information infrastructures. While existing literature identifies issues that make the study of infrastructuring demanding, few propose ways of addressing these challenges. In this paper we review characteristics of information infrastructures identified in the literature that present challenges for their empirical study. We look to current research in the social sciences, particularly anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) that focus on how to study complex and extended phenomena ethnographically, to provide insight into the study of infrastructuring. Specifically, we reflect on infrastructuring as an object of ethnographic inquiry by building on the notion of “constructing the field.” Recent developments in how to conceptualize the ethnographic field are tied both to longstanding traditions and novel developments in anthropology and STS for studying extended and complex phenomena. Through a discussion of how dimensions of information infrastructures have been addressed practically, methodologically, and theoretically we aim to link the notion of constructing the ethnographic field with views on infrastructuring as a particular kind of object of inquiry. Thus we aim to provide an ethnographically sensitive and methodologically oriented “opening” for an alternative ontology for studying infrastructuring ethnographically.
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    Journal Article
    The Multiple Intersecting Sites of Design in CSCW Research
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 24, No. 4, 2015) Bjørn, Pernille; Boulus-Rødje, Nina
    CSCW is fundamentally an interdisciplinary research endeavour investigating the basic nature of collaborative work with the aim of designing collaborative technologies. Yet, it is not pre-given where CSCW design takes place. This leads to the simple, yet important, question: Where can we find the sites of design in CSCW research? In other words, where does CSCW design actually take place? To answer this question, we follow a CSCW researcher as she creates various connections across multiple sites of design, takes on various roles, and engages with different types of interventions. We unpack the complex interplay between multiple intersecting sites of design and the transformation processes that result from the connections created. We explore the different types of interventions that were enacted by the CSCW researcher during a longitudinal study of the collaborative work and the design of healthcare systems within a paediatric emergency department. We further unpack the multiple intersecting sites of design, and show how the researcher exercises different analytical sensibilities, transforming the various design sites. We argue that the classic CSCW discussion about the relationship between ethnography and design no longer fully captures what a contemporary CSCW researcher does when she engages in various types of interventions across multiple sites of design in an interdisciplinary manner. Thus, we suggest distributing what constitutes a field site in CSCW research, including changing how we characterize roles and interventions in CSCW research.