Collaboration in Emerging Ecological Practice

Human-Computer Interaction in Biodiversity Informatics Workshop

June 2, 2005

Bonnie A. NardiDepartment of Informatics

School of Information and Computer ScienceUniversity of California, Irvine

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

My background

Anthropologist

Computer-supported collaborative work

Science studies (how does science work?)

Activity theory (culture and cognition)

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Research on collaborative tools for ecologists

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QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Why Ecology?

Pressing needs to understand environmental change

Moment in time: ecology transforming to big science

Activity theory asks how such transformations happen

Interesting issues of changes in collaborative technologies and practices during such

transformations

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

General approach to my work

Ethnographic studies of work practices

Design of new tools

Prototype, test new tools to evaluate their usefulness and usability working with technical people

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Research on “emerging practice” in ecology

Current practice: single investigator or small teams

Emerging practice: larger teams, more data, more technology

Transforming to “big science” (or trying to)

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

“Big science”

Broad, problem-directed goals

Interdisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, technicians

Work is often distributed

Extensive instrumentation (such as NEON sensor network)

Processing of large volumes of data

Projects are professionally managed

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Drivers of move to big science in ecology

Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER)

EcoVisions Project of Ecological Society of America

NEON, CUAHSI (hydrology), CLEANER, and others

Availability of terabyte scale datasets from NASA, DOE, EPA,

USGS and other government agencies

Individual scientists discovering these datasets

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Collaboration in Ecology

As ecology scales up to big science, need for different

kinds of collaboration:

interdisciplinary distributed involves sharing and interpreting large volumes of data

What kinds of technologies will sustain such collaboration?

Are the problems similar to those of other fields?

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Something that might be unique to ecology:

Combination of:

Data from heterogeneous sources, including historical

field-based data which can be quite old

Very complex interactions among variablesliving things in complex contexts

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

What I’ve done so far

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Collaboration in Ecology Workshop at UC Irvine, October, 2004

Karen Baker (data manager)Stephen Bocking (historian who studies

ecology)Scott Collins (ecologist)Paul Dourish (computer scientist)Cliff Duke (ESA)Anna Gold (librarian)Bryan Heidorn (librarian)Vivian Hutchison (USGS)Roberta Lamb (computer scientist)Renee Miller (computer scientist)Gary Olson (psychologist)Diane Pataki (ecologist)

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Collaboration in Ecology Workshop

Mark Schildhaeur (NCEAS)Katie Suding (ecologist)Bill Tomlinson (computer scientist)Ferdinando Villa (ecologist)Ann Zimmerman (librarian and co-

organizer)

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

What else…

NSF Grant submitted: Collaboration in Transformational Science

(with Ann Zimmerman at U Michigan and Susan Sim, UCI)

Ongoing interviews with ecologists at UC Irvine

Participation in NEON

Member NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network)

Design Consortium’s Information Technology and Communication Subcommittee (“Cyberinfrastructure”)

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

What else…

Ph.D. student will study seismologists at UC San Diego this

summer

How they work with technicians and engineers to configure

distributed sensors and design experiments

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Preliminary ideas on collaboration problems of interest

“Dating”

Design

Data

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

“Dating”

Problem: Find collaborators with special expertise in a particular area of ecology or in another field

As in dating, half the problem is locating the right person and the

other half is getting the relationship to work

Possible Solution: Online directory (like Friendster) Service for linking people to collaborate in small

light-weight projects to get to know each other

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Design

Problem: Experiments with large sensor network

Or analyses with government databases

How to design large experiments, analyses, observations?

Solutions: ?? Need ethnographic work here

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Data

Problem:NCEAS et al. working on data problems of data

integration, metadata

How to interpet data scientists did not collect,

especially when there are large volumes of data

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Interpreting data

“Data are not simple carriers of meaning. [C]onverting raw data

into scientific or social meaning is an active, context-dependent

process” (Birnholtz and Bietz, 2003)

Solution: Talk to others about their experiences with the data

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

People talk about data to interpret it

Zimmerman interviewed an ecologist who was formerly an

economist:

In economics, typically people are working with a shared

data set. There are hundreds of people that work with the current

population survey, for example, and you can go and find out, “Well,

what are the problems with this data set?” Everyone can tell you,

“Oh yeah, ’79 was a really bad year, and there’s a glitch, and you are

going to have to reprocess this field if you want to use it.”

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Solution: Data Conversations

Communications research has shown that conversation is

efficient for clarification, coordination, updates, brainstorming,

interpretation, critiquing and elaboration of complex ideas.

Harvest electronic conversations in instant messaging, wikis,

blogs, chats, listservs.

Make available to wider group of scientists

Tools for summary and presentation needed

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Biodiversity Workshop, June 2, 2005

Conclusion: Outputs of research

a. New understandings of transformational science

b. New collaborative tools for ecologists working toward

transformational science

c. Testing of ideas about collaboration in activity theory

(which involve a and b).QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.