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After decades of growth, a research community's network information system and data repository were transformed to become a national data management office and a major element of data infrastructure for ecology and the environmental sciences. Developing functional data infrastructures is key to the support of ongoing Open Science and Open Data efforts. This example of data infrastructure growth contrasts with the top‐down development typical of many digital initiatives. The trajectory of this network information system evolved within a collaborative, long‐term ecological research community. This particular community is funded to conduct ecological research while collective data management is also carried out across its geographically dispersed study sites. From this longitudinal ethnography, we describe an Incremental Growth Model that includes a sequence of six relatively stable phases where each phase is initiated by a rapid response to a major pivotal event. Exploring these phases and the roles of data workers provides insight into major characteristics of digital growth. Further, a transformation in assumptions about data management is reported for each phase. Investigating the growth of a community information system over four decades as it becomes data infrastructure reveals details of its social, technical, and institutional dynamics. In addition to addressing how digital data infrastructure characteristics change, this study also considers when the growth of data infrastructure begins.
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Hanging on a Wire: Understanding the Impacts of Climate Change on Networked Infrastructures in South Louisiana
How will we stay connected amidst a climate crisis? Conditions associated with climate change, such as sea level rise and increasing extreme weather events, can destabilize already vulnerable network and digital infrastructures. While existing infrastructures are in dire need of maintenance, additional infrastructures are simultaneously being built to address imbalances in network access and distribution. My dissertation project attends to these intersecting precarities as a way to reconsider how digital infrastructures can be reworked to address overlapping questions of environmental and digital inequities. My research is situated within marginalized coastal communities in south Louisiana, where legacies of petrochemical extraction has led to deep socioeconomic and ecological disparities, while increased intensity of storms and floods have begun to impede and damage an already sparse network infrastructure. In my project, I use archival, ethnographic, and design research methods to examine longer histories of environmental degradation, investigate current practices of maintaining and developing network infrastructures, and develop approaches for researchers in HCI and related computing fields to re-envision just and equitable network infrastructures.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2147052
- PAR ID:
- 10528164
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9781450391566
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 5
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- New Orleans LA USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3503817
