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Creators/Authors contains: "Ribes, David"

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  1. Drawing from a longitudinal case study, we inspect the activities of an expanding team of scientists and their collaborators as they sought to develop a novel software pipeline that worked both for themselves and for their wider community. We argue that these two tasks - making the software work for themselves and also for their wider scientific community - could not be differentiated from each other at the beginning of the software development process. Rather, this division of labor and software capacities emerged, articulated by the actors themselves as they went about their tasks. The activities of making the novel software work at all, and the extra work of making that software repurposable or reusable could not be distinguished until near the end of the development process - rather than defined or structured in advance. We discuss implications for the trajectory of software development, and the practical work of making software repurposable. 
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  2. null (Ed.)
    We focus on how the concept of knowledge infrastructure can help interrogate both the novelties and continuities in energy transitions. In particular, we turn attention to research, innovation, and knowledge production ca- pacities in renewable energy transitions. We outline the subfield of knowledge infrastructures and introduce concepts relevant to energy research. We especially illustrate the ways that knowledge infrastructures may support or adapt to change, and also the ways that they display ‘legacy’ properties that inhibit, slow or outright prevent transitions. To ground our investigation, we briefly examine research in Scotland’s marine energy sector as the nation pursues a transition from an energy sector heavily reliant on oil and gas, to one based on renewable energy innovation and implementation. Via this case, we illustrate that a great deal of the ‘old’ knowledge in- frastructures for energy research, rather than being wholly swept away, instead persist across energy transitions. The concept of knowledge infrastructures provides a powerful addition to energy social science because they are fundamental to our ability to research and develop renewable energy technologies, and so play an important role in defining possible energy futures. 
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  3. This paper re-traverses the author's investigations across several years as he sought to pin-down the meaning of the in vivo category 'domain'. The paper is a methodological reflection on the grounded theory approach to concept development, with a focus on the technical terms: in vivo category, iteration on the code, and sensitizing category. It is also a substantive theoretical contribution, elaborating the concept of a domain in computing, data and information science, and how it has long served as an organizing principle for developing computational systems. Four tricks of the trade for studying the 'logic of domains' are offered as sensitizing concepts to aid future investigations. 
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  4. Schwartz, Russell (Ed.)
  5. The logic of domains has become a key organizing principle for contemporary computing projects and in broader science policy. The logic parses collectives of expertise into ‘domains’ that are to be studied or engaged in order to inform computational advancements and/or interventions on the domains themselves. The concept of a domain is set against a proposition that there is a more general, domain independent or agnostic technique that can serve to intermediate the domains. This article contrasts instances of this discourse, organizing and techne, drawing from cases in artificial intelligence, software engineering, and science policy to illustrate three ongoing figurations of the logic as i) experimental research, ii) formalization in method and software tools, and iii) a de facto organizing principle for science policy and technology development. 
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