It’s the end of the semester and my hands are still pretty full. I have one last class to wrap up by writing a theory construction paper, and some final papers to grade to finish up my graduate assistantship for the year. This Saturday I’ll be volunteering to help out with the iOpening, in which our newly renovated Hinds Hall facilities will be dedicated. And that will be the end of the school year, at long last.
But it doesn’t really imply a break. I’ll be continuing service on the faculty search committee over the summer and likely into the next school year; there is plenty of work involved and we’ve just gotten started with the search. I’ll also be continuing to work with my advisor on projects related to developing FLOSS research infrastructure, and I’ve volunteered to help out with grant writing on top of that.
I’ll start up a couple of summer projects pretty soon, too - wouldn’t want to get bored without classes to swallow up my time. I’m determined to paint my drab living room a cheery green, and turn my thesis into a journal article submission. Another venture will be working on syllabus and course development with Derrick Cogburn for a new course on distributed collaboration technologies. In June, I’ll be visiting Manchester, UK for the eSocial Science conference as well; I’m really looking forward to it and feeling pretty lucky that I get to go.
New experiences for the fall are already lining themselves up. I’m eagerly anticipating a course on research design because I’m basically a methods geek at heart. I’ve also registered for a seminar on Organizational Behavior at the Whitman School of Management, which will complement the organizational sociology seminar from this semester. And I’ll have a new job, this time administering an NSF grant focused on research and design of a new curriculum for cyberinfrastructure information professionals in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) disciplines. It should be an interesting experience, it’s research-oriented, and will help me develop pedagogical skills beyond classroom teaching.
The semester caught up to me for awhile there and I’ve been trying to catch up since. CHI in Florence was great; in addition to another fine conference, we really enjoyed the food, art, and sights. I miss the coffee. There’s too much to say about Florence to try to capture it in a short catch-up blog post, and who knows if I’ll ever actually get around to blogging it at all, but at least there are plenty of photos.
I have to blog about Ravelry.com soon, because it’s just that awesome. By helping me organize my patterns and yarn, I think it’s helping me be a more productive knitter! I’ve been doing a lot of knitting this winter because it helps me relax and focus; since the start of the school year, I’ve made a couple of scarves, a neckwarmer, and a couple of hats and headwarmers. I just finished up a sweet little silk organza ribbon yarn scarf made from special yarn I bought in Florence. I’m also making great progress on a cardigan for Everett, who is enjoying the attention involved in having a custom handmade garment created to fit him better than any other sweater he’s ever had.
The semester is nearly over, but I still have a paper to finish and a practicum to wrap up. The paper is a big theory construction paper that I dread, but at least I have a plan for using a case study theory construction method to inductively form a theory about why some open source software development projects are successful. Fortunately, I can leverage a bit of work on a review paper from my research group and the prior papers I wrote this semester to generate this paper much more efficiently than the last few. All the more fortunately because I had a momentary lapse of reason and volunteered for the faculty search committee; I think it will be a valuable experience on the overall, but the additional work for committee service is immediate and not insignificant.
Life is good, but very busy just now. After the semester ends, I will have a couple of weeks off to try to recover from the school year before diving into summer work. I’m really looking forward to it; I haven’t had two weeks in a row off in years and years. I have all manner of grand plans, and I’m sure I can get at least half of them accomplished.
I haven’t been writing as much here as perhaps I ought. One of my goals for the year is to improve my facility with writing, and it would stand to reason that blogging would be a means to that end. Lately, I’ve been writing more for my classes and the occasional conference abstract. Much is going on, at least in my head. March has been a month of catching up, working ahead, and generally trying to manage my life like a reasonable person. It’s been a week since spring break ended; I did nothing more remarkable over break than taking the first weekend off to relax a bit, and spending every evening watching films with my husband. These mundane rewards are pleasurable enough that it’s hard to kick myself back into high gear for the rest of the semester.
I’ll be kicking it, though. It’s now less than two weeks until we depart for Florence for CHI 2008. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends in the Human-Computer Interaction community, and spending the frantic week enjoying being the photographer once again. It’s interesting to observe how the role has formalized over the last few years, as I’m coming up on my third go-round as the CHI staff photographer. I expect it will be another fun and exhausting conference, but I dread the consequences of taking 10 days out for travel. After that, the rest of the semester will be devoted to catching up and wrapping up. So will end a semester in which I have yet to feel that I have caught my stride, due to all the interruptions from travel. I’m not complaining, just observing, as I wouldn’t trade the opportunities for anything.
Speaking of opportunities, my fingers are crossed on a submission for the eResearch conference at the Oxford Internet Institute in September, and the eSocial Science conference submission that we should be hearing about any time now. The two papers that were submitted to the Fourth International Conference on Open Source Systems were both accepted, and the one for which I’m first author received very complimentary reviews. I’ll be going to Milan in the fall to present one (or possibly both) of them, so that should make an auspicious start to the next school year.
Before that, however, I still have to survive this semester and the intervening summer. This semester still has five papers, three presentations, and a handful of smaller writing assignments remaining. Fortunately, the writing has been interesting for me, and I’m working on trying a handful of different writing strategies to improve my flexibility, process, and product. Somehow, it all works out.
I just got back from my second trip to California in one month. This time I was presenting a paper at the iConference in Los Angeles; the paper is a leaner, cleaner version of my thesis research on hiring in the iSchools. To my delight, I got my first citation during the first paper in the first session of the conference! So now that my thesis has been cited, I’m hoping that I can work it into a journal article submission. My advisor made a great suggestion to pull in some narrative of the development trajectory for computer science for comparison. I probably won’t get a chance to follow up on that until summer, but it’s on the to-do list.
I heard through the grapevine that my paper was mentioned in a couple of other sessions, and I had some great discussions about the research with other members of the community over the course of the conference. It was also really great to see some friends from Michigan - I thoroughly enjoyed catching up with Lada, Libby, Sean, and a number of other people from SI. All in all, it was a really fantastic conference experience for me.
At least, it was up until I got back in to Syracuse - the airport is understaffed and it took 2 hours for the baggage to be unloaded. Although my bag was a carry-on, it was gate checked because the planes are so small that an ordinary carry-on doesn’t fit in the overhead compartment, and this time they unloaded gate-checked bags with the rest of the checked bags. Except that the last bags on, which were the first bags off, were also the last ones returned. So all the complaints I’ve been hearing about United seem to be well founded, and I’ll be avoiding them in the future. Getting in at midnight and having to wait until 2 AM before my carry-on bag was returned made me a rather unhappy customer.
That aside, everything has been going very well for me lately, for which good fortune I am truly thankful. Of course, all of that is due in no small part to plenty of effort on my end. I had a really good annual review just before the iConference, and the main thing I need to work on over the next year is writing, which is difficult at times but seems to be getting better lately. It’s a little intimidating to go up for review before 8 professors, but they were quite gentle and I got a lot of good tips for writing.
I also got news that I have a summer job as a research assistant working on some FLOSS project efforts, which is really great because it’s exactly what I would best like to be doing with my summer. I’ll be working on data management and analysis workflow development to support some of the research efforts on decision making and group maintenance, and will doubtless be working on some grantwriting as well. I’m very well motivated to lend a hand with grantwriting as I’d rather get my support from grant-funded research than general funds next year.
In Weick’s discussion of sensemaking in organizations, he engages a process-oriented perspective toward sensemaking and discusses the difference between sensemaking and interpretation. I found that the differentiation speaks to a fundamental outlook on the nature of knowledge; that is, whether knowledge exists to be discovered (interpretation) or whether knowledge is created (sensemaking.) This points to a basic epistemological debate that underlies this conception of sensemaking, and a rather existentialist one at that.
Weick is credited with the concept of the enacted environment, as discussed by Pfeffer & Salancik, who seemed to define the environment as that which the organization knows it to be, which is to say that whatever the organization is not aware of, is not a part of its environment. Only the reality as known by the organization can be acted upon, even if that reality is not a very good representation of the environment. I find this perspective intriguing and also somewhat paradoxical; it implies an external subjective reality that can only be partially known by the organization, and that the portion that is known by the organization is its environment, which is socially constructed and subjective. This must be the main point of differentiation in the discussion of the enacted environment, as opposed to any other sort, is the enacted environment seems to be socially constructed, which would imply that non-enacted environments exist, and are not socially constructed. At the same time, I expected that the concept of an enacted environment might come closer to the idea of co-evolution of the organization and the environment, but from my reading, this does not really seem to be the case. Enactment puts control almost entirely in human hands.
Just to be picky, I would also flatly refute the assertion from Pfeffer & Salancik that “information is not neutral.” Information IS neutral. The perception and use of information is not neutral. The information itself does not take sides, though it may present a non-neutral perspective, which should instead be attributed the source of information.
Pfeffer, Jeffrey and Gerald Salanick, “The enactment process,” in The External Control of Organizations, 71-78. Harper & Row.
Weick, Karl, 1995. “The nature of sensemaking,” in Sensemaking in Organizations 1-16 Sage.
