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.
I attended my first NSF workshop earlier this week at UC Irvine; the hospitality and sunshine were delightful. The workshop was a great opportunity to meet others who are interested in similar research questions and who deal with the same challenges in dealing with FLOSS data. It was also a nice chance to put some of my learning from my teaching practicum with the Science Data Management course, although the class hasn’t progressed all the way through the relevant topics that would apply to the workshop focus on FLOSS research infrastructure. The combination of experiences should provide a useful context for me when it comes time to write an NSF grant proposal this summer, especially because one of the benefits of attending this workshop was learning a lot more, from insiders’ perspectives, about how the NSF funding works for these types of projects.
The workshop experience was new for me; a handful of invited participants made presentations and the discussion of their content formed the base of the program, unlike many workshops which are based on presentations of position papers or work in progress. I presented a couple of slides demonstrating the use of Taverna Workbench to replicate prior research that uses the FLOSSmole data repository. After a day and a half of “think tank” discussions, many participants had to fly home, but a few of us stayed an extra evening (due flight schedules, among other things) and we put together a draft outline of the workshop report for the funding agency. Developing the workshop report was probably the best part for me - it gave a nice summary and review of everything that had transpired, with intense discussion among the few of us who remained. We wrote it collaboratively, sharing a document with Google Docs, so even though I didn’t really say much, I was able to contribute “legitimate peripheral participation” in the form of writing. The workshop web site was another such case; it was designed for collaborative content contribution, and I posted some of my notes for posterity. So instead of blogging here about the content of the workshop, it was blogged on the workshop site.
One thing that was notable to me is how overwhelmingly male-dominated this area is. This is not just because computer science is underpopulated by women, but the gender disparity is apparently even more extreme in FLOSS development and research. The evidence at this workshop was the attendance of just two women in a group of 20 participants - only 10% - which I found slightly mystifying, given the nearly equal gender balance on the SU FLOSS research team. In fact, I think we have more women than men in the FLOSS group right now. However, a key detail is that I’m the only “data geek” among them (like the other female workshop participant, who’s into data mining) and this might be true for the broader population. It doesn’t put me off; if anything, a gender imbalance in this regard indicates good opportunities for people like me. But I do wonder why it is so…
In Sewell’s criticism of Giddens’ discussion of structuration theory, he finds the idea of a virtual nonhuman resource implausible, but information is a resource that can be virtual and nonhuman, while also being human and actual. Information as a resource can take many forms; information embedded in individuals or processes would seem to be virtual and human, while information recorded in some durable media such as print text appears to be actual and nonhuman, and information recorded in digital media can arguably be considered virtual and nonhuman.
I’m not sure why the virtual versus actual nature of resources matters so much to Sewell. Part of the challenge in interpreting Sewell’s intention in discussing the “virtual” aspects of structure is that he does not directly define “virtual” to clarify his perspective but rather refers to the literature and Giddens’ assertion of existence of structure outside of space and time. Sewell’s redefinition of rules and resources as virtual schemas and actual resources leaves me wondering which of these constitutes information, or whether both do.
Sewell’s discussion of the polysemy of resources refers several times to “an array of resources” that is interpreted or reinterpreted, and the language suggests that the word “information” is a suitable substitute for “array of resources.” This would lead me to restate the definition of agency as the actor’s ability to use information in context, and structure as the information and culture that influence social action and tend to be reproduced by social action. Perhaps this is a bit simplistic, but it is an interpretation that helps me think about the theory in terms that are meaningful to me.
Sewell, William 1992 “A theory of structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation”, American Journal of Sociology, 98: 1-29
Giddens, Anthony. 1979. “Agency Structure”, in Central Problems in Social Theory, 49-72 Cambridge University Press
