Social scientists and cyberinfrastructure

Abstract

Contemporary cyberinfrastructure (CI) seem poorly developed to meet the distributed work practices of social scientists. We draw from the literatures of science studies and e-science practices to advance a document-centered articulation of social scientists' distributed work practices. We report on a pilot study to provide some insights into CI needs for these scholars. This study relied on a mixed-methodological approach involving the mapping of digital and physical documents, automated tracking of desktop and online repositories, participant-generated images of physical documents and desktop, behavioral queries, along with interviews and participant observation. Findings suggest a document perspective provides insight into the distributed work practices and CI uses of social scientists.