Christine L. Borgman

The Sensed vs Sensing in Embedded Networked SensingData and data sharing at an ENS research center

Christine L. Borgman — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:35:05 PDT

Drowning in the Data Deluge: Digital Library Challenges for Asia (Keynote)

Christine L. Borgman — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:48:59 PDT

Scholarly communication no longer consists merely of papers and publications. Research data have become valuable objects to be captured, documented, and shared. Funding agencies are requiring "data management plans" for all new proposals. Libraries, universities, and research institutes are assessing how to manage those data in ways that can be leveraged for future value. But what are "data"? We are drowning in them without being able to define what they are. This talk will explore the shifting landscape of scholarly information, with special attention to how these shifts may influence digital libraries in Asia. Research is disseminated by many formal and informal means, not only by libraries and publishers but also by new media such as preprint repositories and tweets. Access may be faster if one can separate signal from noise amidst the plethora of communication channels. These changes are the result of the transition from a closed scholarly world to the open Web, the shift in content and context of networked information, the shift in focus from information services for readers to those for authors, and differences between publications and data. If future scholars are to use the scholarly content of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the digital library community must reclaim information retrieval, rethink partnerships throughout the information life cycle, share responsibility for the information infrastructure, and address policy and incentive issues.

Who is Responsible for Data? An Exploratory Study of Data Authorship, Ownership, and Responsibility

Jillian C. Wallis et al. — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:28:52 PDT

Data repositories rely on the deposit of materials from the communities they serve, forming a chain of stakeholders from the data creator to the repository and data user. Top-down policies that describe the responsibilities of the depositing scientists and other stakeholders are drafted accordingly. But we see very little deposit of scientific data beyond the Big Sciences or communities for whom deposit is required by publications. As part of an ongoing data practices study, we asked scientific researchers about who would be responsible for the data collected. It is clear that researchers are not talking about who is responsible for the data. The results presented here are meant to demonstrate the need for further research into what it means to be responsible for research data and how this responsibility is delegated to members of a research team.

Data, data, everywhere: How many drops to drink? Symposium panel on Scholarly Communication: Changes, Challenges, & Initiatives

Christine L. Borgman — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 10:18:24 PDT

Local or global? Making sense of the data sharing imperative (keynote)

Christine L. Borgman — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 10:12:18 PDT

Preface

Christine L. Borgman — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:55:40 PDT

Who’s got the data? Interdependencies in Science and Technology Collaborations

Christine L. Borgman et al. — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 00:00:40 PDT

Science and technology always have been interdependent, but never more so than with today’s highly instrumented data collection practices. We report on an 8-year study of collaboration between environmental scientists (biology, ecology, marine sciences), computer science, and engineering research teams as part of a 5-university distributed science and technology research center devoted to embedded networked sensing. The science and technology teams go into the field together with mutual interests in gathering more scientific data, at higher sampling rates and finer granularity, at more locations, and with greater ability to adapt to field conditions than is possible with manual methods. While they collect data together in field deployments, “data” are constituted very differently between the research teams. What are data to the science teams are context to the technology teams, and vice versa. Interdependencies between the teams raise tensions in collecting, using, and managing data, in both the short and long terms. Curating the scientific data is of greater interest to the participants than is maintaining the technical data. However, the technical data may be essential for interpretation of the scientific data. Decisions on what data to curate, for whom, for what purposes, and for how long, may depend upon critical interdependencies between scientific and technical processes, and the often disparate dispositions of those data.

Is data to knowledge as the wasp is to the fig tree? Reconsidering Licklider’s Intergalactic Network in the days of data deluge.

Christine L. Borgman — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 23:47:23 PDT

How is research being made available in formal and informal ways and what can be done now to make it available for future scholars?

Christine L. Borgman — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 10:43:58 PDT

Several decades ago, access to scholarly information was the exclusive domain of libraries and publishers. Now research is disseminated by many formal and informal means, not only by libraries and publishers but also by preprint repositories and tweets. Access may be faster – if one can separate signal from noise amidst the plethora of communication channels. Changes in access are a result of the transition from a closed scholarly world to the open Web, the shift in content and context of networked information, information services for readers and for authors, and differences between publications and data. If future scholars are to use the scholarly content of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the scholarly community must reclaim information retrieval, rethink partnerships throughout the information life cycle, share responsibility for the information infrastructure, and address policy and incentive issues.

The conundrum of sharing research data.

Christine L. Borgman — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:15:00 PDT

The deluge of research data has excited researchers, policy makers, and the general public. Not only might research be reproducible, but new questions can be asked, with great benefit to research, innovation, education, and the citizenry. However, very little data is being shared, despite the best efforts of funding agencies and journals. This article explores the complexities of data, research practices, innovation, incentives, economics, intellectual property, and public policy associated with the data sharing conundrum – “an intricate and difficult problem.” Research data take many forms, are collected for many purposes, via many approaches, and often are difficult to interpret once removed from their initial context. Rationales for sharing data vary along two dimensions: whether motivated by research concerns or by leveraging public investments, and whether intended to serve the interests of researchers who produce data or the interests of potential re-users of data. Four rationales for sharing research data are identified and positioned on these dimensions. Researchers’ incentives to share their data depend not only on these rationales, but on characteristics of their data and research practices, funding agency policies, and resources for data management. Much more is understood about why researchers do not share data than about when, why, and how researchers do share data, or about when, how, and why researchers or the public reuse data. The model and research agenda are illustrated with examples from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

RCUK Review of e-Science 2009

D.E. Atkins et al. — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:05:12 PST

Digital Libraries for Scientific Data Discovery and Reuse: From Vision to Practical Reality

Jillian Wallis et al. — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 23:54:08 PST

Embodying research methods into fields and tables: a process

Laura A. Wynholds et al. — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 23:51:44 PST

Curators to the stars

David S. Fearon Jr. et al. — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 23:48:52 PST

Embedded Sensor Networks

Christine L. Borgman — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 23:42:14 PST

Research Data: Who will share what, with whom, when, and why?

Christine L. Borgman — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:29:26 PDT

The deluge of scientific research data has excited the general public, as well as the scientific community, with the possibilities for better understanding of scientific problems, from climate to culture. For data to be available, researchers must be willing and able to share them. The policies of governments, funding agencies, journals, and university tenure and promotion committees also influence how, when, and whether research data are shared. Data are complex objects. Their purposes and the methods by which they are produced vary widely across scientific fields, as do the criteria for sharing them. To address these challenges, it is necessary to examine the arguments for sharing data and how those arguments match the motivations and interests of the scientific community and the public. Four arguments are examined: to make the results of publicly funded data available to the public, to enable others to ask new questions of extant data, to advance the state of science, and to reproduce research. Libraries need to consider their role in the face of each of these arguments, and what expertise and systems they require for data curation.

The Digital Future is Now: What the Humanities can Learn from eScience

Christine L. Borgman — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 08:39:03 PDT

As the digital humanities mature, their scholarship is taking on many characteristics of the sciences, becoming more data-intensive, information-intensive, distributed, multi-disciplinary, and collaborative. While few scholars in the humanities or arts would wish to be characterized as emulating scientists, they do envy the comparatively rich technical and resource infrastructure of the sciences. The interests of all scholars in the university align with respect to access to data, library resources, and computing infrastructure. However, the scholarly interests of the sciences and humanities diverge regarding research practices, sources of evidence, and degrees of control over those sources. This talk will explore the common and competing interests of disciplines for scholarship in the digital age, concluding with a call to action for the humanities.

The Data Conservancy: Science-driven Information Science

Christine L. Borgman et al. — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:09:53 PDT

The Data Conservancy –which is a National Science Foundation funded Datanet project with a diverse array of partners – embraces a shared vision: data curation is not an end, but rather a means to collect, organize, validate, and preserve data to address grand research challenges that face society. Key to the data conservancy approach is information science research on the data practices of the science domains. Three teams are conducting social studies of individual science domains. Prof. Carole Palmer of the University of Illinois will report on their comparative studies of multiple biosciences domains. Prof. Christine Borgman of the University of California, Los Angeles, will report on their studies of astronomers. We are in the first year of the project, and will focus on our research questions, methods, and what we hope to learn from this 5-year project.

http://www.ibi.hu-berlin.de/institut/veranstaltungen/bbk/bbk-material/abstracts/

The Digital Archive: The Data Deluge arrives in the Humanities

Christine L. Borgman — Wed, 19 May 2010 20:47:29 PDT

The data deluge has began to overwhelm the sciences, as instruments such as sensor networks and space telescopes are generating far more data than can possibly be inspected manually. Only digital tools can make sense of these vast volumes of data. As the humanities draw more heavily on digital archives, their scholarship is taking on many characteristics of the sciences, becoming more data-intensive, information-intensive, distributed, multi-disciplinary, and collaborative. However, the humanities typically lack the technical infrastructure available to the sciences. The scholarly interests of the sciences and humanities also diverge with respect to research practices, sources of evidence, and degrees of control over those sources. This talk will explore some of the challenges facing humanities scholars in mining digital archives.

Scientific data archiving: the state of the art in information, data, and metadata management

Kalpana Shankar — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:40:47 PST

This white paper is the product of a one-year postdoctoral fellowship to study data archiving requirements for the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing during its first year of operation. The paper focuses on introducing current thinking on scientific data management issues and primarily on relevant standards in data description (metadata) and management for scientific archives. Appendices include a

rudimentary data dictionary for the current James Reserve database, and sample metadata crosswalks for Ecological Metadata Language (EML) and Sensor ML. This paper covers current standards, developments, and sources of datasets (where appropriate) for:

• General data management and discovery - tools

• Environmental science/ecology

• Seismology

• Oceanography

• Atmospheric science

• Toxic hydrology

• Geographical Information Systems (GIS)

• Education