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Surfacing Data Change in Scientific Work

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Information in Contemporary Society (iConference 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11420))

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Abstract

Data are essential products of scientific work that move among and through research infrastructures over time. Data constantly changes due to evolving practices and knowledge, requiring improvisational work by scientists to determine the effects on analyses. Today for end users of datasets much of the information about changes, and the processes leading to them, is invisible—embedded elsewhere in the work of a collaboration. Simultaneously scientists use increasing quantities of data, making ad hoc approaches to identifying change difficult to scale effectively. Our research investigates data change by examining how scientists make sense of change in datasets being created and sustained by the collaborative infrastructures they engage with. We examine two forms of change, before examining how trust and project rhythms influence a scientist’s notion that the newest available data are the best. We explore the opportunity to design tools and practices to support user examinations of data change and surface key provenance information embedded in research infrastructures.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This work is part of the Deduce project (http://deduce.lbl.gov). The goal of the Deduce project is to develop methods and tools that support data change exploration and management in the context of data analysis pipelines.

  2. 2.

    http://www.sdss.org/, http://www.desi.lbl.gov/.

  3. 3.

    http://watershed.lbl.gov/, http://ameriflux.lbl.gov.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the members of the Deduce project, the study participants, and the anonymous reviewers of this work. This work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science and Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Data Science and Technology Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Drew Paine & Lavanya Ramakrishnan

Authors
  1. Drew Paine
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  2. Lavanya Ramakrishnan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Drew Paine .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    Natalie Greene Taylor

  2. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Caitlin Christian-Lamb

  3. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Michelle H. Martin

  4. University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Bonnie Nardi

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Paine, D., Ramakrishnan, L. (2019). Surfacing Data Change in Scientific Work. In: Taylor, N., Christian-Lamb, C., Martin, M., Nardi, B. (eds) Information in Contemporary Society. iConference 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11420. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15741-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15742-5

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