Recent ucla_knowledge_infrastructures_pres items

Knowledge Infrastructures: The Invisible Foundation of Research Data (Slides and Video)

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Knowledge Infrastructures: The Invisible Foundation of Research Data (Slides and Video)

Meaningful Data Metrics for Whom?

Thu, 9 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Make Data Count (MDC) is a scholarly change initiative, made up of researchers and open infrastructure experts, building and advocating for evidence-based open data metrics. Throughout MDC’s tenure, various areas key to the development of research data assessment metrics have been identified. Please join a Spring seminar and discussion series centered around priority work areas, adjacent initiatives to learn from, and steps that can be taken immediately to drive diverse research communities towards assessment and reward for open data.The third and last webinar in our series “BEGIN: metadata for meaningful metrics” will look at next steps to develop responsible and fair data metrics that can reflect the use and impact of research datasets and help elevate them to first-class scholarly outputs. We’ll focus on necessary metadata to construct metrics that take into account characteristics and contexts of open data across disciplines.

"Meaningful Data Metrics for Whom?" is the...

Research Data Infrastructure: A Problem of Governance

Thu, 9 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

5a sesión del Seminario de Estudios sobre el Futuro. Con la participación de Christine Borgman, Directora del Center fo Knowledge Infrastructures de la Universidad de California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Big Data, Little Data, or No Data? Scholarship, Stewardship, and Humanities Research

Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

While the humanities have caught the “big data” wave, “little data” remains the norm in those many domains where evidence is scarce and labor-intensive to acquire. Until recently, data was considered part of the process of scholarship, essential but largely invisible. In the “big data” era, data have become valuable products to be captured, shared, reused, and stewarded for the long term. They also have become contentious intellectual property to be protected, especially in the humanities. Public policy leans toward open access to research data, but rarely provides the public investment necessary to sustain access. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. As the number and variety of research partners expands, so do the difficulties of sharing, reusing, and sustaining access to data. Until the larger questions of knowledge infrastructures and stewardship are addressed by research communities, “no data” may become...

Big Data, Little Data, or No Data? A Social Science Perspective on Data Science [Presentation slides]

Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One person’s signal is another’s noise. Data exist in the eye of the beholder; they are neither products nor commodities. This talk is based on two decades of studying how scientists collect, make, manage, use, reuse, and lose their data. Scientific communities have built large knowledge infrastructures that encompass observatories, telescopes, sensor networks, data archives, technical standards, software tools, institutions, and scholarly societies. These infrastructures evolve over long periods of time; no one is really in charge. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. Many of the essential practices necessary for knowledge and data production are invisible, resulting in fragile infrastructures that are difficult to maintain. The ability to share, reuse, and sustain access to scientific data depends on these fragile systems and relationships. Data scientists tend to focus on “big data,” whereas “little data,”...

Institutional Dimensions of Data Curation:Astronomy, Research Libraries, and MultipleApproaches to Curation

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Institutional Dimensions of Data Curation:Astronomy, Research Libraries, and MultipleApproaches to Curation

Keynote: Big Data, Little Data, or No Data? Why Human Interaction with Data is a Hard Problem (slides)

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges of human interaction and retrieval. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. As the number and variety of research partners expands, so do the difficulties of sharing, reusing, and sustaining access to data. Information retrieval is hindered by the lack of agreement on what are “data.” Complexities of human interaction with data will be illustrated with empirical examples from environmental sciences, sensor networks, astronomy, biomedicine, and other fields. Unless larger questions of knowledge infrastructures and stewardship are addressed by research communities, “no data” often becomes the norm. Implications for policy and practice in the information sciences will be explored, drawing upon the presenter’s book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015), and...

Privacy & Information Technology Syllabus, Fall 2017, UCLA

Thu, 9 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Privacy is a broad topic that covers many disciplines, stakeholders, and concerns. This course addresses the intersection of privacy and information technology, surveying a wide array of topics of concern for research and practice in the information fields. Among the topics covered are the history and changing contexts of privacy; privacy risks and harms; law, policies, and practices; privacy in searching for information, in reading, and in libraries; surveillance, networks, and privacy by design; information privacy of students; uses of learning analytics; privacy associated with government data, at all levels of government; information security, cyber risk; and how privacy and data are governed by universities. We will touch on relationships between privacy, security, and risk; on identification and re-identification of individuals; privacy-enhancing technologies; the Internet of Things; open access to data; drones; and other current issues in privacy and information technology.

Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier

Data, infrastructure, and stewardship

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Data, infrastructure, and stewardship

Data: Unstable in concept and context

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Data: Unstable in concept and context

Whose Science? Whose Data? Whose Evidence?

Thu, 8 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Whose Science? Whose Data? Whose Evidence?

Why Data Sharing and Reuse in Biomedicine are Hard to Do

Tue, 18 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Why Data Sharing and Reuse in Biomedicine are Hard to Do

Research Data Alliance in the Science Data-Sharing Landscape

Wed, 5 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

RDA-France Conference in Partnership with National Open Science Plan for France

Paris, 5 December 2018

The Research Data Alliance, in less than six years since its founding, has grown to more than 7000 members, has held 12 international plenary meetings, and convened a vast array of groups interested in data sharing and data-drivenresearch.During this period of time, the array of countries, communities, funding agencies, and individual scholars concerned about open access to data has continued to expand. Concurrently, awareness of the challenges of open science, open data, open access, and eResearch also has grown. Data sharing is an essential requirement for open science, but it is not an end in itself. Making data reusable, and keeping data available in scientifically useful forms for long periods of time, are much harder problems. As the RDA community grows and matures, it faces complex issues of data stewardship, trust, economics, infrastructure, standards,...

Big Science, Little Science, and Open Science: Sustainability, Stewardship, and Knowledge Infrastructures

Tue, 4 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Conference on the National Open Science Plan for France: From Strategy to Action

Paris, 4 December 2018

As France launches a national plan for open science that spans open access publishing, open access to data, and integration with international partnerships on scholarly sustainability, the country is taking a leap forward in developing new knowledge infrastructures – robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions for producing, exchanging, and sustaining knowledge. Research data have become scholarly objects in their own right, to be released, shared, and reused. Publications and datasets are distinct genres that serve scholarship in complementary ways. Data sharing is a complex and labor-intensive process, and data reuse is even more so. Whereas data sharing policies presume that research data are useful to others and that others will reuse those data, neither outcome is assured. Concerns for data sharing and open access raise questions about what data...

The invisible knowledge infrastructure of astronomy: A sharper focus on blurry data

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Age-old patterns of research and publication were disrupted as scholarship moved online. Astronomy now conducts research at scales of data collection that were unforeseeable in the days of glass plates – and yet those glass plates, famously stored at CfA, remain valuable as records of irreproducible observations. Keeping digital data “alive” at scale is proving to be a complex and expensive challenge. Astronomy has built a particularly robust network of people, artifacts, and institutions for producing, exchanging, and sustaining knowledge that links publications, telescopes, digital data archives, and other scientific resources – a knowledge infrastructure. My research fellowship at CfA for October 2018 is devoted to advancing a decade-long study of astronomy data practices to ask questions about the durability and fragility of these infrastructures and the invisible work required to sustain access to data, tools, instruments, publications, documentation, and other infrastructure...

PhD Thesis - From Open Data to Knowledge Production:Biomedical Data Sharing and Unpredictable Data Reuses

Tue, 6 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Using a US consortium for data sharing as the primary field site, this three-year ethnographic research project examines the socio-technical, epistemic, and ethical challenges of making biomedical research data openly available and reusable. Public policy arguments for releasing scientific data for reuse by others include increasing trust in science and leveraging public investments in research. In most types of scientific research, data release occurs in parallel with associated publications, after peer-review. In the consortium studied for this project, datasets may also be released independently without an associated publication. Such research datasets are conceptualized as “hypothesis free” resources from which novel knowledge can be extracted indefinitely. Among the findings of this project are that biomedical researchers do not download and re-analyze “hypothesis free” research data from open repositories as a regular practice. Data reuse is a complex, delicate, and often...

Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Berkman Klein Luncheon Series

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Wednesday October 10 2018

The growth in availability of digital data resources is changing university practice in more ways than most faculty, administrators, and students are aware. Researchers provide open access to their data as a condition for obtaining grant funding or publishing results in journals, leading to an explosion of available scholarly content. Universities have automated many aspects of teaching, instruction, student services, libraries, personnel management, building management, and finance, leading to a profusion of discrete data about the activities of individuals. Many of these data, both research and operational, fall outside privacy regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, and PII. Universities see great value of these data for learning analytics, faculty evaluation, strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities, governments, and private individuals also see...

Beyond Privacy: The Emerging Ethics of Data Reuse

Wed, 3 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The workshop will explore the meaning of “Informed Consent” and its implication for reusing human subject open data from and for biomedical research. Patients and volunteers donate their data in the context of research designs that are vetted and approved by ethics committees. When research data are released in open access – especially observational data - these can be reused to explore a number of new hypotheses. As we know from previous studies, biomedical data can be reused in many unpredictable ways – new research communities are formed around pre-existing data, and the free availability of research data increases innovation, knowledge integration, and reproducibility. At the same time, openness of data could also expose donors to surveillance and discriminatory research practices that not only have ethical implications, but also were never agreed upon by the donors at the moment of data collection. In this workshop, cases of both successful and controversial data reuse practices...

If Data Sharing is the Answer, What is the Question?

Wed, 3 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Data sharing has become normative policy enforced by governments, funding agencies, journals, and other stakeholders. Reasons for data sharing include leveraging investments in research, reducing the need to collect new data, addressing new research questions by reusing or combining extant data, and reproducing research, which would lead to greater accountability, transparency, and less fraud. Much of the scholarship on data practices attempts to understand the sociotechnical barriers to sharing, with goals to design infrastructures, policies, and cultural interventions that will overcome these barriers. Yet data sharing and reuse are common practice in only a few fields. Astronomy and genomics in the sciences, survey research in the social sciences, and archaeology in the humanities are the typical exemplars, and remain the exceptions rather than the rule. The lack of success of data sharing policies, despite accelerating enforcement over the last decade, indicates the need not...

The Data Conservancy: Science-driven Information Science

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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/

Digital Libraries: Now here, or nowhere? (Keynote)

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Digital libraries have matured over the 15+ years since the term was coined. Yet the term “digital libraries” has never come into general use outside of a select group of conferences and journals. Have digital libraries been subsumed under the rubric of cyberinfrastructure and eResearch? Have they fallen prey to the eternal debates between the (digital) library of the future and the future of (digital) libraries? Has a focus on technology obscured the larger questions of social practice that surround digital libraries? Or is digital library research at an inflection point, in a pivotal position to respond to the next wave of challenges for an information society?

Scholarship in the Digital Age: Blurring the Boundaries between the Sciences and the Humanities (Keynote)

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Digital Archive: The Data Deluge arrives in the Humanities

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Research Library of the Future: Less Selection, More Curation

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Only a decade ago, this definition of a research library seemed adequate (Borgman, 2000, p.38): Librarians tend to take a broad view of the concept of a library. In general terms, they see libraries as organizations that select, collect, organize, conserve, preserve, and provide access to information on behalf of a community of users. Revisiting this definition today, libraries seem both broader and narrower in scope. The scope is narrower in that libraries are doing far less selecting and collecting of journals as they move from purchase to lease models. Research libraries rapidly are approaching the “e-only tipping point” (Johnson & Luther, 2007) for journals, and some predict that the e-only tipping point for books is not too far away (Connaway & Wicht, 2007; Sandler, Armstrong & Nardini, 2007). Libraries also are doing fewer of the organizing tasks for their core collections, as digital catalog records accompany digital books, and as more printed books arrive “shelf-ready”...

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