Dec 15, 2011
Faculty win $1.2M grant to study data practices
Information Studies Professor Christine L. Borgman and Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and History Sharon Traweek were awarded $1.2 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to conduct ethnographic studies of scientific information and data practices that will determine how institutions manage and share complex sets of research intelligence.
The unprecedented study will compare projects that produce large volumes of uniform or similar data against those that produce smaller amounts of diverse data, and will also compare projects at earlier and later stages of their life cycles to determine the knowledge infrastructure requirements for a broad spectrum of scientific research and practice.
One aspect of the study is devoted to the transfer of data collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a massive, decade-long astronomical survey that has systematically mapped a quarter of the sky. The survey is now entering its archival phase, and its data are being transferred to libraries at Johns Hopkins and Princeton Universities.
The project will also examine data transfers at multiple sites, including the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA, and Dataverse Network at Harvard University.
Pictured above from the left: Sharon Traweek and Christine Borgman
