THE CONVERGENCE ACTORS

An Inquiry into Collaboration in the Sciences

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This project aims to investigate new dynamics of collaboration emerging around goals for convergent research, and the development of cross-cutting platforms or infrastructure to support scientific research.

Research Methodologies

Participant Observations

Interviews

Document and Artifact Analysis

Collaborators

Charlotte P. Lee

David Ribes

Andrew Neang

Will Sutherland

Timeline

9/2020 — Current

Convergent Research

 

Convergent research also presents novel challenges for collaboration across heterogeneous expertise.

Convergent research seeks to translate expertise, tools, or analytic technique across projects, fields or domains.

These challenges and the strategies to manage them have not been systematically examined and conceptualized in research on collaboration thus far.

This qualitative study will investigate instances of convergent or translational research. Our focus will be on exemplary experts that conduct translational research (‘convergence actors’), their practices, organizational forms, technical tools, and architectures.

The goal is to understand and analyze practices of:

 
 
 
 
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Convergence
 
 
 
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recurrent challenges
 
 
 
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technological architectures
 

The methods used are comparative, archival and ethnographic. Findings will contribute to the sociotechnical design of tools and infrastructure, the HCI field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), science policy, and Science and Technology Studies (STS).

Data Integration as Coordination

 

Retooling Tool Libraries

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