The Co-Production of Data-Sharing Norms: From the Lab to CI-Enabled Data Repositories and Back Again

• In Event: Lab Studies Reloaded? Machine Learning, Ethnography, and Critical STS

Abstract

While lab studies have played an important role in shaping STS, serious critiques have led to their decline and fragmentation. However, the integration of cyberinfrastructure (CI) in laboratory life has revived interest in questions around the utility of in situ techniques. In this study, we argue with Lynch (2018) that lab studies remain valuable sites for critical STS. Further, we maintain that metadata from cyberinfrastructure (CI)-enabled open research repositories contextualize lab studies, addressing questions around the co-production of institutional scripts and information sharing norms, as enacted in data-intensive science labs.

To animate these arguments, we report on an empirical study of the micro-organization of Molecular Biology, focusing on the co-production of scriptural infrastructures and lab practices vis-à-vis the norms of data submission to open research repositories, a signpost of big CI-enabled science. Our data is comprised of fieldwork (3 lab sites, r1 universities), interviews (n =17), and the statistical properties of data co-authorship networks from NCBI’s GenBank (1994 - 2018). We find that CI ecosystems are imbricated in laboratory life, and normative differences in lab groups reflect dynamic tensions between institutional scripts and the open science movement. We find lab members and research groups differentially adopt, normalize, appropriate, and resist institutional and cultural scripts of emerging computational literacies and data sharing norms.

The study contributes empirical work to STS, particularly the long-held emphasis on the co-production of science and society in ‘Low Church’ STS (Fuller, 1997) and methods for adding structural and temporal context to smaller-scale STS studies (e.g. Bietz and Lee, 2009).

Author

• Sarah Elaine Bratt, Syracuse University School of Information Studies