Drawing from a longitudinal case study, we inspect the activities of an expanding team of scientists and their collaborators as they sought to develop a novel software pipeline that worked both for themselves and for their wider community. We argue that these two tasks - making the software work for themselves and also for their wider scientific community - could not be differentiated from each other at the beginning of the software development process. Rather, this division of labor and software capacities emerged, articulated by the actors themselves as they went about their tasks. The activities of making the novel software "work" at all, and the "extra work" of making that software repurposable or reusable could not be distinguished until near the end of the development process - rather than defined or structured in advance. We discuss implications for the trajectory of software development, and the practical work of making software repurposable.

This paper contributes to the development of an under-utilized area of focus for CSCW research and design: history. The design and evaluation of technology, as practiced in the field, has positioned CSCW as a largely forward-looking community. The enduring "presentism' and lack of historical view threatens to leave out a wealth of resources that can inspire design, support comparative analysis, and develop a deeper understanding of technology development and its social consequences. This paper argues that a historicist sensibility should inform the due diligence of all CSCW research, and we present connection points for the various ways in which historical research might more deeply inform CSCW, while offering a selection of historiographic challenges to sensitize CSCW scholars as we seek to better situate our collective work within both the present moment as well as ongoing temporal change.

Author(s): Sahneh, Faryad; Balk, Meghan A; Kisley, Marina; Chan, Chi-kwan; Fox, Mercury; Nord, Brian; Lyons, Eric; Swetnam, Tyson; Huppenkothen, Daniela; Sutherland, Will; Walls, Ramona L; Quinn, Daven P; Tarin, Tonantzin; LeBauer, David; Ribes, David; Birnie, Dunbar P; Lushbough, Carol; Carr, Eric; Nearing, Grey; Fischer, Jeremy; Tyle, Kevin; Carrasco, Luis; Lang, Meagan; Rose, Peter W; Rushforth, Richard R; Roy, Samapriya; Matheson, Thomas; Lee, Tina; Brown, C Titus; Teal, Tracy K; Papeș, Monica; Kobourov, Stephen; Merchant, Nirav | Editor(s): Schwartz, Russell

This paper tracks a debate that occurred, first, within the field of Ubiquitous Computing but quickly spread to CHI and beyond, in which design scholars argued that seamlessness had long been an implicit and privileged design virtue, often at the expense of seamfulness. Seamless design emphasizes clarity, simplicity, ease of use, and consistency to facilitate technological interaction. Seamful design emphasizes configurability, user appropriation, and revelation of complexity, ambiguity or inconsistency. Here we review these literatures together and argue that, rather than rival approaches, seamful and seamless design are complements, each emphasizing different aspects of downstream user agency. Ultimately, we situate this debate within the larger, perennial discussion about the strategic revelation and concealment of human and technological operations, and therein the role of design.

This paper re-traverses the author's investigations across several years as he sought to pin-down the meaning of the in vivo category 'domain'. The paper is a methodological reflection on the grounded theory approach to concept development, with a focus on the technical terms: in vivo category, iteration on the code, and sensitizing category. It is also a substantive theoretical contribution, elaborating the concept of a domain in computing, data and information science, and how it has long served as an organizing principle for developing computational systems. Four tricks of the trade for studying the 'logic of domains' are offered as sensitizing concepts to aid future investigations.

Data interoperation functions with the logic of a black box. Interoperation is achieved through front-loaded work and epistemically charged negotiation that thereafter become infrastructural, that is, supporting downstream actions without fully revealing the underpinnings that enable those actions. Drawing from ethnographic and archival investigations of data interoperation within and across an ecology of HIV/AIDS research infrastructures, this paper offers several sensitizing concepts for the investigation of how data are brought together and thereafter circulate. Data interoperability is historical, infrastructural, relatively irreversible, negotiated, epistemic, seamful and seamless, and is approaching the status of a general value rather than a specific means to an end.

Ethnographers have traditionally studied people in particular times and places. However, sociotechnical systems are often long-term enterprises, spanning the globe and serving vast communities. Drawing from three cases of research infrastructure development, this paper demonstrates a methodology in which the ethnographer examines scalar devices: actors' techniques and technologies for knowing and managing large-scale enterprises. Such devices are enacted in and across concrete times and places; for the ethnographer they are observable as activities of scaling. By examining the enactment of scale we can better investigate diverse kinds of size and growth within sociotechnical systems.

Infrastructure makes it easier, faster or possible for investigators to study objects of research. It does so by making available consistent and stable resources and services such as data, collaboration tools, sites of sample collection, or calibrated instruments. This paper offers the concept of the kernel of a research infrastructure as a new unit of analysis for investigating the enabling capacities of infrastructure. The kernel is the core resources and services an infrastructure makes available (called the cache), as well as the work, techniques and technologies that go into sustaining that availability (called addressing). By inspecting and comparing the kernel of two long-term scientific enterprises, this paper demonstrates how focusing on the kernel can help explain key qualities of research infrastructure such as flexibility and persistence in the face of dramatic changes to the objects, methods and practice of science.

CSCW studies of large-scale distributed practice in the sciences and elsewhere have taught us important things about space and place as props and barriers to distributed collective action, but they have had relatively less to say about time. This paper develops a heuristic of collaborative rhythms and points to the work of temporal alignment as a neglected but crucial element underpinning distributed collective practice in the sciences (and other spheres of collective activity). Specifically, we argue that joint scientific work is organized around four separate registers, or 'rhythms' - organizational, infrastructural, biographical, and phenomenal - and that efforts to align such rhythms constitute an important and under-recognized aspect of collaborative work. The ideas and examples are drawn from our own field studies around IT infrastructure and collaborative practice across a range of scientific fields.

In this paper, we examine the social roles of software tools in the English-language Wikipedia, specifically focusing on autonomous editing programs and assisted editing tools. This qualitative research builds on recent research in which we quantitatively demonstrate the growing prevalence of such software in recent years. Using trace ethnography, we show how these often-unofficial technologies have fundamentally transformed the nature of editing and administration in Wikipedia. Specifically, we analyze "vandal fighting" as an epistemic process of distributed cognition, highlighting the role of non-human actors in enabling a decentralized activity of collective intelligence. In all, this case shows that software programs are used for more than enforcing policies and standards. These tools enable coordinated yet decentralized action, independent of the specific norms currently in force.

This paper traces the use of the concept 'community' by drawing attention to the ways in which it serves as an organizing principle within systems development. The data come from an ethnographic study of participants and their activities in the Water and Environmental Research Systems Network (WATERS). WATERS is a US National Science Foundation-funded observatory and cyberinfrastructure project intended to serve the heterogeneous scientific disciplines studying the water environment. We identify four vehicles by which WATERS participants sought to know the needs, conflicts and goals of their diverse communities: engaging in vernacular discussions; organizing community forums; implementing surveys; and requirements gathering. The paper concludes that the use of community in IT development projects is substantially divorced from its traditional meanings which emphasize collective moral orientations or shared affective ties; instead, within systems development, community has a closer meaning to a 'political constituency,' and is used as a short-hand for issues of inquiry, representation, inclusion and mandate.

In designing information infrastructure participants are planning for the long-term. The notion of infrastructure evokes images beyond 'a proof of concept,' a 'prototype' or an isolated 'application'; it is intended to be a persistent, ubiquitous and reliable environment. However, in implementing such projects participants confront multiple difficulties such as securing sustained funding, supporting maintenance and integrating new technologies.