Standards and protocols play important but under-theorized roles in HCI research and design efforts, including those dedicated to the development of new collaborative infrastructures in the sciences. Building on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines standardization efforts attached to new forms of design and computational development in American ecology. We explore the role that standards play in large-scale research networks; how standards are enacted and enforced in complex interactive systems like science; how standards struggle and fail (and what happens when they do); and how actors work across the gaps that standards leave to produce more effective forms of practice and design. We also argue for the potentially creative role of standards, including contexts in which they function as fulcrums for change and innovation. We conclude with reflections on how HCI researchers might rethink the nature and possibilities of standards and standardization in their own work.

HCI studies of computational change in the sciences have made important design and analytic contributions, to other fields of science and to HCI itself. But some of the longer-term effects and complexities of infrastructural change in the sciences aren't easily captured under short-term, design- or artifact-centered accounts. Drawing on extended ethnographic study of computational development in ecology, this paper explores the relationship between new computational infrastructure and the nature of ecology as a vocation: roughly, the deeply held sense of what it means to 'be' an ecologist, and to 'do' ecology. We analyze in particular the nature of the field and field work as a central site of ecological practice and identity; how new computational developments are remediating this crucial relation; and the emergent vocational values that new and more computationally-intensive forms of ecology may give rise to.