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Yahoo seminar series: Christine Borgman

The enthusiasm for “big data” is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship. Inside the black box of “data” is a plethora of behavior, technology, and policy issues. Publish or perish remains the clarion call of today’s scholars. Now they are being asked to release their data as well, which marks a fundamental transition in scholarly communication.

Data are not shiny objects that are easily exchanged. Rather, they are fuzzy and poorly bounded entities. Data flows are uneven – abundant in some areas and sparse in others, easily or rarely shared. Open access and open data are contested concepts that are often conflated. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. Data are a lens to observe the rapidly changing landscape of scholarly practice in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities.

The future for libraries to manage the deluge of data is streaming with possibilities – and with challenges.

Visiting Fellow at Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), at the Hague and Amsterdam.

Keynote Talk on "Data, Data, Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink" at the Research Data Alliance Fourth Plenary Meeting in Amsterdam.Click for Slides.

Professor Christine L. Borgman presents inaugural lecture at Göttingen University on October 2, 2014. "Big Data, Little Data, Open Data" is the title of a public lecture to be held on Thursday, October 2, 2014, at Göttingen University by Christine L. Borgman, Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) organises the lecture in cooperation with Göttingen eResearch Alliance (eRA). The lecture in English commences at 18:00 CET in the Historical Library Building at Papendiek 14. It will launch the "Göttingen Lectures on Academic Information Futures", a new lecture series organised by the SUB.

Bibliometrics, long the province of information science scholars, is attracting new devotees who wish to apply bibliometric principles to data citation. One reason for this development is the growth in data volume relative to storage and analytic capacities. Fields such as astronomy, physics, and genomics are producing more data than investigators can investigate themselves. By sharing and combining data from multiple sources, other researchers can ask new questions. Another factor is advances in the technical infrastructure for generating, managing, analyzing, and distributing data. Tools are more sophisticated, bandwidth capacity is greater, and transfer speeds continue to improve. Third, and by no means least, are associated shifts in research policy. Data are now viewed as significant research products in themselves, more than just adjuncts to publications. Funding agencies now expect investigators to capture, manage, and share their data. When viewed as research products, data deserve attribution similar to that of publications. Attribution, in turn, requires mechanisms for references to be made and citations to be received. Yet data are very different entities than publications. They take many more forms, both physical and digital, are far more malleable than publications, and practices vary immensely by individual, by research team, and by research area. Institutional practices to assure stewardship of data are far less mature than are practices to sustain access to publications. All of these factors contribute to the complexity of data citation and attribution. This talk is drawn from the forthcoming book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World, MIT Press, January, 2015.

Big data, data-intensive science, and eScience are contemporary terms to describe research fields that generate, manipulate, and manage large volumes of data. Astronomy was among the first data-intensive fields, hence many other domains wish to learn from the experience of astronomers. Their knowledge infrastructure – an ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects, and relationships – has accumulated over millennia. Over the last several decades, the practice of astronomy has transitioned from analog to digital technologies. In turn, the broad adoption of common tools, standards, and technologies has enabled astronomers to construct infrastructure components such as the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Center (CDS), the NASA Extragalactic Database (NED), the Virtual Observatory, and data archives for missions such as Chandra, Hubble, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. While far from complete or seamless, the knowledge infrastructure for astronomy provides more comprehensive access to scientific publications and data than do most other scientific domains. This talk is drawn from continuing research by the Knowledge Infrastructures project on scholarship in astronomy (Borgman, Sands, Golshan, Darch, & Traweek, in progress) and a forthcoming book (Borgman, 2015).

Workshop presented by ICIS: Innovating Communication In Scholarship. Keynote based on Dr. Borgman's recent publication "Big Data, Little Data, No Data; Scholarship in the Networked World."

Scholars are increasingly subject to pressures from funding bodies, disciplinary norms, professional and personal ethics, and institutional directives to share their research data and make it available for reuse. There is, however, a great deal of heterogeneity across the research enterprise with respect to what is meant by ‘data’ and ‘data sharing,’ why data sharing is deemed important, and what data management strategies are considered most effective. Moreover, data are often difficult and costly to produce and share. Therefore, many scholars view these as a significant product of their intellectual labor for which they should receive some sort of credit towards tenure and promotion, authorial recognition through citation, or financial compensation.

This workshop will address theoretical concerns and pragmatic solutions that can be harnessed to help researchers comply with requirements or desires to share their data in ways they deem appropriate for their goals.

American Association for the Advancement of Science 2015 Annual Meeting

The Plenaries are multi-day meetings held twice a year in various locations worldwide to provide the Research Data Alliance community an opportunity to network and collaborate with peers in various disciplines, and hear from industry experts and world leaders on topics related to research data sharing and exchange.

Inaugural Göttingen Lecture on Library Futures (English, Deutsch)

The enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges for stewardship. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. They are a lens to observe the rapidly changing landscape of scholarly work in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Inside the black box of data is a plethora of research, technology, and policy issues...

Plenary Speaker for iConference 2015

By celebrating the diversity of research data, their value and richness may be enhanced. However, that diversity poses challenges for preserving context, for stewardship, for exploiting data in collaborations across research domains, and for reuse over the short and long term.

STM Publishers Annual US Conference 2015

This talk explores the role of data in scholarly communication and the implications for STM publishing.

Berkman Center for Internet & Society Luncheon

This talk identifies some of the challenges faced by universities in managing and governing complex categories of data. Material is drawn from Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (Borgman, 2015, MIT Press) and the UCLA Data Governance Task Force (work in progress).

Seminar presentation, Digital Archiving and Networked Services

The DANS R&D colloquium is a meeting place for researchers, archivists and ICT specialists. Organized by DANS, its focus is on research data and what can be done with it.

In 2015-16, the CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation Standards and Practices is organising a series of workshops in participating countries. The objective is to promote the implementation of data citation principles in the research policy and funding communities throughout the world.

The goal of the workshop was to create a forum for direct interaction between the National Science Foundation large facilities and CI developer community – to explore evolving facility needs and approaches for CI, identify issues and solutions, exchange CI best practices and operational experience, and generate recommendations that can guide current and future NSF CI programs.

The University Committee on Academic Computing and Communications represents the University of California's Academic Senate in all matters involving the uses and impact of computing and communications technology.

The University Committee on Academic Computing and Communications represents the University of California's Academic Senate in all matters involving the uses and impact of computing and communications technology.

Data are essential to the process of scholarship, but remained largely invisible until the era of “big data.” The transition from process to product suggests that research data have become valuable objects in themselves to be captured, shared, reused, and sustained for the long term. Scientists, policy makers, governments, business, and the public alike now see great potential in reuse of research data. To reuse data requires that data creators are willing and able to share them. Therein lies the rub.

Data also have become contentious intellectual property to be protected, whether for proprietary, confidentiality, competition, or other reasons. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. Enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges for stewardship. Public policy leans toward open access to research data, but rarely with the public investment necessary to sustain access. This talk will explore the stakes and stakeholders in research data and implications for policy and practice.

Scholars in the humanities are unaccustomed to viewing their sources of evidence as data or to sharing and releasing those data as part of the publication process. Meanwhile, as more archival materials are digitized and as more cultural information is created in digital form, humanities scholars have turned to computational tools for analysis and interpretation. In turn, as the digital humanities adopt data-intensive methods, they often become subject to open access policies that governments, funding agencies, and publishers impose on science. The transition is an uneasy one for many scholars. This presentation centers on a case study of a Chinese Buddhist philologist whose scholarship employs evidence from material objects and digital resources to study the communication of Buddhist texts ca. 3rd to 5th century C.E. He was an early adopter of CBETA, a digital counterpart of the Taisho edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon. As CBETA expanded in scope and features over the course of a decade, it grew in value as a data source. Because these new tools are integrated into the knowledge infrastructure that serves his community, his scholarly products have become more portable across platforms, increasing the likelihood they will endure. However, these infrastructures remain fragile as they depend on invisible work to curate disparate content and technologies. Chinese texts, both ancient and modern, are particularly difficult to digitize and encode for scholarly analysis. Problems of open access, data management, curation, preservation, and sustainability loom large for the digital humanities. The Chinese scholarship case study is set in the broader context of data in scholarly communication, drawn from the presenter’s recent book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015).

Everybody talks about the weather but no one does anything about it. Similarly, everybody talks about open data, but few can do anything about it. “Open,” “data,” and “open data” each incorporate a plethora of concepts that vary by domain, context, and stakeholder. Scientists, software developers, librarians, data scientists, policy makers, and prospective data users often bring different conceptions to the discussion. The lack of agreement on meanings of “open data,” much less on the associated value, processes, and mechanisms, has stymied progress in practice and in policy. Rather than assuming that a single definition is possible or desirable, this panel session will compare approaches to open data across domains and across stakeholder perspectives. We bring together empirical studies of data practices in earth and geo-sciences, microbiology, biomedicine, astronomy, and climate modeling to explore questions about the value, risks, costs, benefits, behaviors, and processes associated with open data. Speakers are drawn from the Center for Knowledge Infrastructures at UCLA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), in Boulder, Colorado, and the Research Data Alliance (RDA). Each speaker will address a common set of questions, drawing upon research conducted at a distributed, multi-disciplinary site. These questions include:

· What perspective do you bring to open data in this domain? Creator, user, manager, observer, re-user, steward, policy maker, or other role?
· What are these data and how are they used in science?
· Who are the stakeholders in these data?
· What is the scale of these data, in terms of volume, complexity, temporality, rates of change, and other factors?
· What are the characteristics of data release in this community?
· What are the characteristics of data reuse in this community?
· What data are considered “open,” and how do notions of openness vary among the stakeholders in this community?

Christine Borgman, who directs the Center for Knowledge Infrastructures at UCLA, will present framing remarks and moderate the panel. Irene Pasquetto, UCLA, will report findings from FaceBase, an NIH-funded collaboration to share data in craniofacial research. She will discuss how perspectives on open data in this community vary between scientists, computer scientists developing a sharing hub, and potential users. Also from UCLA, Ashley Sands will report on SDSS and LSST, two major astronomy sky surveys, with respect to how openness has evolved over the course of several decades. From NCAR, Matthew Mayernik presents a data professional’s perspective on how openness is manifested in different meteorological and atmospheric data repositories. Mark Parsons, RDA, will discuss how arctic data services evolved over multiple decades within the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) as the array of stakeholders with interest in arctic data has expanded and uses of the data have become politically, as well as scientifically, contentious. After a 5-minute overview by Prof. Borgman, these five speakers will make 8 to 10-minute presentations, leaving 45 minutes for discussion with the audience.

Professor Christine Borgman, UCLA’s Presidential Chair in Information Studies, and a member of the Quello Center Advisory Board, will be giving a Quello Lecture on the 5th of October 2016 at MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences. Her latest book is entitled Big Data, Little Data, No Data, which I interviewed her about for Voices from Oxford (VOX). My VOX interview with Christine was done when we were both at Balliol College and is at: http://www.voicesfromoxford.org/video/data-in-the-digital-domain/228 The interview is brief, just over 15 minutes, but I hope it will give you a sense of the wide range of topics that Christine is likely to develop here at MSU.

Christine did her undergraduate degree here at MSU, and remains a loyal alum, and went on to a number of higher degrees, including a doctorate from Stanford in communication. You might notice the music introducing and concluding the video seems to accentuate our American accents, thanks to Sung Hee Kim, Director of VOX.

Infrastructures are not inherently durable or fragile, yet all are fragile over the long term. Durability requires care and maintenance of individual components and the links between them. Astronomy is an ideal domain in which to study knowledge infrastructures, due to its long history, transparency, and accumulation of observational data over a period of centuries. Research reported here draws upon a long-term study of scientific data practices to ask questions about the durability and fragility of infrastructures for data in astronomy. Methods include interviews, ethnography, and document analysis. As astronomy has become a digital science, the community has invested in shared instruments, data standards, digital archives, metadata and discovery services, and other relatively durable infrastructure components. Several features of data practices in astronomy contribute to the fragility of that infrastructure. These include different archiving practices between ground- and space-based missions, between sky surveys and investigator-led projects, and between observational and simulated data. Infrastructure components are tightly coupled, based on international agreements. However, the durability of these infrastructures relies on much invisible work – cataloging, metadata, and other labor conducted by information professionals. Continual investments in care and maintenance of the human and technical components of these infrastructures are necessary for sustainability.

Distinguished Lecture
Academia Sinica
While the popularity of “big data” reflects the growth of data-intensive research, “little data” remains the norm in those many fields where evidence is scarce and labor-intensive to acquire. Until recently, data was considered part of the process of scholarship, essential but largely invisible. In the “big data” era, data have become valuable products to be captured, shared, reused, and sustained for the long term. They also have become contentious intellectual property to be protected, whether for proprietary, confidentiality, competition, or other reasons. Public policy leans toward open access to research data, but rarely provides the public investment necessary to sustain access. Enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges for stewardship. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. Until the larger questions of knowledge infrastructures and sustainability are addressed by research communities, “no data” may become the norm for many fields. This talk will explore the stakes and stakeholders in research data and implications for policy and practice, drawn from the presenter’s recent book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015).

Christine L. Borgman, Ashley E. Sands, Milena S. Golshan
Keynote
KNOWeSCAPE 2017

As open access to research data becomes a requirement of funding agencies and journals, digital data archives are the preferred mechanisms for data sharing and reuse. While institutional policies support data sharing, surprisingly little is known about the uses and users of digital data archives, and about the relationships between users and the staff of data archives. Digital data archives, however, vary widely in organizational structure, mission, collection, funding, and relationships to their users and other stakeholders. We present a case study of DANS, the Data Archiving and Networked Services of the Netherlands, with the goal of analyzing the uses, users, policy, and practice of digital data archiving based on highly-distributed data collection, and the implications for data sharing and reuse.

Presented at the Astronomy Journal Club Meeting, UCLA Division of Astronomy & Astrophysics, UCLA Los Angeles, CA.

Christine Borgman, and Irene Pasquetto
Why Data sharing & Reuse Are Hard To Do Webinar
The BD2K Guide to the Fundamentals of Data Science Series

The Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative presents this virtual lecture series on the data science underlying modern biomedical research. In this webinar Dr. Borgman and Irene Pasquetto discuss how researchers are producing an unprecedented amount of data by using new methods and instrumentation. By accessing and reusing these data, scientists can answer complex research problems that need systemic approaches to knowledge discovery. However, research data are often not readily available, and even when data are shared, they cannot be reused outside their original context of production. Based on our studies of data practices in science, we compare data sharing and reuse challenges faced by researchers in life sciences, oceanography, astronomy, molecular biology, and genomics. Data sharing difficulties include determining what to release, when, in what format, and by what means. Data reuse challenges include determining what data could be reused, by whom (expertise required), with whom (collaborative environments), under what conditions (issues of data quality and curation), why (needs for data integration, control a nd comparison), and to what effects (types of analysis).

Gary and Judy Olson's Retirement Celebration

A celebration of the many contributions Judy and Gary have made to the Department of Informatics, UCI, and the research community at large.

Christine L. Borgman and David G. Kay
University of California Cyber Risk Governance Committee

The 10th Annual BCLT Privacy Lecture will be presented by Christine L. Borgman, Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Center for Knowledge Infrastructures. Prof. Borgman will explore the clash between two trends. One is for academic researchers to provide open access to their data in connection with grants and publications; the other is for universities to accumulate vast amounts of data about the activities of their communities.

Borgman is the author of more than 250 publications in information studies, computer science, and communication. Her most recent book is Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT, 2015).


Agenda:
Registration: 3:00 – 3:30 P.M.
Presentation: 3:30 – 5:30 P.M.
Reception: 5:30 – 6:30 P.M.

For questions, email [email protected].

While the popularity of “big data” reflects the growth of data-intensive research, “little data” remains the norm in those many fields where evidence is scarce and labor-intensive to acquire. Until recently, data was considered part of the process of scholarship, essential but largely invisible. In the “big data” era, data have become valuable products to be captured, shared, reused, and stewarded for the long term. They also have become contentious intellectual property to be protected. Public policy leans toward open access to research data, but rarely provides the public investment necessary to sustain access. Enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges for stewardship. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. Until the larger questions of knowledge infrastructures and stewardship are addressed by research communities, “no data” may become the norm for many fields. This talk will explore the stakes and stakeholders in research data and implications for policy and practice, drawn from the presenter’s recent book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015).

University of California Information Technology Leadership Council

MIT will host a working summit on the Grand Challenges in Information Science and Scholarly Communication March 19-23, 2018. Inviting experts from across disciplines and sectors, the summit aims to identify critical problems in information science that are solvable within 10 years and which have broad implications across the scholarly community.

Three consecutive 1.5-day workshops will produce draft research agendas in the areas of:

- Scholarly discovery
- Digital curation and preservation
- Open scholarship

Pufendorf Institute, Data Theme Seminar Series

While the popularity of “big data” reflects the growth of data-intensive research, “little data” remains the norm in those many fields where evidence is scarce and labor-intensive to acquire. Until recently, data was considered part of the process of scholarship, essential but largely invisible. In the “big data” era, data have become valuable products to be captured, shared, reused, and stewarded for the long term. They also have become contentious intellectual property to be protected. Public policy leans toward open access to research data, but rarely provides the public investment necessary to sustain access. Enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges for stewardship. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. As the number and variety of research partners expands, so do the difficulties of sharing, reusing, and sustaining access to data. Until the larger questions of knowledge infrastructures and stewardship are addressed by research communities, “no data” may become the norm for many fields. This talk will explore the stakes and stakeholders in research data, in interdisciplinary research, and implications for policy and practice, drawing upon the presenter’s book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015), and subsequent research.

Christine L. Borgman, Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA, is the author of more than 250 publications in information studies, computer science, and communication. These include three books from MIT Press: Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (2015), winner of the 2015 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in Computing and Information Sciences; Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (2007); and From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (2000). The latter two books won the Best Information Science Book of the Year award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery. At UCLA, she directs the Center for Knowledge

The Pufendorf IAS Symposium on Interdisciplinarity

Drawing on 20 years of studying data practices in the physical sciences, life sciences, medicine, engineering, and technology, this talk will address the question of “How is ‘interdisciplinary’ done?” by presenting several case examples. One scenario from the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing will illustrate how one research team’s evidentiary signal may be noise to another team with whom they are collaborating. A scenario from the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Informatics will illustrate how methods decisions made early in the data collection process determine how and whether other disciplines can make use of physical specimens later. The third scenario, drawn from astronomy, will demonstrate how data taken from a single instrument can diverge in form and evidentiary value when processed by scientists in multiple sub-disciplines of the field. While data sharing and reuse are concerns in all of these fields, concepts of data “use” differ widely.

Christine L. Borgman, Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA, is the author of more than 250 publications in information studies, computer science, and communication. These include three books from MIT Press: Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (2015), winner of the 2015 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in Computing and Information Sciences; Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (2007); and From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (2000). The latter two books won the Best Information Science Book of the Year award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery. At UCLA, she directs the Center for Knowledge Infrastructures with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and other sources.

5:30PM Reception
6:30PM Dinner

Keynote address presented by
Su Kim Chung MLS '98, PhD 2015,
Head, Special Collections Public Services
University of Nevada Las Vegas

Presenting the 2018 Distinguished Alumni Award to
Miki Goral MLS '67

and the 2018 Distinguished Service Award to
Christine L. Borgman, Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA

For more information about department and alumni events, please contact [email protected]