Exploring Collaborative Rhythm: Temporal Flow and Alignment in Collaborative Scientific Work

Recent 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 offers a typology of collaborative rhythms and argues for the importance of temporal alignment as a neglected but crucial element underpinning distributed collective practice in the sciences (and we believe other spheres of distributed collective activity). Specifically, we argue that joint scientific work is organized around four separate and potentially dissonant temporal registers, or ‘rhythms ’ – phenomenal, organizational, biographical, and infrastructural – and that efforts to align such rhythms constitute an important and under-recognized aspect of collaborative work. The ideas and examples are drawn from the authors ’ own field studies around IT infrastructure (‘cyberinfrastructure’) and collaborative practices across a range of scientific fields