Social Scientists and Cyberinfrastructure: Insights from a Document Perspective

Contemporary cyberinfrastructure (CI) efforts are most often directed to meeting the needs of physical and natural scientists. We wonder: might the CI needs of social scientists be different? To provide insight into this question we report on a pilot study of social scientist’s distributed and collaborative work practices. To frame this study we drew from the literatures of science studies and e-science and followed a mixed-methodological research design. Findings suggest focusing on documenting practices provides novel insights into the distributed work practices and the CI uses of social scientists. Author Keywords Cyberinfrastructure, social scientists, work practices