Sharon Traweek: Meshworks and Faultlines in Data Practices

Föreläsning

Sharon Traweek ger ett seminarium över ämnet: Meshworks and Faultlines in Data Practices på fredag 2 november.

In a joint arrangement between the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, and the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg, we welcome you all to a seminar by Sharon Traweek this Friday, November 2nd.

Traweek, associate professor in the History Department at UCLA, gained great recognition some 25 years ago with her seminal work Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (1988). Continuously with a concern for questions of gender, ethnicity and culture, she has recently turned her empirical focus to data-intensive research and how so called Large Data Sets (LDS), often within astronomy, investigating what happens when such data interacts with scientific practices.

Title
Meshworks and Faultlines in Data Practices

Abstract
Many claim data-intensive science is changing the meaning of experimental and theoretical research. Processes for data design, collection, calibration, classification, analysis, access, and archiving are now perpetual and often not in that order. Dis/organizing the data into tidy bundles is constant. Who is mingling with data and how? How do they reason with data? Does scale matter? I argue that gender, ethnicity, nationality, careers, and collaboration strategies are imploded in those data practices and their changing infrastructures. Meshworks and faultlines are key concepts for understanding these implosions. This analysis is based upon an NSF-funded collaborative study of those working on large-scale databases in astronomy.