Back in DC

After a lovely, not-so-warm-but-dry summer is San Francisco, I've returned to DC. Couldn't be happier. I'll be teaching Infrastructure Studies and the Intro to STS this fall.

Tenure Line Position - Technology Studies

The Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) M.A. program at Georgetown University focuses on the ways that new technologies of communication and digital media are reshaping human experience on all levels from the local to the global, and how these technologies are redefining the practice of science, research, education, government, media, business, and culture and the arts more broadly. The CCT Program is now redefining its emphasis on technology and technology studies, including developing a new lab, which will be a hub of technology knowledge, discovery, and research, connecting CCT and Georgetown to the larger world of practice and innovation in all sectors.

The new lab will provide a means for CCT to create partnerships with leading private sector information organizations developing innovations in digital media, knowledge management, and Internet applications; to remain at the forefront of research by creating relationships with initiatives in the Digital Humanities and the Information Schools; and push forward the boundaries of knowledge through external support by agencies and foundations such as NSF and Mellon.

As a major step toward accomplishing this larger mission for CCT, the program seeks to appoint a tenure-track Assistant Professor with a solid knowledge of the key technologies in the post-Internet and digital media environment, and with interdisciplinary expertise in the study of technology, including history, theory, and current methodologies. Applicants must be proficient in teaching the technical aspects of how technologies work and how such technologies are employed in communication-related fields. The appointee will be expected to help teach a new Fundamentals of Technology course, a core course in the CCT curriculum, with a focus on the practicum component.

Georgetown University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer and strongly encourages applications from women and minority candidates as part of its commitment to professional excellence and diversity. Please send application letter/statement of interest, c.v., and the names of three referees to cctjobs@georgetown.edu by 15 September 2011.

Three tenure-line positions at CCT-Georgetown

Below are calls for three tenure-line positions in my program at Georgetown University: Technology Studies, Cultural History, Language and Technology. All three could be relevant for an STS/CSCW/HCI or iSchool scholar (or a cousin thereof), but in particular the technology studies position is geared for those specialties. There is also a 'professor of the practice' or clinical professor position for a technologist who is interested in pushing forward our multi-media & social computing lab.

Link to details.

Special Issue: Cyberinfrastructure & eResearch

Our special issue on Sociotechnical Studies of Cyberinfrastructure is now available through Online First at JCSCW, including an introductory article by yours truly. The editors ofthe special issue are Charlotte P. Lee, David Ribes, Matthew J. Bietz, Marina Jirotka and Helena Karasti. I'll keep you posted for when this appears in print. Link to journal  pre-prints below.

Sociotechnical Studies of Cyberinfrastructure and e-Research: Current Themes and Future Trajectories

David Ribes and Charlotte P. Lee

Synergizing in Cyberinfrastructure Development

Matthew J. Bietz, Eric P. S. Baumer and Charlotte P. Lee

The Dialectical Tensions in the Funding Infrastructure of Cyberinfrastructure

Kerk F. Kee and Larry D. Browning

Reconfiguring Evidence: Interacting with Digital Objects in Scientific Practice

Marko Monteiro

Reusing Scientific Data: How Earthquake Engineering Researchers Assess the Reusability of Colleagues’ Data

Ixchel M. Faniel and Trond E. Jacobsen

Infrastructure Time: Long-term Matters in Collaborative Development

Helena Karasti, Karen S. Baker and Florence Millerand

Invitation to a Workshop on Studies of Sociotechnical Systems

We invite participation in the second iConference Workshop on Sociotechnical systems, to be held prior to the iConference on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign on February 3, 2010.  To see “who we are”, check out the facebook group – “Researchers of the Sociotechnical” or our website at http://www.sociotech.net . You may register here: https://www.ischools.org/conftool/

Workshop: “Keywords of the Sociotechnical”
Organizers: Steven Jackson, University of Michigan;  David Ribes, Georgetown University; Sean Goggins, Drexel University

In 1975 British cultural historian Raymond Williams published his influential pocket dictionary /Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society/. The text tackled the most difficult, contested and often underexplored terms in his field: culture, agency, technology, etc.  Today studies of sociotechnical systems finds itself at a place not unlike where British Cultural Studies was in the early 70s: a meeting place for scholars of multiple disciplinary backgrounds deploying concepts and tools whose commonality (and separateness) of meaning has yet to be fully established.

What are the words that transcend the sectional interests of, say, organizational science and HCI,  CSCW and science and technology studies?  When an HCI researcher and a social informatics scholar say ‘system’ or ‘design,’ are they really talking about the same thing?  Relatedly, how do we go about attaching these keywords to concrete socio-technical research problems in our diverse disciplinary traditions?  How do we go about transforming a cross-field coincidence of research objects (Wikipedia, eScience, social practices in pervasive computing spaces, and countless others) into a mutually informed set of research problems?

This workshop will provide a venue to gather and discuss our intellectual traditions, research objects, and vocabularies in order to elaborate and clarify the keywords of the sociotechnical.

Studying Sociotechnical Systems

The workshop builds on and extends efforts that have included the 2008 & 2009 Summer Research Institute of the Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems (CSST).  These Research Institutes, supported by the National Science Foundation and held at the University of Michigan (2008) and Syracuse University (2009), brought together a diverse set of researchers from fields as diverse as science and technology studies, human-computer interaction, management and organizational studies, library and information science, sociology, social informatics, and computer science, to begin exploring and framing a future research agenda centered on socio-technical research.