Data Integration as Coordination: The Articulation of Data Work in an Ocean Science Collaboration

Recent CSCW research on the collaborative design and development of research infrastructures for the natural sciences has increasingly focused on the challenges of open data sharing. This qualitative study describes and analyzes how multidisciplinary, geographically distributed ocean scientists are integrating highly diverse data as part of an effort to develop a new research infrastructure to advance science. This paper identifies different kinds of coordination that are necessary to align processes of data collection, production, and analysis. Some of the hard work to integrate data is undertaken before data integration can even become a technical problem. After data integration becomes a technical problem, social and organizational means continue to be critical for resolving differences in assumptions, methods, practices, and priorities. This work calls attention to the diversity of coordinative, social, and organizational practices and concerns that are needed to integrate data and also how, in highly innovative work, the process of integrating data also helps to define scientific problem spaces themselves.