Technical Work

Two papers on CSCW

I've posted two papers on computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), which can be downloaded from the "Working papers and reprints" list in the left-hand column. The first paper, Reach, bracket and the limits of rationalized coordination was prepared for a forthcoming volume on Resources, Co-Evolution, and Artifacts: Theory in CSCW, edited by Mark S. Ackerman, Christine Halverson, Thomas Erickson, and Wendy A. Kellogg. The second paper, The organization of reconciliation in distributed work, is for a workshop on Distributed Collective Practices to be held at the ACM's CSCW conference in Chicago on November 6. The "Reconciliation" paper is an elaboration of some points made in the "Reach, bracket" paper.``

"Reach, bracket" is a theoretical paper concerned with coordinating tasks in highly distributed work. This problem has been gaining increasing importance as the development of information technology has made it common to cooperate across organizational, territorial, cultural, and other boundaries. The paper argues that we need to distinguish between problems of coordination across different circumstances, and problems of coordination in each set of local circumstances. The first class of coordination problems is largely, but not entirely, accomplished through the use of abstract standards (protocols); the second is accomplished by customizing arrangements and by reconciling incommensurable requirements.

How are such requirements reconciled? Often, there is a common system of arrangements which can impose a solution; for example, a dispute within a firm can be resolved by a management policy decision. But what happens when there is no centralized means for making and enforcing such decisions? The second paper (summarizing and extending a section of the first) discusses several different organizational mechanisms for reconciling differences in the absence of a centralized mechanism: exactly the situation that arises when there are disagreements in a task that cuts across organizational, territorial (i.e., legal and political) and cultural boundaries.

A paper on Evo-Devo

I've posted a draft paper on the intersection of evolutionary and developmental biology (called "Evo-Devo"), which can be downloaded by clicking on the title in the list on the left. This is from a workshop last year at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA. It's a lovely place, and the workshop was very productive and a lot of fun.

The workshop grew out of a session the year before at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA., which is one of the finer ornaments of civilization.

The papers from the workshop are going to be published in a book edited by Jane Maienschein and Manfred Laubichler of Arizona State, who also organized the workshop, gave papers, and made everything work right.

The paper sketches a major thread in a complicated argument I'm trying to make about the ways in which institutional arrangements influence the intellectual content of research. It focuses Evo-Devo, which is the most interesting and exciting area of research in biology today.

Obligations among specialties (cont.)

I said in my post about burden of proof (last post, 3 August), that many of the relations among specialties can be seen as a network of settled obligations. At the same, unsettled relations among lines of research can often be seen as disputes about what obligations one specialty has toward the concepts, theories, and methods of another.

Many of the obligations among specialties are quite clear and solid. For example, research in many areas presupposes much of modern physics conceptually, theoretically, and procedurally, via embedding in instruments. It's easy to think up a chain of these dependencies: chemistry is obligated to physics, molecular biology is obligated to chemistry, cell biology is obligated to molecular biology, development is obligated to cell biology, and so on, so that we eventually wind up noticing, e.g., that Da Vinci's Last Supper (1498) is obligated to the physics of sub-atomic particles.

Burden of proof in scientific work

Lawrence Solum's recent elegant posting on burden of proof helps to clarify a related problem in understanding the relationships among scientific disciplines. Our model for thinking about burden of proof is, of course, the criminal trial and the rules of procedure which have grown up around it. But scientific research also involves extensive burden-of-proof considerations, for claims to discovery are subject to a similar kind of public scrutiny, complete with versions of cross-examination and rebuttal. Indeed, the historian Barbara Shapiro argues that scientific notions of fact-establishment are modeled on the legal procedures of the early modern period.

Here, I want to look at the way that distributing the burden of proof in scientific research acts to organize the relationship among specialties.