Document Practice as Insight to Digital Infrastructures of Distributed, Collaborative Social Scientists

Abstract

The objective of this study is to understand scholarly research practice in virtual, distributed collaborations by focusing on the flow of documents among the participants and to advance design guidance for supporting improved document practice across distributed collaborative platforms. To do so, we develop a theoretical framework on document practice highlighting the sociotechnical role of documents in digital infrastructure. This mixed-methods study will first conduct semi-structured interviews to understand document practices. The second phase of the study will collect trace data of documents as a way to understand how they change over time. In this poster, we report on the analysis of twelve interviews from social scientists working in virtual collaborations. Initial findings show that social scientists organize their documents and scholarly work on emergent digital infrastructures. Although not ideal, emergent digital infrastructures provide stability for collaboration across time and space.