Putting the Lab in the Lab Book: Supporting Coordination in Large, Multi-site Research

Large and distributed science projects present researchers with a challenging environment for interaction and collaboration. While digital technologies offer promises in supporting these difficulties, researchers appear reluctant to discontinue their use of analogue resources. We present a study of communication practices in very large-scale collaborative scientific research programmes that involve multidisciplinary and multinational research consortia. Qualitative data collection with researchers, principal investigators and project coordinators were carried out to examine the conduct and coordination of biological, biomedical and chemistry experiments that were distributed over multiple geographical locations. Results show that many problems in collaboration appear to result from the collective documentation of experimental operating procedures, tracking of experimental samples, and the sharing and cross-association of physical and digital experimental materials. Our analysis highlights the crucial but problematic role of the laboratory notebook as a driver for collaboration, most notably in supporting traceability of the distributed experimental process. We identify opportunities for improving experimental coordination, scientific communication and project synchronisation, drawing implications for digital interaction design that offers opportunities to enhance research coordination

Distributed scientific group collaboration across biocontainment barriers

This paper reports the findings from a field study of distributed scientific collaboration within a national animal health laboratory. Collaboration in this setting is challenged by the need for biosecurity - there are physical containment barriers between scientists and work groups and movement of people and other physical objects across the barriers requires extensive security procedures. The aim of the field study was to understand how the scientists communicate across the barriers, particularly how they share information and collaborate on its analysis. The findings reveal that the collaboration issues relate not just to the challenges caused by the containment barriers but also to the need for collaboration support between the scientists and their work groups irrespective of the barriers. The paper explains how these findings informed the design of the collaboration platform being installed and how more generic requirements of supporting collaboration over distance were configured and extended to meet the specific requirements of a very particular local setting. © 2012 ACM

Intensely distributed nanoscience: co-ordinating scientific work in a large multi-sited cross-disciplinary nanomedical project

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThis thesis is concerned with the study of biomedical scientific research work that is intensely distributed, i.e. socially distributed across multiple institutions, sites, and disciplines. Specifically, this PhD probes the ways in which scientists co-operating on multi-sited crossdisciplinary projects, design, use and maintain information-based resources to conduct and coordinate their experimental activities. The research focuses on the roles of information artefacts, i.e. the tools, media and devices used to store, track, display, and retrieve information in paper or electronic format, in helping the scientists integrate their activities to achieve concerted action. To examine how scientists in globally distributed settings organise and co-ordinate their scientific work using information artefacts, a multi-method multi-sited study informed by different ethnographic perspectives was conducted focused on a large European crossdisciplinary translational research project in nanodiagnostics. Situated interviews with project scientists, participant observations and participatory learning exercises were designed and deployed. From the data analysis, several abstractions were developed to represent how the joined utilisations of key information artefacts support the co-ordination of experimental activities. Subsequently, a framework was developed to highlight key interactional strategies that need to be managed by experimenters when using artefacts to organise their work cooperatively. This framework was then used as a guiding device to identify innovative ways to design future digital interactive systems to support the co-ordination of intensely distributed scientific work. From this study, several key findings came to light. We identify the role of the experimental protocol acts as a co-ordinative map that is co-designed dynamically to disseminate various instantiations of experimental executions across sites. We have also shed light on the ways the protocol, the lab book and the material log are used jointly to support the articulation of scientific work. The protocol and the lab book are used both locally and across co-operating sites to support four repeatability and reproducibility levels that are key to experimental validation. The use of the local protocol / lab book dyads at each site is further integrated with that of a centralised material log artefact to enable a system of exchange of scientific content (e.g. experimental processes, intermediate results and observations) and experimental materials (both physical materials and key information). We have found that this integration into a co-ordinative cluster supports awareness and the articulation of experimental activities both locally and across remote labs. From this understanding, we have derived several sensitising tensions to frame the strategies that scientific practitioners need to manage when designing their multi-sited experimental work and technologists should consider when designing systems to support them: (1) formalisation / flexibility; (2) articulability / local appropriateness; (3) scrutiny / tinkering; (4) accountability / applicability; (5) traceability / improvisation and (6) lastingness / immediacy. Lastly, based on these tensions, we have suggested a number of implications for the design of interactive information artefacts that can help manage both local and multi-sited co-ordination in intensely distributed scientific projects