Abstract
My article examined the emergence and adoption of cyberinfrastructure, a platform that enables big science with big data. During the research, I faced two challenges. First, the participants came from different stakeholder groups, such as lead users, developers, administrators, policy makers, and social scientists working in the cyberinfrastructure community. Their varying perspectives and motivations made generating a coherent narrative difficult. Second, there was a paradox that while the community was full of conflicting tensions, large-scale funding continued pouring into the infrastructure. The mystery that begged a deeper explanation was how a community full of tensions could move a national infrastructure forward so successfully. Then I recalled a metaphor from my notes during Q-Camp 2009: “Writing up an article is like making a stained glass window—it is okay to deconstruct and reconstruct to give the best story.” Given this, I started analyzing transcripts from diverse participants from different professional backgrounds across 17 US states, juxtaposed with existing literature, in order to develop an explanation that was not obvious. The result was an unexpected insight that emerged; instead of trying to resolve the conflicting tensions, recognize that the tensions were the productive forces behind cyberinfrastructure emergence.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Atkins, D. E., Droegemeier, K. K., Feldman, S. I., Garcia-Molina, H., Klein, M. L., Messerschmitt, D. G., & Wright, M. (2003). Revolutionizing science and engineering through cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure [Online]. Accessed Dec 19, 2006, from: http://www.communitytechnology.org/nsf_ci_report/
Fairhurst, G. T. (2001). Dualisms in leadership research. In F. M. Jablin & L. L. Putnam (Eds.), The new handbook of organizational communication (pp. 379–439). Sage.
Gibbs, J. (2009). Dialectics in a global software team: Negotiating tensions across time, space, and culture. Human Relations, 62(6), 905–935.
Kee, K. F. (2017). The ten adoption drivers of open source software that enables e-research in data factories for open innovations. In S. Matei, N. Jullien, & S. Goggins (Eds.), Big data factories: Computational social sciences (pp. 51–65). Springer.
Kee, K. F., & Browning, L. D. (2010). The dialectical tensions in the funding infrastructure of cyberinfrastructure. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 19(3-4), 283–308.
Meyer, E. T., & Schroeder, R. (2015). Knowledge machines: Digital transformations of the sciences and humanities. MIT Press.
Putnam, L. L. (2004). Dialectical tensions and rhetorical tropes in negotiations. Organization Studies, 25(1), 35–53.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kee, K.F. (2023). Moving Qualitative Data from Little Pieces of Colored Glass to an Elegant Stained-Glass Window. In: Soelberg, F., Browning, L.D., Sørnes, JO., Lindberg, F. (eds) Transformative Learning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20439-5_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20439-5_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-20438-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-20439-5
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)