Timescapes of ocean data: temporal dimensions of oceanographers’ data management practices

Abstract: One enduring challenge common across all scientific fields is that of managing research data and ensuring that access to research data is possible over long time periods. Access to research data has been argued to improve scientific practice and create economic value. However, it is hypothesized that such benefits can only be reaped if research data are managed. Over the last decade, data management plan (DMP) mandates have been introduced by funding agencies, such as National Science Foundation (NSF), as a means for ensuring that research data is available and accessible beyond the lifetime of their individual research projects. Despite its important role, DMPs are not thought of highly by the principal investigators who author them, they are not the primary criteria by which a grant proposal is evaluated against and are not strictly enforced by funders who require them. A decade after its introduction, researchers have a greater understanding of what a DMP is. However, it is not clear what it is that DMPs do. By extension, we have yet to understand what the impacts of the NSF’s broader science data policy are and how, if at all, the DMP mandate has affected researchers’ data practices and workflows since it has been in effect. In order to address this gap we need to explore the temporal dimensions of data management practices. This will enable us to examine the relationship between the ways that data management is articulated in the policy and the ways they are performed in practice. For my dissertation research, I propose an empirical qualitative study of ocean data practices to highlight the impact of the NSF’s DMP policy mandate on oceanography PIs. I will focus on a broad range of these types of temporal dimensions of oceanographers’ data practices. Through document analysis of DMPs, interviews with oceanographers, and observations of an oceanography research group I will construct what sociologists have referred to as a “timescape” of scientific data practices. By surfacing the spectrum of temporal dimensions of researcher’s experiences and data practices through the creation of ocean data timescapes, I trouble the framing of specific modes of data sharing and preservation, like archiving data locally on hard drives or sharing data through a personal website, as “bad.” I will explore the ways that the NSF’s data policy has introduced time standards for data access in oceanography. In doing so, I hope to explore the possibility that “bad practices” are, in part, the result of a misalignment between the timeframes for data access articulated by the DMP policy mandate and the work that researchers are required to do to make ocean data accessible and that this misalignment is a form of “torque”.

Supervisory Committee

Co-Chair: Megan Finn, Associate Professor, Information School
Co-Chair: Jaime Snyder, Associate Professor, Information School
GSR: Katy Pearce, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, College of Arts & Sciences
Member: Ricardo Gomez, Associate Professor, Information School