We have all been very busy over the last three months! We have focused on transcribing and coding the interviews we held with members of teams of scientists using the Mag Lab facilities. Our graduate and undergraduate interns and research assistants have been transcribing the interviews and typing up any notes they took. Along with PI Kathy Burnett and co-PIs Gary Burnett and Michelle Kazmer, they have been coding the transcripts based on our theoretical framework, drawing upon the theory of information worlds, lifecycles concepts, and scientific collaboration research. Kathy, Gary, and Michelle are then entering these codes into NVivo qualitative analysis software for further derivation of qualitative findings from our interviews. We hope to submit a paper for publication, reporting on these findings, sometime next year. We do have a few more interviews still to take place, so we both greatly thank those who already participated and hope those of you we contact shortly will be willing to help us out and contribute to our study!
We have finished our observations of Mag Lab scientists, staff, and visitors, and coding of these is now also complete; analysis continues. A poster reporting preliminary findings from our observations has been accepted to the 2012 iConference in Toronto, Canada this coming February, and we will post it to this site once the conference is over. Our continuing, in-depth analysis of these findings in context of information worlds and lifecycles is being worked into a paper, led (as our observations were) by co-PI Paul Marty and graduate research assistant Adam Worrall, which we will be submitting to an interdisciplinary journal within the next three months. We are also continuing to work on revisions to our paper reporting quantitative findings on the quality and impact of Mag Lab publications and the relationship between seniority, affiliation, and impact. Senior personnel Chris Hinnant, lead author on this paper, will submit our revisions to the journal shortly.
We obtained a six month no-cost extension from the NSF for our current project, which we will be putting towards finishing our coding and analysis of interviews. We are also working on two new grant proposals (one to NSF, one to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, IMLS) to allow us to continue our research and explore further the relationship between team lifecycles (the focus of the current project) and data lifecycles. A second poster reporting on exploratory, preliminary interviews on the lifecycle and quality of data at the Mag Lab—conducted by co-PI Besiki Stvilia, senior personnel Chris Hinnant, and graduate research assistant Shuheng Wu—was also accepted to the 2012 iConference. We hope to expand upon this work if our new grant proposals are accepted.
Finally, we would like to thank all of our undergraduate and graduate interns who have helped us with our project during the last 16 months: Ryan Huff, Jessica Roberts, Aprille Case, Wilhelmina Randtke, Lauren Lachowsky, Andrea Haranki, and Brian Knop. Without their help we would not have been able to complete our observations, interviews, and coding and analysis. We’d also like to thank the Mag Lab scientists, staff, and users who allowed us to observe their experiments in progress and interview them about their work. We believe we have many interesting findings and look forward to sharing them here. We hope everyone had a happy and healthy holiday season and wish you a great beginning to the new year!