Kristin Eschenfelder and Greg Downey are finishing their four year Sloan funded exploration of the long-term sustainability challenges of science data infrastructures in the social sciences with co-PI Kalpana Shankar from UC Dublin. They visited with and gathered historical organizational documents from ICPSR at University of Michigan, the Roper Center for Public Opinion, now at Cornell, the UK Data Archive (part of the UK Data Service) at University of Essex and the LIS Cross National Data Center in Luxembourg and NYU. They will be writing up results focusing on themes including (a) how information infrastructure organizations change themselves over time in order to remain relevant and functional (b) the evolution of “open” data and access and use controls to manage data sharing from 1960 to today (c) and the hidden labor of data infrastructures and the roles of people, their social networks, and professional organizations as infrastructure supporting science.
Kristin Eschenfelder is a Professor of The Information School at the University of Wiconsin-Madison. Kristin is also a member of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies.
