“The emergence of spatial cyber infrastructure” by Wright and Wang explores how cyberinfrastructures (spatial or otherwise) has contributed to the advancement of scientific enquiries.
After reading this article, I still can’t imagine what a cyberinfrastructure would look like. Is it just a really big database?
Reading the article made me wonder what characteristics make a CI good and effective, and how design of the CI shapes what can be done with the data it stores?
In the beginning of the semester, we discussed how different understandings or definition of a given ‘thing’ affects how store information about it. We talked about how a hydrologist would define a river vs how the Cree community sees a river (which would include the bank as well as the flowing water (if I remember correctly)). How would you account for this difference in a CI?
CIs have been essential to collaborative research, however more work is needed to understand how the conceptual and cultural assumptions a CI embeds affects (or not) research.
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