The NSF has supported early forms of scientific cyberinfrastructure from the 1960s. Since about 2000, however, new cyberinfrastructure (CI) initiatives have gathered momentum, guided by an increasingly comprehensive vision of CI as a principal agent of change for a new era of large-scale, distributed, data-intensive, collaborative science in virtually every domain. EarthCube, as a large-scale international CI project provides a fertile ground for the observation of the negotiation and policy work necessary to facilitate distant collaboration and the accumulation, provision and sharing of scientific knowledge and resources (data, tools, models). As a collaborative design process drawing from both the policy and scientific worlds, EarthCube is a site where the complex relationships and negotiations between governance and particular visions of novel science are particularly evident as well as being a microcosm of the co-constructive processes that produce relevant knowledge for both policy and science. This writing explores the relationship of policy work and the production of scientific knowledge, and provides an account of the complex interactions between regulatory, legislative, and organizational work with knowledge production practices in the geosciences through the lens of research funding and cyberinfrastructure development both historically and ethnographically.

The Eighth European Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference (ECSCW 2003), a biannual forum that brings together the social and technical aspects for supporting collaborations, provides a venue this year to gather researchers interested in the study of scientific collaborations and their technology support. The response to the call for papers for the Computer Supported Scientific Collaboration workshop (CSSC) is evidence of the CSCW community members shared interest in the elements of collaboration particular to scientific communities and in the challenges they present for designing computer-based support systems. Like the Three Smiths of Nylund's statue in Helsinki, we three organizers came together to work jointly at crafting an understanding of a scientific network, the Long-Term Ecological Research program. Having hammered out a workshop agenda, we welcome the CSSC participants. Through the position papers collected here and with our diverse case studies, from ecological teams and human genes to digital streams, we add shape to the characterization of CSSC.

The human is transforming; the human is being transformed. This dissertation approaches the transformation of the human via the lenses of phenomenology, historiography, and media and critical theory, in order to identify the ontological status of the human transformed. It addresses and theorizes: (1) the transitional status of the human as subject-object chimera in terms of the emerging category of things that populate the Internet of Things (IoT); (2) the historiographical and epistemological assumptions of a post-IoT archive and their impacts on what it will mean to say, ‘I am human.’ Through the realization of the future-oriented imaginary of IoT, the human will know itself as a construction of objectivist reductionism: they will become objects.

1. Things are a gathering. The transformation of the human will occur, in part, as a result of a reconstellation of the subjects and objects that gather to produce things in the IoT: an n-adic mode of thinging. The evidenced reconstellation and expansion of the subject-object dyad that comprises the thing implies an ontological shift: the membrane that once separated the biune categories of subject and object expands to create a liminal space in which subject-object chimeras emerge. The biune becomes triune. The result is a human that knows itself as a subjectivity through the reductionist dissociation of objectivist, data-driven information extraction.

2. The rise of the subject-object chimera implies an archival duplication; it evidences widespread discursive transformation such as one might expect at the emergence of a new historical a priori condition, a new era. This duplication shines further, materialist light on the emergence of what Bowker referred to as the Age of Potential Memory. Through duplication—wherein the liminal space that divides becomes a phenomenological space unto itself in which the human resides between two archives—traditional dichotomies of subjects and objects, extensions and prostheses, humans and posthumans, come into question. Through reverse anthropomorphosis, the human will come to know itself, post hoc, as a subject only through the reflection provided by the objects with which they couple to produce things.

In this thesis, I expand on the concept of algorithmic authority, a concept that I introduced in earlier work to understand the role of algorithms in daily life. Algorithmic authority is the legitimate power of algorithms to direct human action and to impact which information is considered true. In contrast to much other work on algorithms in sociotechnical systems, I argue for more precise use of the word “algorithm”, as well as for the importance of studying algorithmic systems that do consist of “black box algorithms”. Through a study of the users of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, I explore what it means to trust in algorithmic authority in an open source, decentralized system and contrast it with the authority of centralized and corporate software. My study utilizes data from my survey, interviews, and observation of the broader Bitcoin community. I examine the tensions between members of the Bitcoin community who would prefer to integrate Bitcoin into institutions and those that saw it as a radical use of algorithmic authority. I describe how my participants preferred algorithmic authority to the authority of conventional institutions that they saw as untrustworthy. However, they acknowledged the need for mediating algorithmic authority with human judgment. I examine these tensions between how they would like Bitcoin to be used and how it is being used, and what those tensions can tell us about algorithmic authority. Lastly, I suggest future research directions for examining a wider range of algorithms and better understanding the Bitcoin community.