[Air-l] Distributed Research labs - any examples/links ?

[Charlie Hendricksen]

Professor Lund,

    My doctoral dissertation, "The Research Web: Asynchronous
Collaboration in Social Scientific Research" studied four research
groups collaborating in research using the WWW as the medium of
collaboration.  Only one of the four could be considered a success,
but of course doctoral candidates do not have the resources to direct
large-scale research programs.  Failure was always due to social
reasons, never technological.  The principles of the Research Web seem
sound, after all they were the basis of a doctoral dissertation.

    In the Research Web the emphasis on interaction is asynchronous,
because the research team is assumed to be distributed in space and
thus time zones.  The dialog of the group is document-centered and is
mediated by a tool that allows annotation of every document.  The
annotations are directed to small segments of the document, typically
paragraphs and list elements.  All the tools are WWW-based so the user
needs only e-mail and a browser to be fully equipped.  The Research
Web should have a facilitator to remove the technical minutiae from
the research team -- There should be no requirement for the researcher
to become distracted by irrelevant.

    Research Webs are focused on collaboration, not technology.  All
design is directed toward the facilitation of collaboration rather
than the building of vast programs that amaze all users with the
virtuosity of the programmers.  The scope of each Research Web is
defined by its "issue domain," a research topic that is large enough
to attract interest from several investigators, yet small enough so
every subtonic is interdependent.  So each Research Web is home to a
single team rather than a collaboratory open to everyone.

    Should you care to see the dissertation, go to
http://students.washington.edu/veritas/diss/diss.html , for the
abstract see http://students.washington.edu/veritas/diss/diss.html . 
I am of course available for further dialog!
    

Niels Windfeld Lund wrote:
> 
> Hello
> 
> At our department of Documentation Studies at the University of
> Tromsoe (the northernmost university in the world) we are working
> with the idea of making a distributed research lab, called The
> Document Academy, by linking a number of groups/departments/people
> from different places together with the aim of working together on
> document analysis, document development. It should not only be a
> place for presentation of research, but a place where the actual
> research work take place, sharing documents, editing documents etc.
> It should also include all kind of media/means like writing, images,
> video and sound.
> We are planning this together with people at our local center for
> tele medicine around the case of electronic patient record and people
> at SIMS/UC-Berkeley.
> 
> I have heard of examples of that kind of distributed labs from coast
> to coast in US, but there might be a lot of cases which we do not
> know, so do any of you have any experience of that kind of work or do
> you know any working examples of this kind ?
> 
> thanks
> 
> Niels Windfeld Lund
> --
> Niels Windfeld Lund, professor, Instituttleder / Head of Department
> Institutt for dokumentasjonsvitenskap / Department of Documentation Science
> HUM-FAK, Universitetet i Tromsø/University of Tromsoe
> Breivika, N-9037 Tromsoe, Norway
> tlf. +47-77646284, fax + 47-77644239
> 
> http://thedocumentacademy.hum.uit.no
> 
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-- 
            Charlie Hendricksen, Ph.D.   veritas at u.washington.edu

            "Information technology structures human relationships."
                            "Models relate concepts."