Frequently Asked Questions
What parts of Cassini are you looking at in particular, and why?
Our study of the socio-computational approaches to planetary exploration has four main areas of interest:
- The role of social organization in work practices, software development and scientific collaboration
- Distributed operations -- across institutions, states, countries, and interplanetary space
- Data sharing across, within, outside, and after the mission
- Community changes as a result of budgetary and staffing changes
All of these areas of interest are shared across many different sociocomputational systems. Studying these aspects of Cassini will help us to generate strong design principles for collaboratories and cyberinfrastructure across the sciences and technical domains.
What methods are you using?
We are academics trained in Sociology, Anthropology, History, Computer Science, and Informatics. Our methods seek to understand, characterize as accurately as possible, and respect the environment and community we study.
Our primary method is Ethnography, a qualitative method common in Anthropology and Sociology. Ethnographers commit to spending considerable time with a community until they become a member of it. They collect information about what people in that community commonly do every day, how they describe their work, what tools they use or build to do that work, and how they resolve challenges. They then use qualitative data analysis tools to generate findings that may apply not just to the community, but to other places as well.
We are also using Social Network Analysis. This method uses quantitative and statistical analysis to examine the ties between community members. This helps us to better understand how distributed international collaboration works by visualizing community structures. The input data is publicly-available information such as publication co-authors, institutional affiliations, and funding agencies.
Finally, we use some methods from Human-Computer Interaction to come up with possible implications for the design and production of socio-computational tools: that is, programs and software that takes into account the social setting of that systems' use.
We are in discussion about bringing in some experimental approaches with robots in a laboratory, away from our field site: stay tuned for more on that development.
Is this a NASA Project?
While we are studying a site that is partially affiliated with NASA, we are independently supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Socio-Computational Systems program, #0868616. This is an exciting joint initiative from the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering, and the Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences.
How long will the study run?
Our work with the Cassini Mission will run from the fall of 2010 until the summer of 2013. At that time, we expect to have collected all of our study data.
I am a student at Princeton looking for an independent research project. Can I work with the SpaceTeams Project?
We invite applications for participation from qualified students to work as research assistants on the SpaceTeams Project. Students must have a background in Social Science, History, and/or Computer Science and at least a 3.75 GPA in order to apply. Please contact Dr Vertesi for more information.
I am a study participant. What rights do I have? Am I at risk? Will you use my real name?
Thank you for participating in our study! We do not anticipate any risk from involvement in this study. To mitigate any possible effects, we always use pseudonyms instead of real names in our publications, and take every effort to anonymize our study participants.
Please download and look over our Study Information Sheet to learn about consent procedures, your rights in participation, and data protection during our study.
Do you have Human Subjects approval for this work?
Yes, from both Princeton University (Protocol #0000004846) and University of California, Irvine (Protocol #2010-7618). If you have any concerns related to our research procedures, please contact these offices.
When the study is over, what will you produce?
We expect to produce academic, peer-reviewed publications that explain the socio-computational dynamics of such a complex collaborative effort as this mission. Such publications may be at conferences, such at the Association of Computing Machinery's CHI: Human Factors in Computing Systems, or CSCW: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work conferences; in journals such as Social Studies of Science or Science, Technology and Human Values; or in an eventual academic book publication. We also hope to develop guidelines for the successful design and implementation of computational tools to support sociotechnical work.
Would you like to study our organization or mission too?
At present, our resources are limited to the Cassini Mission as an exemplary model of scientific and technical collaboration. However, we are always looking for other interesting examples if they fit with our work and our resources. Please contact us to start a conversation.