Updated 09/18/99

Hypertext
Dissertation
Frontmatter
Abstract
Chapter One

Phase Two
Toward a Subjective Reality of the Collaboratory
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Conclusion

References

Appendices
A. Retrieval Set
B. CIRAL Matrix
C. Participating
Collaboratories

Guest Book

Dissertation
Committee

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Taxonomies

A Naturalistic Inquiry into the Collaboratory:
In Search Of Understanding
For Prospective Participants

Copyright ã joanne twining, 1999
All Rights Reserved

This study takes three distinct approaches to the collaboratory environment. In Phase One, an objective reality is constructed based on the documents made available through the world's libraries. In Phase Two, a subjective reality is constructed during immersion in the online environment of the collaboratory. In Phase Three, an intersubjective reality is constructed based on interaction with Collaboratory Pioneers. Together, the objective, subjective, and intersubjective approaches construct a general environmental overview of the collaboratory.Phase One creates an objective reality by consulting the only enduring public record of the collaboratory's first decade: the publications held by the world's libraries. Two taxonomies, or quantitative classification schemes, based on collaboratory foundation documents (Wulf 1988, Lederberg and Uncapher 1989), and a third based on Haddow's (1997) types of publications, are constructed. The collaboratory literature (n=86) is analyzed and cross-analyzed by discipline, focus, type, topic, and approach of research and publications. The assumptions of relative equality of contribution to research leading to development of the collaboratory and the interdisciplinarity the collaboratory environment are explored and proved as principles by practices reflected in the literature. Phase One concludes with a synoptic analysis of a subset of Theory-Type Research publications (n=22) from which a theory of the collaboratory as an ungendered environment emerges.

Phase Two creates a subjective, experiential reality during prolonged immersion in the online environment of the collaboratory. Criteria for inclusion as a collaboratory are developed and aspects and elements of four collaboratory environments are explored and discussed. Phase Three creates an intersubjective reality of the collaboratory during an electronic Delphi among collaboratory pioneers to determine the "rules of the road" for the collaboratory and identify skills collaboratory pioneers value in prospective participants.

This environmental survey serves the progress of collaboratory science by creating a resource to aid general understanding of prospective participants. Understanding the concept of the collaboratory is important to the advance of virtual science generally, and so is of interest to higher education, libraries, business, the professions, as well as to scientists and individuals who may come to participate in this new knowledge environment.

The once distinctly sequential document-based, experience-based, and colleague-based information environments converge in the collaboratory. This convergence has logical consequences for the process of collaboratory science beyond the claim that constraints of time and space will be overcome. New information environments may require new knowledge processes. Examining the environment should shed light on those processes. The relative newness of the collaboratory provides a unique opportunity to explore the convergence using the traditionally sequential objective, subjective, and intersubjective approaches.

Phase One's objective reality determines how the collaboratory is represented in the library literature. Knowledge created in Phase One should reflect what any researcher consulting the cultural record might come to know and understand about the collaboratory's first decade. Phase Two determines if the collaboratory exists as an environment as it is represented in the library literature. Knowledge created in Phase Two should reflect what any researcher experiencing the online collaboratory might come to understand. Phase Three determines the "rules of the road" for the collaboratory and identifies skills collaboratory pioneers value in prospective participants. The "rules of the road" are a previously unaddressed information need identified in the National Research Council's (1993) National Collaboratories: Applying Information Technologies for Scientific Research. Knowledge created in Phase Three reflects what any researcher engaged with collaboratory participants might come to know and understand about working in the collaboratory.

Isolating the three distinct approaches is significant for several reasons. Understanding is a human process by which information is transformed into knowledge (Nitecki 1993). There are many philosophies to guide how knowledge is constructed (Crimshaw 1986, Wilson 1999). Traditionally, scholarly research is achieved in a three step process: by studying the literature, as in library research; by praxis, as in the laboratory experience; and by interaction and exchange with individuals and groups, as at conferences or in the scholarly peer review process. Granted, these processes, by necessity, overlap in the traditional scholarly environment. How knowledge is created in an environment purposively constructed to simultaneously intertwine the objective, subjective, and intersubjective approaches should shed light on the new processes the collaboratory intends to facilitate.

A triangulated approach (Nitecki 1995) provides a logically balanced intellectual alternative to the more traditional dichotomous and disproving approach of the scientific method (Wilson 1999). The notion of triangulated thinking is reflected in the "see one, do one, teach one" ideal of American education and in the older Chinese wisdom:

Tell me and I forget.
Show me and I remember.
Involve me and I understand. (Lecture 1995)

As access to the collaboratory becomes more widely available, this study serves by providing a general introduction for prospective participants. A synoptic, environmental exploration will be useful on other fronts, as well. Historians, toolmakers, and other researchers may use this study to support inquiry into other aspects and elements of the collaboratory's larger information ecology. Librarians and information professionals may find this study useful as they enter the collaboratory environment to work. Business, economics, publishing, and the social sciences may find it useful as the concept of virtual work spreads to their less instrument-dependent environments and they become part of the "intellectual stew" the collaboratory intends to produce.

The cycle of traditional scholarly publishing produces a significant delay between discovery, understanding, and dissemination of findings. The collaboratory is often represented as a way to speed up, if not side step, portions of this process and hasten the research-to-shrink-wrap cycle. The delay in scholarly publishing is regularly a year, and frequently several years, by which time, particularly in the fast-paced world of technological development, publication may serve primarily as historical background rather than to practically inform ongoing research of scientists and scholars (Schrage 1991). No general investigation of the collaboratory's alleged ability to sustain and facilitate productive exchange and co-manipulation of active datasets while facilitating mutual discovery, and continuous real-time problem solving, exists. This study is a first step in that inquiry.

To an item, every scholarly account of the collaboratory is from an insider's perspective; from someone involved and vested in some aspect of the collaboratory's creation or development. There is no scholarly account of a journey into the collaboratory by someone from outside its walls. This study provides that perspective.

Phase One seeks to understand what the collaboratory says it is, and so provides a foundation from which the published account and the actual experience of the collaboratory may be evaluated. In Phase One, three taxonomies are constructed and the collaboratory literature is classified, then analyzed within and among these taxonomies. This taxono-bibliometric analysis represents a type of tacit collaboration of minds across time reached by searching, reading, and analyzing the published literature. It counts no experience of the environment, nor does it count on the bilateral exchange of ideas, or formal collaborations over time, all three of which the collaboratory, by design, intends to simultaneously foster.

Phase Two seeks to understand the technologically-enabled environment of the collaboratory, and to determine whether and to what extent the collaboratory vision has been achieved. Phase Three seeks to understand the personality and emergent culture of the collaboratory through purposive interaction with collaboratory pioneers.

Statement of the Problem

The larger agenda of this research is understanding, and the motivation is curiosity. What is the collaboratory? Does it exist? What are its elements and attributes? What is its nature? What does the collaboratory do? What can you do in a collaboratory? What is it like to participate in collaboratory activities? What types of research are being conducted in the collaboratory? For what other activities might collaboratory technologies be used? Will the collaboratory indeed change the way science is conducted? How might it change the way science is conducted? Why do scientists collaborate online?

The problem delegated to Phase One of this study is: How does the library portray the collaboratory? Does that portrayal reflect the ideals put forth in the collaboratory's foundation documents? What are the collaboratory's theoretical foundations? What does the published record of collaboratory research reveal?

The problem delegated to Phase Two of this study is: Is the collaboratory as the library portrays? Are the ideals and philosophies put forth in the literature reflected in the actual environment?

The problem delegated to Phase Three of this study is: What do collaboratory pioneers say are the "rules of the road" for the collaboratory? What skills do collaboratory pioneers value in prospective participants? What does the bilateral exchange of ideas about the collaboratory with collaboratory pioneers reveal?

Taken as a whole, these perspectives should provide a general, environmental overview of the collaboratory. The process of probing the environment in search of understanding should shed light on how knowledge might be created as the objective, subjective, and intersubjective fuse online.

Paradigm of the Study

This study employs the naturalistic/constructivist paradigm (Erlandson, et al. 1993), and rests firmly on the notion that

shared constructions, developed collaboratively by empowered individuals, are the basis for significant cross-cultural and interpersonal understandings. (xvii)

The naturalistic/constructivist paradigm assumes no single reality exists and admits ungeneralizable, context-specific subjectivity as an appropriate process of inquiry. The aim of the naturalistic paradigm is to illuminate a single, specific context and provide assumptions, principles, working hypotheses and emergent theory for the expansive research of others. Naturalistic inquiry allows methods to evolve during the course of research rather than requiring that methodologies be determined ahead of the research. Naturalistic inquiry must meet the criteria of "trustworthiness" (Erlandson, et all 1993) as defined by credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability (Guba 1981, Guba and Lincoln 1981, Guba and Lincoln 1989, Lincoln and Guba 1985).

Credibility is defined as the "degree of confidence in the 'truth' that the findings of a particular inquiry have for the subject with which--and context within which--the inquiry is carried out" (Erlandson, et al. 1993, 29). Credibility is achieved by strategies including prolonged engagement, persistent observation, triangulation, referential adequacy materials, peer debriefing, and member checks.

Transferability is defined as "the extent to which its findings can be applied in other contexts or with other respondents" (Erlandson, et al. 1993, 31). Transferability and generalizability are not the same thing. Generalizable findings must apply across all environments while transferability allows knowledge gained to be applied to other environments. Transferability is achieved two ways: through thick description of sufficient detail and precision that it brings the reader vicariously into the environment under investigation, and through purposive sampling governed by emerging insights and information achieved during the course of the investigation.

Dependability is defined as the extent to which, if the inquiry "were replicated with the same or similar respondents (subjects) in the same (or similar) context, its findings would be repeated" (Erlandson, et al. 1993, 33). Dependability is achieved through a "dependability audit" which includes construction and maintenance of an archive facilitating access to all documentation as well as a running account of the process of inquiry in the form of researcher logs.

Confirmability of an inquiry is defined as "the degree to which its findings are the product of the focus of its inquiry and not of the biases of the researcher" (Erlandson, et al. 1993, 34). Confirmability is achieved when constructions, assertions, and facts can be tracked to their original sources and when the logic behind their construction leads to an explicit and implicitly coherent and corroborating whole. Confirmability is achieved via a "confirmability audit" which allows external reviews to judge the conclusions, interpretations and recommendations of the inquiry. The Dependability Audit and the Confirmability Audits are facilitated by the construction of a project library using commonly available relational database, spreadsheet and word processing software, and Internet technologies.

Methodology

Phase One of this study begins with a comprehensive search of the world's libraries for documents pertinent to the collaboratory, and proceeds without further design, trusting the document retrieval set to reveal how best it might be understood. Therefore, specific methodologies emerge during, and are discussed as part of, the analysis of data. Phase Two chronicles the journey into the online environment of the collaboratory using thick description during prolonged immersion, and is also guided by discoveries made during the course of the research. Phase Three relies on an electronic permutation of the Delphi Technique (Linstone and Turoff 1975) which employs the process of iterative interrogation and reduction to consensus, stasis, or understanding among purposively selected authorities who are most likely able to answer the questions raised.

Chapter Two ->

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