From Standing Apart to Standing Together: The Social (Re)Organization of Biological Field Stations Through Computer-Supported Cooperative Work

Biological field stations—scientific facilities adjacent to natural environments—are a resource for many researchers across scientific domains. These facilities provide essential support to researchers (e.g., housing, equipment, laboratory space, and staff expertise) that is necessary to facilitate science. Scientific research, including field research, is increasingly digital and data-intensive. However, despite advances in data-intensive environmental research, digital connections between field stations and the research they support, as well as the connections between field stations as a global network, are often missing. Station directors argue that these missing connections obscure their value in our ever-growing digital world. Thus, this dissertation addresses the question: How could field stations, individually and collectively, address these problems of disconnection from the larger scientific enterprise? To answer this question, I conducted a three-year qualitative and ethnographic study across 20 field stations examining the social organization of field station-supported research. I found that the research project is central to how science is conducted, and only portions of projects eventually become shared through downstream research outputs, like journal articles or datasets. This makes projects problematically and pervasively inaccessible to other researchers and to the broader scientific enterprise. I conceptualize this condition as “dark projects.” Interestingly, while projects are dark to the scientific enterprise, field stations are aware of projects, since they facilitate access, but lack visibility of the project’s important downstream outputs. In response to the empirical findings, a final phase of research alternates between ethnography and infrastructuring to co-design infrastructure interventions with a field station director. These interventions illuminate dark projects using metadata that is standardly available but rarely employed. Through these interventions, field stations can attach their role to the larger research trajectory of projects by shifting the reporting of science from something researchers solely control post-fieldwork to something the field stations can also report by publishing projects at the point of station access. I argue that this shift redistributes power towards the station and research locations, providing an example of infrastructure intentionally designed to resist extractive colonial harms and to demonstrate field stations’ value by standing together, individually and collectively.