Updated 09/18/99

HOME                                         http://www.intertwining.org/dissertation

Hypertext
Dissertation
Frontmatter
Abstract
Chapter One

Phase One
Toward an Objective Reality of the Collaboratory
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Conclusion

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

Phase Three
Toward an Intersubjective Reality of the Collaboratory
Chapter Nine
Conclusion

Conclusion of
the Study

References

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

BS00621A.gif (3644 bytes)

Guest Book

Dissertation
Committee

.pdf Document
Traditional dissertation format suitable for print. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.
(281 pages, 1.1MB)

Powerpoint Presentation
(1.MB 103 slides)

List of
Hyperlinks from
the text of the
study

Taxonomies

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

Copyright ã joanne twining, 1999
All Rights Reserved

CHAPTER FOUR
Topic and Approach of Publications

In Chapter Two, William Wulf's (1988) White Paper, which sets the philosophical foundation of the collaboratory, and Lederberg and Uncapher's (1989) report, which sets the intellectual foundation of the collaboratory, were presented in detail. In Chapter Three, the collaboratory literature (n=86) is described and analyzed using constructed taxonomies based on Wulf's disciplines needing to contribute to, and the needed focus of research leading toward development of the collaboratory, and on Haddow's (1997) article types. Analysis of the research-type publications (n=22) by discipline and focus revealed that the social sciences and the hard sciences have made relatively equal contributions to the collaboratory's research literature. This supports Wulf's assumption of relatively equal contribution to and inherent interdisciplinary of the collaboratory environment.

Chapter Four continues taxonomic analysis of the collaboratory literature by turning to Lederberg and Uncapher's (1989) Toward a National Collaboratory: Report of an Invitational Workshop. Lederberg and Uncapher's report identifies three research topics and three approaches of research required for

development of a national collaboratory. A taxonomy based on Lederberg and Uncapher type and approach is developed, and the collaboratory literature is reanalyzed. A triangulated analysis using the Discipline x Focus, Article Type, and Type x Approach Taxonomies explores a subset of Theory-Type Research publications (n=22), by discipline. Qualitative synoptic analysis of the content of the Theory-Type Research publications is undertaken to balance the triangulated, quantitative, taxonomic analysis and explore for an emergent environmental theory of the collaboratory.

The Lederberg and Uncapher Taxonomy

The Lederberg and Uncapher’s report identifies three topics that need to be researched for the collaboratory to be realized:

  • Systems Architecture
  • Tools and Technologies
  • Uses and Testbeds

These topics correspond loosely with Wulf's foci on instrumentation, colleagues, and data. However, Lederberg and Uncapher's topics do not address data as a separate area, and Systems Architecture (networks and networking) and Tools and Technologies (computers and software) are separated into two categories while they are combined in Wulf's Instrumentation category. Also, the emerging environment of the collaboratory, the testbed, is coupled with uses and user studies, as they might be logically but are not specifically in Wulf's Colleagues category. These slight but significant differences warrant a third taxonomy for analysis of the collaboratory literature and provide an opportunity to validate the findings of relative equality of contribution and interdisciplinarity.

The Lederberg and Uncapher report also identifies three functional approaches of research that needed to be done:

The philosophical approach of Wulf's White Paper does not address the need to research the processes of building the collaboratory, as does the Lederberg and Uncapher report with its approaches of research. The attention to more practical matters in the Lederberg and Uncapher report begins building the intellectual foundation for the collaboratory.

A 3x3 taxonomy is constructed based on Lederberg and Uncapher's research topics and approaches, and a third coding of the eighty-six-document retrieval set is performed. During analysis, the literature quickly revealed that a fourth and very distinctive approach to collaboratory research was being taken: theory research. These theory type articles did not fit comfortably into any of the Lederberg and Uncapher research approaches. Accordingly, a new category, Theory, was added to the matrix and is used for classification of publications concerned with construction of general intellectual models or the development of theory intended to support Implementation, Design, and Testing work. Again, documents might logically belong in multiple categories, but each was logged only once, based on its primary topic and type.

The leftmost column in Table 6 represents Lederberg and Uncapher’s topics of research: Systems Architectures, Tools and Technologies, and Uses and Testbeds. The remaining columns represent the three approaches identified as necessary for development of the National Collaboratory: Design, Implementation, and Testing, with the fourth category, Theory, which emerged from the data, added.

Table 6. Topic and Approach of Articles

Approach

Topic

DESIGN

IMPLEMENTATION

TESTING

THEORY

TOTAL
System Architecture 9 8 0 9 26
Tools and Technologies 8 11 3 4 26
Uses and Testbeds 5 12 6 11 34

TOTAL

 22 31 9 24 86

As an example of coding decisions, a published document representing the development of a multimedia email interface for use in the collaboratory is categorized in the Tools and Technologies/Design cell, while a paper concerned with interpersonal communication theory in the electronic environment of the collaboratory is placed in Uses and Testbeds/Theory cell. Again, each cell was assigned a number, and the number ascribed to each document was transferred to a created field in the study database. The database records were imported into a spreadsheet for analysis and graphing.

There is little difference in the number of publications within each of the topics. Number of publications by topic is graphed in Figure 12. Uses and Testbeds includes thirty-four articles, and Systems Architecture, and Tools and Technologies each include twenty-six.

Figure 12. Topic of Articles

Figure 13 shows that among the eighty-six documents, Implementation-type publications dominate with thirty-one articles, and the added category, Theory, contains the second largest number, twenty-four of the total. The Design-type category includes twenty-two articles, and the Testing-type includes nine. Figure 14 shows the full Topic x Approach taxonomy and reveals a relative equality in dispersion among the categories.

Figure 13. Approach of Articles

Figure 14. Topic and Approach of Articles

Lederberg and Uncapher's "Cycles"

The Lederberg and Uncapher report suggests that collaboratory research will take a three-fold approach (8), and that the three approaches will repeat themselves in cycles of design, implementation, and testing. To test this, the collaboratory literature was plotted using the Topic x Approach taxonomy, over time.

In Figure 15, each line represents one approach of publications plotted annually. Classic time-series data analysis requires a minimum of fifty datapoints for confidence, so the dataset does not allow the luxury of statistical inference, but early analysis hints that publication by approach does appear to be cyclical.

The widest possible view shows a slight cyclical irregularly beginning in 1994, when theory and then implementation publications make positive surges. Continued monitoring from this perspective would allow inference to such areas as predicting fruitful focus for short and mid-term research agendas. Because the theory category was added during coding of the dataset, and because of the relatively high number of publications placed into it, the theory category was selected for closer analysis.

Figure 15. Approach of Articles Annually

 

Theory-type Research Publications

The twenty-four publications identified in the Topic x Approach Taxonomy's Theory category were coanalyzed with the twenty-two documents classified as Research in the Article Type taxonomy developed in the previous chapter. The Article Type taxonomy classes publications as either Glad Tidings and Testimony, Research, or News-Type. The resulting subset is Theory-Type Research publications.

One of the Theory documents not included in both sets is classed as a Glad Tidings and Testimony article because it did not develop or exercise theory, merely speculated about it, and the other is classed as a News-Type article about collaboratory research generally. Both are removed from the document set, which is reduced to twenty-two publications.

The subset of Theory-Type Research articles is further classified by topics of research and graphed in Figure 16. Ten of the theory-type research publications are classed in the Users and Testbeds topic category. Seven are classed in Tools and Technologies, and five are classed as System Architecture.

Figure 16. Theory-Type Research Articles by Topic

 

Theory-type Research Articles by Discipline

When the twenty-two Theory-Type Research articles are classed by discipline and plotted in Figure 17, we see that the Social, Behavioral, Economics (SBE) disciplines contribute the greater overall number as well as the greater percentage of Theory-Type Research articles, and that the Uses and Testbeds Topic produced the greatest number of Theory-Type Research articles.

Figure 17. Theory -Type Research by Topic and Discipline

Social, Behavioral, and Economics disciplines (SBE) contribute ten Theory-Type Research articles: eight about Uses and Testbeds, and one each about Systems Architecture and Tools and Technologies. Computer Science/Computer Communications Engineering (CS/CCE) contributes seven Theory-Type Research articles: three each in Systems Architecture, and Tools and Technologies, and one in Uses and Testbeds. Library Information Science (LIS) contributes two Theory-Type Research articles: one each in Uses and Testbeds and Tools and Technologies, but none in Systems Architecture. Other disciplines (including physics, biology, botany, chemistry, medicine, journalism and others) contribute three Theory-Type Research articles: one in Systems Architecture, two in Tools and Technologies, and none in Users and Testbeds.

Following the precedent set in Chapter Three, reconstructing the disciplines by collapsing CS/CCE and Other into "Hard Sciences" and SBE and LIS into "Social Sciences," another subtle balance in the contributions to the collaboratory literature is revealed, and is graphed in Figure 18. While the hard sciences contribute ten and the social sciences contribute twelve Theory-Type Research articles, the topic of research reported reveals a complementary balance between the disciplines: between Use and Testbed, or human-oriented research, and Systems Architecture and Tools and Technologies, or technology-oriented research.

The hard sciences, or CS/CCE and Other, produced a greater number of Theory-Type Research articles dealing with Systems Architecture and Tools and Technologies while the social sciences, or SBE/LIS, produced an inversely proportional number of Theory-Type Research publications dealing with User and Testbeds. This finding further confirms as practiced the assumptions of relative equality of contribution to, and interdisciplinarity of, the collaboratory environment as put forth by Wulf and Lederberg and Uncapher in their foundation documents. It also provides the foundation for a statement of an objective reality of the collaboratory: that the environment of the collaboratory, as represented by the published literature, reflects a relatively equal contribution from the disciplines (the body of articles is multidisciplinary), and that the environment of the collaboratory they constitute is inherently interdisciplinary when analyzed by one if not all of Klein's (1990) four strategies for definition of interdisciplinarity:

  1. by example, to designate what form it assumes;
  2. by motivation, to explain why it takes place;
  3. by principles of interaction, to demonstrate the process of how disciplines interact; and
  4. by terminological hierarchy, to distinguish levels of integration by using specific labels (55).

 Figure 18. Theory-Type Research Articles by Topic and Combined Disciplines

 Conclusion

Chapter Four examines the collaboratory literature (n=86) and the subset Theory-Type Research publications (n=22) using a taxonomy constructed from the topics and approach of research suggested by Lederberg and Uncapher (1989). Triangulated analysis with the Discipline x Focus taxonomy constructed from Wulf's White Paper, and the Articles Type Taxonomy constructed from Haddow's (1997) publications types in Chapter Three, confirms the relatively equal contribution in number of collaboratory research articles from the hard and soft sciences. A subtle complementarity between approach by discipline within the relative equality of total number of publications, is also revealed, with the soft science disciplines contributing more in the human-centered areas of research (user testbeds) and the hard science disciplines contributing more in the technology-centered areas of research (tools and technologies, systems architecture). Chapter Five examines the twenty-two Theory-Type Research articles qualitatively, and seeks an emergent theory of the environment of the collaboratory.

Chapter Five ->

 

Placed January 1999
Contact reseacher: twining@intertwining.org
Dissertation web: http://www.intertwining.org/dissertation

-30-