Software and Space: Investigating How a Cosmology Research Group Enacts Infrastructure by Producing Software

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

Rheology and Microfluidic flows of a cationic surfactant and hydrotropic salt mixture

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

Surveying Scientists About Their Software

Software is an important infrastructural component of scientific research practice. The work of research often requires scientists to develop, use, and share software in order to address their research questions. This report presents findings from a survey of researchers at the University of Washington in three broad areas: Oceanography, Biology, and Physics. This survey is part of the National Science Foundation funded study Scientists and their Software: A Sociotechnical Investigation of Scientific Software Development and Sharing (ACI-1302272). We inquired about each respondent’s research area and data use along with their use, development, and sharing of software. Finally, we asked about challenges researchers face with and about concerns regarding software’s effect on study replicability. These findings are part of ongoing efforts to develop deeper characterizations of the role of software in twenty-first century scientific research.

Experientialist Epistemology and Classification Theory: Embodied and Dimensional Classification

What theoretical framework can help in building, maintaining and evaluating networked knowledge organization resources? Specifically, what theoretical framework makes sense of the semantic prowess of ontologies and peer-to-peer sys- tems, and by extension aids in their building, maintenance, and evaluation? I posit that a theoretical work that weds both for- mal and associative (structural and interpretive) aspects of knowledge organization systems provides that framework. Here I lay out the terms and the intellectual constructs that serve as the foundation for investigative work into experientialist classifi- cation theory, a theoretical framework of embodied, infrastructural, and reified knowledge organization. I build on the inter- pretive work of scholars in information studies, cognitive semantics, sociology, and science studies. With the terms and the framework in place, I then outline classification theory s critiques of classificatory structures. In order to address these cri- tiques with an experientialist approach an experientialist semantics is offered as a design commitment for an example: metadata in peer-to-peer network knowledge organization structures.