Karasti, Teija Helena | Finland

Karasti received a PhD from University of Oulu in 2001 and was appointed an adjunct professor in Information Systems at University of Turku in 2008. She holds currently the post of Academy of Finland Research Fellow. Karasti’s lasting research interests include studying technologically mediated work, particularly in transitions from material to digital mediation; exploring the relations of technology use and design; bridging the gap between the social and the technical; integrating ethnographic and action research approaches; and interdisciplinary research. Her main empirical domains have been within the health care sector and large scientific collaborations.

At present Karasti’s research focuses on the long-term challenges involved in digital curation of research data and information infrastructure development in e-Research. She became introduced to the long-term temporal perspective during her post doc year at University of California, San Diego in 2002. The project she participated in studied the US Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network and focused on the questions long-term research poses for information management in support of large-scale interdisciplinary collaboration. Karasti is currently empirically involved with a number of LTER networks, and aims to integrate more STS insights and theory into her explorations and conceptualizations of the long-term.

Project at IAS-STS: Long-term and e-research infrastructure development

Disciplines and specializations embrace certain temporal assumptions and associated time-dependent theories, concepts and instruments that depend on the particular level of analysis and temporal horizon of their preferred object of inquiry. Thus, it is likely that temporal mismatches exist between the specializations that participate in interdisciplinary endeavors. Consequently, advancing an integrated perspective crucially depends on a keen appreciation of the temporal complexities that shape the interactions between the involved specializations.

Recent works within STS looking at the interdisciplinary enterprises of information infrastructure development consider time as a base-level tension that adds complexity to the work of infrastructure building. Simple notions of infrastructure building as planned, orderly and mechanical act coincide with the prevalent short-term funding schemes for development projects but ignore the longer time scales over which infrastructures typically grow and take hold in emergent and complex ways.

This study investigates the temporal assumptions of a number of disciplines pertinent to e-Infrastructure development in one particular context, namely Long-Term Ecological Research: the ‘domain sciences’ for which infrastructures are developed, information management, digital curation, infrastructure development, participatory design, and science and technology studies. The overall aim is to enrich and expand the temporal assumptions in e-Infrastructure development towards less-biased temporal horizons.
 

Selected publications

Karasti, Helena, Karen S. Baker and Florence Millerand (2010) Infrastructure Time: Long-Term Matters in Collaborative Development. Computer Supported Cooperative Work – An International Journal, Special Issue on “Supporting Scientific Collaboration Through Cyberinfrastructure and e‐Science” (To be published in 2010). DOI: 10.1007/s10606-010-9113-z

Karasti, Helena and Karen S. Baker (2008) Digital Data Practices and the Long Term Ecological Research Program Growing Global. International Journal of Digital Curation, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 42-58.

Karasti, Helena and Karen S. Baker (2008) Community Design: Growing One’s Own Information Infrastructure. Participatory Design Conference (PDC’08). Oct 1-4 2008, Bloomington IN. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, pp. 217-220.

Karasti, Helena, Karen S. Baker and Eija Halkola (2006) Enriching the Notion of Data Curation in e-Science: Data Managing and Information Infrastructuring in the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, Computer Supported Cooperative Work – An International Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 321-358.

Karasti Helena and Anna-Liisa Syrjänen (2004) Artful infrastructuring in two cases of community PD. Proceedings of the Eight Participatory Design Conference 2004 (PDC’04) Artful Integration: Interweaving Media, Materials and Practices. July 27-31, 2004; Toronto, Canada. Eds. A. Clement et al. ACM 2004. pp. 20-30.

Karasti, Helena, Karen S. Baker and Geoffrey C. Bowker (2002) Ecological Storytelling and Collaborative Scientific Activities. SIGGROUP Bulletin 23(2): 29-30.