Articulation Work Supporting Information Infrastructure Design: Coordination, Categorization, and Assessment in Practice

Articulation work is a critical factor in information infrastructure building projects that involve multiple and diverse communities. It brings awareness of language differences, ramifications of definition and use of categories, as well as other coordination mechanisms. Articulation work is of particular relevance to scientific endeavors that have broadened in the past decade to encompass global scale research and now require collaborative arrangements to handle complex interdependent elements. Our interdisciplinary research team joined with the long term ecological research (LTER) community of information managers recently to develop articulation work in selected activities. Through this partnership, initial activities and approaches in the articulation process are considered along with language and category uses pertinent to four main concepts (infrastructure, representation, design and mediation). Coordination mechanisms developed and employed over the last year as means for articulation work include dialogue mediation, co-design activities, and category elaboration in addition to traditional and emergent forms of assessment