BACKGROUND
Our EAGER award is listed at the site for the NSF, Office of CyberInfrastructure:
Short Abstract: "My topic is how women/minority scientists have been engaged with large scale databases in the physical sciences, especially astronomy. I have two related hypotheses. First, the links built by/among women/minority scientists will be meshworks [see links below to the work of Arturo Escobar and Manuel de Landa], lateral, intersectional, sustaining careers/thinking strategies that are built at the edges of the mainstream. Secondly, their strategies and tastes for designing, maintaining, revising, accessing, interpreting databases will be distinctive, and will show characteristics of their meshworks among their colleagues. I am especially interested in LSST, a loosely distributed collaboration at Un iversity of Arizona, UC Davis, SLAC, etc". --Project PI
SDSS AND LSST "SITES"
The SDSS was being discussed by the mid- to late 1980s and it began taking data in 1998; the LSST began being discussed in the early to mid-1990s and it might begin collecting data in 2012. Although there are strong links between SDSS and LSST, there also are interesting differences. For example, the SDSS collaboration is based at Johns Hopkins and has ties to Microsoft/IBM; the LSST collaboration is based at the University of Arizona and has ties to Google/Lucent (Bell Labs).
The SDSS data sets led to massive changes in the design of queries/theories/ etc. For example: "Astronomers still do targeted studies of a small number of objects in search of answers to specific questions. But now they also sweep the skies for all the data their instruments can collect and sort through it later. Its a sea change, York said." [Donald York, the SDSS founding director.] There are various ties between high energy physics [HEP] and the SDSS going back to its earliest funding, just as there are between HEP and LSST. These projects also have contributed to some major changes at HEP labs.
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF LARGE SCIENCE GROUPS
NSF has several programs that study this field:
NSF VOSS [VOSS = Delegating Organizational Work to Virtual Organization Technologies: Beyond the Communicational Paradigm] http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503256&org=OCI&from=home