This week I gave a presentation on the Social Life of Data at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. I was presenting as part of a session on “Strategies for Improved Marine and Synergistic Data Access and Interoperability” organized by Cynthia Chandler, John Graybeal, and Karen Baker. The session was a nice mix of high-level framing papers and experiences with concrete systems.

In addition to my presentation, the other presentations were:

  • Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R): Technical Design – Experiences and Lessons. R. A. Arko; S. M. Carbotte; S. P. Miller; C. L. Chandler; V. Ferrini; K. Stocks; A. R. Maffei; S. R. Smith; M. A. Bourassa; S. J. McLean; J. C. Alberts
  • Experiences with an operational, distributed data access infrastructure in The Netherlands. T. De Bruin
  • Regional Ocean Data Portal: Transforming Information to Knowledge. M. K. Howard; F. C. Gayanilo; A. E. Jochens
  • Moving Beyond the 10,000 Ways That Don’t Work. L. E. Bermudez; D. K. Arctur; C. Rueda
  • Information Infrastructure, Information Environments, and Long-Term Collaboration. K. S. Baker; D. D. Pennington
  • Libraries and Data: Short-Term Developments, Long-Term Prospects. A. Gold

AGU Fall MeetingMy presentation was first in the session and was one of the framework papers. I tried to define and motivate a sociotechnical approach to the problems of data management and data sharing. The next four papers described specific projects in developing data infrastructures for oceanography. The Baker & Pennington paper described using a distributed cognition model to understand interdisciplinary collaborations. Anna Gold gave a great presentation on the potential role of libraries and librarians in data management and preservation.

I haven’t worked a lot with oceanographers yet, so it was great to hear about their experiences. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to work with this community more.

On another note, this was my first experience at a conference this huge. Rumor around the conference was that they had over 16,000 registrations. Poster sessions were in the Moscone South exhibition hall. About 2,000 posters presented per day for 5 days. Insane, but fun!