The National Center for Women & Information Technology has released Women in IT: The Facts, a sobering report on the current state of affairs for women’s participation in technology. The report shows that the number of women in IT has significantly declined since the early 1990s, and that women are more likely to leave jobs in IT than jobs in science or engineering. (click images to enlarge) We really need to be doing better!

Charlotte and her world record rubber duck collection had their TV debut last night in a great piece on King-5’s Evening Magazine. “Dr. Charlotte Lee is an engineering professor at the University of Washington. Super smart, driven, commands attention. But when you arrive at her house, there are not so subtle hints that there’s something unusual going on inside.”link She was also featured in the Fremont Universe blog. Go Charlotte!!!

Charlotte, Alex and I all attended the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Savannah, GA a few weeks ago. CSCW focuses on the intersection of technology and collaboration, and is one of the key venues for our work. Charlotte and I attended a workshop on The Changing Dynamics of Scientific Collaborations. Charlotte was one of the organizers of the workshop, along with Cecilia Aragon, Jeffrey Heer, and Claudio Silva, and we presented a position paper on Stakeholders in…

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…

These questions were originally posed by Dennis Severance, and I was introduced to them by Judy Olson as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan School of Information. They serve as a way to guide the research process and structure an argument for a presentation, paper, research proposal, etc. I’ve found them really useful and frequently go back to them as a way to critique my own writing. What is the problem? (in the theoretical debate, the world) Who…

Check out James Landay’s blog, Dub for the Future, for an interesting discussion of the reviewing process at CHI and UIST. James begins: “The CHI reviews just came out and I have to say I’m pretty unhappy… not with the numbers per se… (one paper I co-authored has a 4.5 average out of 5 and I’m sure I’ll get a fair number of papers accepted), but instead with the attitude in the reviews. The reviewers simply do not value the…

I just got back from attending the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The conference is a fun venue and most of the Science and Technology Studies world was there. There is a significant overlap with ACM conferences like CHI and CSCW, but the approach at 4S tends to be more theoretical. I presented a talk about “Cyberinfrastructure and Scientific Validity in Metagenomics Research,” in which I looked at how large DNA sequence databases…

NEW EXTENDED DEADLINE! Call for Papers Special Issue of JCSCW Supporting Scientific Collaboration Through Cyberinfrastructure and e-Science Guest Editors: Charlotte P. Lee, David Ribes, Matthew Bietz , Marina Jirotka, and Helena Karasti Scientific collaboration using cyberinfrastructure (CI), or e-Science, is forward facing. e-Science projects aim to support the collaboration of research communities, whether by facilitating distanced collaboration or sharing data and computational resources. The most ambitious e-Science projects are creating entirely novel scientific fields, anticipating and actively cultivating new scientific…