More follows very soon.

Estrid and Laura’s project investigates the organisational, epistemic and ecological interventions of a university data centre. Scientists and university administrators are juggling with increasingly large quantities of data. This is both due to more precise measuring technologies and available computational power to process and visualize data. The consequence is that established decentralized data storage, e.g., a scientist’s computer or a local hard drive, does not comply with standards of data opening, interoperability and long-term storage. Universities react upon this shortcoming by introducing data management and centralized server hosting and storage facilities. To ensure complying with highest security standards and future scalability, the university in our ethnography decided to build its own data centre on campus.
Whereas commercial data centres are often erected in secret or remote places and are hardly accessible to public and ethnographic inquiry, this small-scale publicly owned data centre offers an opportunity to observe the way in which data centres are organized, managed and intervene in science infrastructures. In our project we ask how the data centre is object to administrative, democratic and epistemic processes in the university and what material and environmental entanglements are rendered relevant in the process. We do so by interviews with scientists, administrators and construction planners, ethnographic visits to the construction side and university’s invisible energy supply infrastructures as well as by the means of participatory methods inviting relevant stakeholders into the ethnographic process. The project is currently in a pilot state while we are looking for additional funding. Currently, a fellowship application is under review at the Centre for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS)

Laura’s thesis investigates the practices of corporate data scientists as epistemological work. She is particularly interested in the way data science translates the local and historical embeddedness of data and how data security and concealment interact with openness and flow of data science infrastructures. Her ethnography of two companies shows the way they actively infrastructure the future of their markets (that is energy and insurance) through data. Laura added data visualization and data science methods to the ethnographic work in order to follow reflexively what working with data requires. This combination of ethnography and data science subsumes into a situated critique of rather than general assumption about business data practices.

This project is enabled by a co-laboration with different actors, e.g., in/with the companies, from the NRW-Forschungskolleg SecHuman financed by the federal ministry of education and science, and event funding for exploratory meetings with colleagues in computer science and social science by the Centre for Advanced Internet Studies.

A large body of research calls for a sustainable transition. Interestingly, powerful actors such as the IPCC call for a rapid transition – while urging societies to make use of existing technologies, and leftovers from the existing systems. Stefan discusses two empirical field sites to rethink energies in flow: modern cycling on the one hand and efforts in the Ruhr Valley to re-use abandoned mining landscapes on the other.

Especially road cyclists and mountain bikers are keen to connect to popular platforms such as Strava, “the Social Network for Athletes” (implying rookies, amateurs and pros). “Athletes” use Strava to share and discuss activities (one’s routes, speeds, watts); they compete against each other on virtual “segments”, explore promising territories, or display their commute. Such apps ‘re-quest’ certain types of gadgets and data, while data centres become passages that are invisibilized yet may shape practices in crucial ways. What happens to the apparently healthy and sustainable form of mobility of cycling when it is mediated through digital infrastructures?

The Ruhr Valley is a former mining hub. It is a dense collection of cities, where many people and industries come together in a small space.  Even though the area now struggles to transition towards a future without relying on coal, the ruins of the past are explored to reorganize this place. What does it mean that scholars and entrepreneurs reframe the Ruhr Valley based on the Carbon-mountains, for example putting innovative power stations underground?

Stefan is preparing funding for the German Research Foundation (DFG).

PhD-project, more information soon.

The study aims to further the understanding of the usage of devices for sleep enhancement under extreme work conditions and seasonal variations of light/dark exposure and its implications for hospital staff and other shift workers applying ethnographic methods.
Hospital staff belongs to a high-risk group suffering from sleep deprivation and sleep disorders while at the same time its work environment demands a high level of concentration, rapid decision-making, and empathy. Nurses and MDs working night shifts above the Arctic Circle are additionally challenged by extreme circadian changes during the polar night and midnight sun periods. These specific work conditions lead to the assumption that Nordic hospital staff is particularly challenged when trying to manage a healthy day-night rhythm.
What is considered optimal sleep? How are sleep devices used by this group to enable or support it?

DAAD PRIME fellow and guest researcher at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture Faculty of Social Science, University of Oslo, Norway (until 12/19)

More information soon. Project funded by the German Research Foundation.