SGER: INVESTIGATING REQUIREMENTS FOR SUPPORTING SCIENTIFIC CREATIVITY IN COLLABORATORIES

Project: Research project

Project Details

Description

A frontier for scientific collaboration is computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), often codified and supported in collaboratories: computing infrastructures providing remote access to scientists, tools, databases, and instruments. A central aspect of and reason for scientific collaboration is creativity but we do not yet have a clear understanding of the relationship between collaboration and creativity in science.

This project will contribute to the basic science of creativity and to the empirical science of measuring creativity. Studies and theories of creativity in human computer interaction (HCI) contexts, and more specifically in real-world CSCW contexts, will advance this traditional area in psychology, which has tended to focus on static, and often unrealistic task situations. Second, this project will develop reusable metrics and measures of creativity in distributed scientific collaboration.

The Next Generation CiteSeer collaboratory (supported under a concurrent NSF Computing Research Infrastructure grant 0454052) will be used to identify and generalize requirements to support creative scientific collaboration in the context of distributed settings; develop and validate a multi-faceted framework to evaluate creativity as an embedded and long-term activity; codify and abstract critical incidents and breakdowns that occur during the longitudinal process of creativity.

Broader impacts

The goal of this project is to enhance the quality of creative collaborative interactions in the Next Generation CiteSeer collaboratory. Two obvious trends in the research practices of the CISE community are its use of Internet-based collaboration (primary through email) and its use of digital resources, such as the ACM Digital Library. The Next Generation CiteSeer project brings these two trends together in a collaboratory environment for CiteSeer-based collaboration. This project will help to enhance our understanding of how this infrastructure can facilitate creativity; findings that may transfer well to similar efforts.

CiteSeer has been a valuable research tool for the CISE community. Log analysis of CiteSeer usage shows that it is well used by Hispanic Serving Institutions and by Historically Black Colleges and Universities. These are institutions that for the most part lack adequate access to the scholarly literature. The project will provide additional service learning opportunities through classes and independent study projects for students, both undergraduate and graduate, to integrate their formal education with its practical application toward a real-world system such as CiteSeer.

StatusFinished
Effective start/end date9/15/072/28/09

Funding

  • National Science Foundation: $89,826.00

Fingerprint

Explore the research topics touched on by this project. These labels are generated based on the underlying awards/grants. Together they form a unique fingerprint.