Digifesto

I love my Mom. One reason I love her is that she is so good at asking questions.

I thought I was on vacation today, but then my Mom started to ask me questions about my dissertation. What is my dissertation about? Why is it interesting?

I tried to explain: I’m interested in studying how these people working on scientific software work together. That could be useful in the design of new research infrastructure.

M: Ok, so like…GitHub? Is that something people use to share their research? How do they find each other using that?

S: Well, people can follow each others repositories to get notifications. Or they can meet each other at conferences and learn what people are working on. Sometimes people use social media to talk about what they are doing.

M: That sounds like a lot of different ways of learning about things. Could your research be about how to get them all to talk about it in one place?

S: Yes, maybe. In some ways GitHub is already serving as that central repository these days. One application of my research could be about how to design, say, an extension to GitHub that connects people. There’s a lot of research on ‘link formation’ in the social media context–well I’m your friend, and you have this other friend, so maybe we should be friends. Maybe the story is different for collaborators. I have certain interests, and somebody else does too. When are our interests aligned, so that we’d really want to work together on the same thing? And how do we resolve disputes when our interests diverge?

M: That sounds like what open source is all about.

S: Yeah!

M: Could you build something like that that wasn’t just for software? Say I’m a researcher and I’m interesting in studying children’s education, and there’s another researcher who is interested in studying children’s education. Could you build something like that in your…your D-Lab?

S: We’ve actually talked about building an OKCupid for academic research! The trick there would be bringing together researchers interested in different things, but with different skills. Maybe somebody is really good at analyzing data, and somebody else is really good at collecting data. But it’s a lot of work to build something nice. Not as easy as “build it and they will come.”

M: But if it was something like what people are used to using, like OKCupid, then…

S: It’s true that would be a really interesting project. But it’s not exactly my research interest. I’m trying really hard to be a scientist. That means working on problems that aren’t immediately appreciable by a lot of people. There are a lot of applications of what I’m trying to do, but I won’t really know what they are until I get the answers to what I’m looking for.

M: What are you looking for?

S: I guess, well…I’m looking for a mathematical model of creativity.

M: What? Wow! And you think you’re going to find that in your data?

S: I’m going to try. But I’m afraid to say that. People are going to say, “Why aren’t you studying artists?”

M: Well, the people you are studying are doing creative work. They’re developing software, they’re scientists…

S: Yes.

M: But they aren’t like Beethoven writing a symphony, it’s like…

S: …a craft.

M: Yes, a craft. But also, it’s a lot of people working together. It’s collective creativity.

S: Yes, that’s right.

M: You really should write that down. A mathematical model of collective creativity! That gives me chills. I really hope you’ll write that down.

Thanks, Mom.