| dc.description.abstract | Social and technical advancements have enabled a greater degree of communication and
collaboration than ever before. Amongst other things, this has allowed for a particularly
interesting triumvirate intersection:
• software development practices have become agile, able to value individuals and
interactions over tools and processes, and to localise developments with user
communities
• it has driven the evolution of digital scholarship which has vastly increased the
quantity of research material potentially available to scholars, and greatly simplified
the task of sharing research data
• and the unprecedented accessibility to and potential scale of collaborative research -
on everything from writing software to cake recipes to extremist propaganda to space
exploration surveys - has driven a number of social movements to open up the
societal and institutional boundaries that traditionally characterise what it means to
be a scholar, a researcher, and even a member of a given community or society.
These three are each made possible by, and contribute to, new scholarly practices; for
example software developers find that extending their development practice may lead to
the creation of even better tools, whilst scholars realise that new tools enable
collaborations that lead to new discoveries in their community. However, the specialist
nature of advanced work in research and/or development also require a degree of
localisation that may present new problems - the developer may find that their close
interaction with scholars leads to inheritance of scholarly traditions as requirements,
because the scholar finds that their community practice still mandates such traditions.
Individuals and teams facing these problems may then find themselves at odds with their
professional community (their locality), prompting some form and degree of
delocalisation.
This thesis investigates the concern that localisation affects the development process
itself, and that this results in friction (and possibly failure) when delocalisation follows.
Contrasting examples of this are found when developments are limited in either their
technical or social scope, resulting in two types of instantiation of the problem of
delocalisation, characterised as follows:
• A locally successful technical solution may be deemed exportable to another
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community without consideration of differences in social practice
• A new practice (such as a form of digital scholarship) may be considered an
advancement of community values, but only a subset of members import or accept
the technical capability to perform it
Whilst such localisations and their accompanying problems of delocalisation may be
quite natural and perhaps even necessary for a development project to get under way, the
proliferation of movements to push boundaries and to open societies and communities
suggests that the problem is common, and in need of further consideration. This thesis
proposes that development of (at least a significant subset of) technology is one and the
same thing as development of society, and that advancing a practice of technosocial
development may therefore be of value.
To investigate this, two sets of studies were performed in parallel throughout 2010 to
2014, each set characterised by their locality in either traditionally technical or
traditionally social developments. One set studies a selection of open source software
development projects and their attempts to export technical solutions, whilst the second
set comprises a collection of qualitative interviews and ethnographies of practice of a
range of scholars, describing their attempts to import aspects of digital scholarship into
their community practices, and how they find themselves questioning and reconstructing
(and in some cases advocating against) the values of the community in which they are
localised. Throughout each set, contrasting qualities of the delocalisation problem are
observed.
The outcomes of the studies suggests that the values of a community are naturally
expressed in and traditionalised by the practices of that community, and that development
is often a reconstruction of community values as introducing new tools can change
practice. Such developments should therefore be considered a technosocial practice, and
so tools that bring value reconstruction to the fore may better acknowledge the (probably
unavoidable) problems of delocalisation. Prototypes of such tools are demonstrated,
using as examples the reconstructions of scholarly practices observed during the studies.
The thesis concludes with a summary of contributions to four target audiences - software
developers, stakeholders in developments, social scientists, and digital scholars. Further
work is proposed for further studies of the practice of technosocial development utilising
the tools developed during this thesis, which have been named Leviathan. | en |
