Moving Qualitative Data from Little Pieces of Colored Glass to an Elegant Stained-Glass Window

My article examined the emergence and adoption of cyberinfrastructure, a platform that enables big science with big data. During the research, I faced two challenges. First, the participants came from different stakeholder groups, such as lead users, developers, administrators, policy makers, and social scientists working in the cyberinfrastructure community. Their varying perspectives and motivations made generating a coherent narrative difficult. Second, there was a paradox that while the community was full of conflicting tensions, large-scale funding continued pouring into the infrastructure. The mystery that begged a deeper explanation was how a community full of tensions could move a national infrastructure forward so successfully. Then I recalled a metaphor from my notes during Q-Camp 2009: “Writing up an article is like making a stained glass window—it is okay to deconstruct and reconstruct to give the best story.” Given this, I started analyzing transcripts from diverse participants from different professional backgrounds across 17 US states, juxtaposed with existing literature, in order to develop an explanation that was not obvious. The result was an unexpected insight that emerged; instead of trying to resolve the conflicting tensions, recognize that the tensions were the productive forces behind cyberinfrastructure emergence.