Scholarship in the digital age is characterized by data-intensive, information-intensive, distributed, interdisciplinary, collaborative research. The same can be said of learning, especially as the research infrastructure is leveraged to support cyberlearning. At the intersection of these themes lie research data, which have become a new stream of scholarly capital. Data can be aggregated to ask new questions, in new ways, and to make comparisons over time and circumstance that were not previously possible.

Capturing and curating data for reuse is among the key challenges of cyberinfrastructure. If research data can be made useful for learning, the payoffs are even greater, as students can engage in scholarly processes, learn by doing, and explore their own research questions. Making research data useful for learning is even more difficult than for scholarship, however.

In this talk, Christine Borgman compares developments in scholarly information infrastructure and in cyberlearning, reflecting on the implications for scholarship in the digital age.

About the speakers

  • Professor Christine Borgman

    Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

    Christine L. Borgman is Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA. She is the author of more than 180 publications in the fields of information studies, computer science, and communication. Both of her sole-authored monographs, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (MIT Press, 2007) and From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2000), have won the Best Information Science book of the year award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology. She is a lead investigator for the Center for Embedded Networked Systems (CENS), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center, where she conducts data practices research.