ICC 2014 - Interdisciplinary Coups to Calamities

Successful interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to Web Science, yet surprisingly little guidance exists about how to reach across disciplines and achieve successful collaborations. The fast pace of both academic and practitioner workplaces limits the possibilities for mindful reflection about success factors in this complex area. This workshop aims to provide such a space and generate insights relevant to the whole community, particularly newcomers and those communities with whom Web Scientists wish to connect.
This workshop offers the opportunity to share and reflect on experiences of interdisciplinary collaboration: from the outstanding to disastrous, and from the surprising to the confusing. If you have ever reached across disciplines and felt there was some lesson to be learned afterwards - whether you had time to reflect on it or not - this is the workshop for you.
Attendees of this workshop will each have time to share a brief summary of their collaboration, what happened, and why. We will generate keywords for each attendee's contribution and use a group working session to find parallels, discrepancies and unexpected insights across the collaborations. We will identify key issues (and possible solutions) in interdisciplinary work, yielding insights for the Web Science community regarding the common issues we face and practical approaches to combat these.
Workshop history
This workshop follows an animated and well-attended Special Interest Group held at CHI'13 [3], entitled Science vs. Science: the Complexities of Interdisciplinary Research. The workshop targeted researchers and practitioners whose work encompasses multiple disciplinary perspectives and methods, bringing them together to share their approaches to tackling the tensions and complexities of interdisciplinary work.
Discussions covered:
Differences in philosophy (and the reasons and motivations behind them)
Differences in methodological approaches (tools and techniques, levels of certainty)
Differences in scholarly culture (publishing, review expectations, communication)
The SIG drew people together for an animated discussion of barriers to interdisciplinary work, which was grounded in real-world examples: participants worked in groups to discuss specific interdisciplinary projects that they felt had been successful. The SIG identified some initial issues in this area: knowledge representation, coverage of literature and mentoring.
Goals and structure of workshop
The CHI SIG only began to scratch the surface of this key area that is central to Web Science research and practice. The outputs of the SIG were unstructured and informal, and this workshop seeks to build on those initial insights and enthusiasm. Our goal is to collate people's experiences of interdisciplinary work, both positive and negative, in order to begin to identify success and failure factors in such collaborations. Outputs will include:
A collection of interdisciplinary collaboration experiences from workshop participants
A list of factors that led to those successes and failures
A first pass at a taxonomy of these experiences
Encompassing multiple disciplinary perspectives and methods is a serious challenge and it is difficult to maintain conferences that fairly review and host contributions from multiple disciplines: as such, we anticipate that the workshop outputs will be relevant not only to individuals seeking to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries and groups who are already engaging in such endeavours, but also the wider WebSci community, including future WebSci conference organisers.
The Web Science community is richly diverse, with multiple interdisciplinary endeavours. Many researchers struggle - understandably - with the issues that interdisciplinary work can bring. It is clear that discerning appropriate methodologies for interdisciplinary work (and appropriate peer review mechanisms for such work) is non-trivial. In this workshop we hope to strengthen the community of people actively engaging in such activity, and identify key issues and possible solutions that span interdisciplinary work.
Schedule
This half day workshop is formatted as follows:
15 minutes Introduction to workshop, goals and schedule. Questions from the participants.
45 - 60 minutes Presentations (of maximum 5 minutes) from each attendee, describing an interdisciplinary collaboration. To include: mechanisms used, what worked, what didn't work.
30 minutes Brief plenary discussion of collaborations: keywords allocated to each collaboration to record a) its success, b) mechanisms used, c) what worked, d) what didn't work and e) other aspects of interest.
60 minutes Plenary discussion (or break out into groups if more than 8 attendees) of parallels, discrepancies and unexpected insights across the set of collaborations.
30 minutes A plenary to draw together outcomes and insights of main discussion period. First steps towards sketching a taxonomy. Collection of expressions of interest for engagement in further work. Agree next steps.