Despite his feet being firmly planted on the ground – and most recently, heading to the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to a new post as an assistant professor – Peter Darch has explored the Earth from the stars to the sea as a researcher. In recognition of this work, he was honored with a nomination for the UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research as one of 24 to be nominated out of more than 1,000 postdoctoral scholars currently at UCLA.
Darch was selected as a nominee based on his work on the data infrastructures of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a large telescope project currently in development, and for his longitudinal case study of the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center that studies interactions between microbial life and geochemical processes on the ocean’s floor. While at UCLA, Darch was a member of the Knowledge Infrastructures team, led by Christine Borgman, professor of information studies, and Sharon Traweek, associate professor of history and gender studies, working on projects that examine the ways that scientists store and manage their data.
A native of Great Britain, Darch earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Oxford University, and a master’s degree in history and the philosophy of science at Durham University. He returned to Oxford and there achieved his doctorate in computer science.
At the iSchool at Illinois, Darch looks forward to collaborating with faculty and researchers across campus at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Ampersand had the opportunity to speak to him on the relationship between hard science and social science, and the ability of the public to further the knowledge of galaxies far, far away.
Ampersand: What drew you to UCLA?
Peter Darch: For my doctorate, I did social science case studies of citizen cyberscience projects, which are online projects where members of the public are recruited by scientists to help process and analyze data sets. One of them was on climate science. Another project was called Galaxy Zoo, which started in 2007 and recruited more than a quarter million members of the public to process and classify galaxy images by shape and by size according to their shape. I studied how the project [scientists] organized themselves, and how they managed members of the public in order to pursue their scientific aims.
The Galaxy Zoo data is drawn from a very large telescope project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Once I finished my doctorate, I was interested in taking on more research from a social science point of view on large science collaborations and the data side of things. I was looking for jobs in academia, and was offered one here.
Professors Christine Borgman and Sharon Traweek co-lead a project at UCLA that was funded for three years by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to study large scientific collaborations, one of which was actually the SDSS. I was really excited because within the field of science and technology studies – which is like social science studies of science – Sharon is one of the biggest names in the field. She wrote this groundbreaking book in the 1980s called “Beamtimes and Lifetimes.” I was also pleased to have the opportunity to work with Christine, who has led debates about scientific research data and infrastructures. To have the opportunity to come and work with her and Professor Borgman, basically the biggest names in the field, was an amazing opportunity.
&: Was there a particular project that helped garner the nomination for UCLA Postdoctorate Research Award for you?
Darch: When I went to the awards ceremony, there was a presentation for each of the nominees on some of what their research was about and I thought it was absolutely incredible. The work that some of the other nominees were doing is really important and at the cutting edge, so it was a real honor to be considered amongst them.
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is the next generation’s big telescope project, led by a consortium of scientists from Stanford, UC Davis, the University of Arizona, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Princeton, and the University of Washington. I’ve been attending their meetings and interviewing and observing them at work. They have been developing the LSST for a decade, and have now actually started building the telescope, to begin operations in 2022.
They are going to generate data that’s unprecedented in scale, and we’re studying the data management component. More than half of the project budget is allocated to data management, and we’re studying how that team is putting together their infrastructure to collect and process and make the data available to astronomers.
&: What are challenges to scientists in managing data today?
Darch: Before the 1990s, the field of cosmology, which is a subdomain of astronomy, had never really had big data sets before. A lot of the foundational theory had never been statistically proven; it was still conjecture to a large extent. So, having these really huge data sets, is allowing them to prove [what] they’ve assumed for decades. But it’s also going to enable them to see more of the universe, so they will do more research than ever before and make new discoveries. It’s really important for astronomy to have that scale of data available.
Darch: Effective data management is so important because they’re going to want to make the data available to as many astronomers as possible, to work with the data, to exploit it. Within astronomy, there are very high standards. The quality of the data has to be extremely accurate; they have to be able to trust it completely. So that’s the major challenge of managing the data. Another major challenge of managing the data is from a security point of view.
Darch: Yes, very much so. Astronomy has always had a very strong component of amateur discovery – amateur astronomers doing their own observations. Public outreach is a very important part of LSST and they want to make data available to the public as well. They’re actually going to use the same web interface for the public as for astronomers, so that’s a major challenge – to have an interface that’s accessible to both [audiences].
&: What type of work do you most look forward to doing at Illinois GLIS, and with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)?
Darch: I’m looking forward to working with various faculty at the University of Illinois who have shared research interests in scientific information flows. The NCSA provides large computational infrastructure to support scientific work, and offers great opportunities to pursue my research interests in how scientists negotiate, build, and use infrastructure, and the impact of this infrastructure on the nature of contemporary scientific work. I’ll also be continuing to collaborate with the Knowledge Infrastructures team at UCLA, working on a new grant from the Sloan Foundation to continue studying astronomers and seafloor microbiologists.
&: How did you become interested in the methods that scientists use to collect data?
Darch: I’ve always been very interested in science, but I was also interested in social science. For example, when I did my undergraduate degree, I got very interested in the history of statistics. On the one hand, I was doing statistics as part of my math degree, but at the same time, a lot of statistical theory was derived for very political reasons. It was interesting to look at both [perspectives].
While I was earning my doctorate and studying citizen cyberscience, I studied two other scientific collaborations. One was on bioinformatics, and the other one was on building virtual simulations of the human body. I was able to discuss with scientists how they collaborated together across disciplines and distances, and how they arrived at shared understandings of what they were doing.
Another project I studied while at UCLA and am continuing to use as a case study is called the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations, which studies microbial life underneath the sea floor. [Researchers] go out on scientific ocean cruisers and drill down to the sea floor to get rock samples and take them to on-shore laboratories. They analyze the microbial communities on the ocean’s floor and the effect that the microbes are having on the physical environment. The microbes exist by getting energy from other sources because there is no sunlight down there. One microbe, for instance, oxidizes iron so it produces rust, and by doing that, gets its energy. By oxidizing the iron, it’s affecting its physical environment, so they look at the interactions between the two.
This study is in a very new domain. The researchers come from all different kinds of backgrounds. There are scientists with a microbiology background, and geologists and geochemists from a physical science background. Because [the field] is so new, they’re trying different techniques and perspectives to see which ones actually work.
&: How do politics come into play in a study such as this?
Darch: I think [politics are] a big driver behind this study. Two decades ago, people weren’t really studying this area of the sea floor for life; there had only been really rudimentary studies. About 18 years ago, there was a paper that suggested that between a third and two-thirds of the Earth’s biomass was underneath the sea floor and as a result, it was important to study this, as it was having a great impact on a lot of environmental issues.