The Dream of a Common Infrastructure: Why We Should Get Out of the Lab in the Big Data Era

Ellen Balka will speak about the need to leave the lab and go out into the field and use ethnography in order to improve data quality in an era of big data. Historically, much HCI research was carried out in laboratory settings using experimental methods. And, while these methods remain important, in this talk she will suggest that they are wholly inadequate in addressing issues arising in our efforts to build large multiuser computing infrastructures to support big data applications and analysis. Using examples from 20 years of ethnographically-based field research in healthcare and related settings, she will outline a number of human computer interaction challenges which emerged through observationally based ethnographic research. The examples she draws on underscore the importance of focusing on how people work in situ – in real world organizations, carrying out real-world tasks – and also highlight a number of issues and challenges which threaten data quality, and ultimately analytic findings based on poor quality data, in an era of big data.