Oxford e-Research Centre Seminar Series - Dr Mark Hartswood

The Oxford e-Research Centre is pleased to welcome Dr Mark Hartswood from Edinburgh University, to present a seminar on Tuesday 28 September 2010

This seminar is open to all and will start at 2pm in the Oxford e-Research Centre Access Grid Room (room 277 - access available via 7 Keble Road).

This seminar may be broadcast with permission via video-link to other e-Research South venues. Only the speaker will be visible from other locations. Recording of this seminar is prohibited.

eDiaMoND was a high profile eScience pilot project aimed at creating a shared national archive of digital mammograms from the UK breast screening programme in order to support a diverse range of research and clinical practice needs. Arguably one of the most important achievements of eDiaMoND was to highlight the social challenges (those relating to trust, ownership, ethics, context and collaborative practice) that arise in attempts to create eInfrastructures able to support the portability and reuse of sophisticated artefacts like mammograms [e.g. 1, 2].

One of the eDiaMoND demonstrator applications was a training tool designed to support the development of radiologists’ perceptual and interpretative skills by providing access to a rich and diverse archive of abnormal and normal presentations. This talk picks up the eDiaMoND story in the context of an EPSRC funded follow-on project (LEMI) aimed at more fully realising a clinically useful training tool in collaboration with clinicians. LEMI proceeded on the assumption that the clinical data it needed would be available at little cost as a legacy of eDiaMoND. It quickly became came apparent, however, that the eDiaMoND data was far from ‘fit for purpose’ (for training) and the need for additional data curation activities (including capture, cleaning, annotating, repairing, (re)structuring) persisted as a significant and ongoing part of the LEMI project also.

In this talk Dr Hartswood will explore some of the problems encountered incorporating the eDiaMoND data into the LEMI training tool, tracing how they emerged and were managed as part of a programme of end-user engagement in tool’s iterative design and evaluation. Drawing upon these experiences he will attempt to formulate some more general lessons concerning data portability and reuse in circumstances like those pertaining to eDiaMoND and LEMI, where the ‘data’ actually consists of rich ensembles of data and artefacts drawn from complex professional settings.

Mark Hartswood is a Research Associate in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He has spent more than a decade researching end-user engagement in ICT design in professional settings, particularly healthcare. His work builds upon the traditions of Participatory Design (PD), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Workplace Studies in exploring issues of ‘professional vision’, trust, ethics and collaborative practice in IT system production and use.