Articulating Institutionalization: How U.S. Academic Faculty Organize Work to Deposit Data and the Impacts on Long-Term Research Data Sustainability

With the ‘data deluge’ leading to an institutionalized research environment for data management, U.S. academic faculty have increasingly faced pressure to make data suitable for deposit into research data repositories, which, in turn, is engendering a new set of practices to adapt federal policy to local circumstances. When these practices involve reorganizing workflows to align the goals of local and institutional stakeholders, we might call them ‘data articulations.’ This dissertation uses interviews to establish a grounded understanding of the data articulations behind deposit in 3 essays: (1) a phenomenological study of genomics faculty data management practices; (2) a grounded theory study developing a theory of data deposit as articulation work; (3) a comparative case study identifying the factors associated with ‘articulating institutionalization’ in high-institutionalization and low-institutionalization of data deposit contexts. Expected findings include a framework of datarticulations and empirical insight into how faculty organize data management work.