Using Digital Trace Analytics to Understand and Enhance Scientific Collaboration

Social interaction and idea flow have been shown to be important factors in the collaboration work of scientific and technical teams. This paper describes a study to investigate scientific team collaboration and activity through digital trace data. Using a 27-month electronic mail data corpus from a scientific research project, we analyze team member participation and topics of discussion as a proxy for interaction and idea flow. Our results illustrate the progression of participation and conversational themes over the project lifecycle. We identify temporal evolution of work activities, influential roles and formation of communities throughout the project, and conversational aspects in the project lifecycle. This work is the first step of a larger research program analyzing multiple sources of digital trace data to understand team activity through organic products and byproducts of work.