Nancy A. Van House

In my work, I seek to understand some of the social and organizational problems that confront online environmental communication. I address two areas in particular: credibility of content, and the design and management of multidisciplinary online systems. I interpret both as knowledge work, where trust and credibility are critical. Using the perspectives of the fields of science studies and science and technology studies (STS), I suggest that it is useful to see tensions in online environmental systems as the inevitable results of crossing epistemic cultures. I suggest that science studies and STS offer useful analytical tools for addressing these tensions.

The empirical base of this research comes from the UC Berkeley Digital Library Project and CalFlora, which provides online scientific information about California plants for research, conservation, and education.