John Tierney recently wrote in the NY Times about “emailgate” in the climate science community, culminating in an investigation and the stepping aside of the director of the Climate Research Unit. I think it is clear both that this is terrible PR, and that the findings about climate change overall are no more or less scientifically sound than they were before. But there are two observations that I want to highlight from this article, possibly useful for our efforts in studying scientific cyberinfrastructure:

1. The hacked records reveal a “data person” wrestling to resolve data quality. Usually, this difficult work that requires judgment calls and nuanced knowledge is hidden from the public. Is keeping that work transparent best? What happens when it is exposed, especially over such a politicized scientific issue?

2. The other interesting issue is around memory. Requests for information from citizens through FOIA-style legal mechanisms were thwarted (and we end up with illegal information access). Scientists did not want to have their raw data seen and scrutinized for fear of misinterpretation. How important is it to keep the raw data vs. sanitized data? When should that data be made visible, especially to the public, ensuring sufficient contextual and knowledge passed along with it to minimize misinterpretation? Should (even some) scientists emails be considered part of the scientific record, or lab notebook?

If you’re interested, Jeff Masters has a blog post following up on the scientific claims of critics based upon the CRU data.