Funds from this grant to information scientist Christine Borgman and anthropologist Sharon Traweek at the University of California, Los Angeles support a robust, three-year ethnographic research program to study scientific data practices and develop recommendations about needed skills and relationships within scientific teams who collect and manage data. Borgman, Traweek and their research group will will carry out an ambitious "2x2" research program, comparing projects that produce large volumes of homogeneous data with those involving smaller amounts of heterogeneous data as well as projects at earlier and later stages of their life cycles. The four sites to be studied include the Dataverse Network at Harvard, the Center for Embedded Network Sensing, a new National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded center for data-driven science and the transfer of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data from Fermilab to long-term homes at Johns Hopkins and Princeton. The research will help develop a better knowledge about existing data practices in modern science, inform future infrastructure investments, and clarify new roles around issues like data curation.