Digital Exhaust as Team Data: A Socio-Technical Measurement Framework for Monitoring and Supporting Digitally Mediated Scientific Teams

Scientific teamwork increasingly occurs within digital environments that mediate communication, coordination, and knowledge production. This paper introduces a measurement framework that reconceptualizes digital traces for artifact-mediated macrocognition in scientific teamwork. Drawing on the Macrocognition in Teams Model, the framework links document revisions, communication patterns, workflow activity, meeting records, and artifact lineage to team cognitive functions such as knowledge externalization, shared understanding, re-synchronization, and action coordination. We illustrate the framework with a pilot case from an interdisciplinary problem-framing workshop, showing how transcript, collaborative mapping, and document-edit traces capture complementary layers of artifact-mediated collaboration: spoken interaction, visual externalization, and written stabilization. As consent-governed sensing infrastructures, collaboration technologies can support longitudinal observation of how scientific teams create, revise, fragment, and reintegrate shared knowledge. The framework informs ethically governed collaboration observatories that support reflection, coordination, re-entry, knowledge management, and longitudinal study of scientific collaboration.