This article examines how the special theoretical significance of the sociology of scientific knowledge is affected by attempts to apply relativist-constructivism to technology. The article shows that the failure to confront key analytic ambivalences in the practice of SSK has compromised its original strategic significance. In particular, the construal of SSK as an explanatory formula diminishes its potential for profoundly reconceptualizing epistemic issues. A consideration of critiques of technological determinism, and of some empirical studies, reveals similar analytic ambivalences in the (...) social study of technology. The injunction to consider "technology as text" is critically examined. It is concluded that a reflexive interpretation of this slogan is necessary to recover some of the epistemological significance lost in the constructivist move from SSK to SST. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue of the same title sets out the context for a critical examination of contemporary developments in sociotechnical systems deployed in the name of security. Our focus is on technologies of tracking, with their claims to enable the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force. Taking these claims as deeply problematic, we join a growing body of scholarship on the technopolitical logics that underpin an increasingly violent landscape of institutions, (...) infrastructures, and actions, promising protection to some but arguably contributing to our collective insecurity. We examine the asymmetric distributions of sociotechnologies of security; their deadly and injurious effects; and the legal, ethical, and moral questions that haunt their operations. (shrink)

Given that many imaging technologies in biology and medicine are non-optical and generate data that is essentially numerical, it is a striking feature of these technologies that the data generated using them are most frequently displayed in the form of semi-naturalistic, photograph-like images. In this paper, I claim that three factors underlie this: (1) historical preferences, (2) the rhetorical power of images, and (3) the cognitive accessibility of data presented in the form of images. The third of these can be (...) argued to provide an epistemic advantage to images, but I will further argue that this is often misleading and that images can in many cases be less informative than the corresponding mathematical data. (shrink)

While many recent accounts of scientific representation have given a central role to the agency and intentions of scientists in explaining representation, they have left these agential concepts unanalyzed. An account of scientific, representational actions will be a useful piece in offering a more complete account of the practice of representation in science. Drawing on an Anscombean approach to the nature of intentional actions, the Means-End Account of Scientific, Representational Actions describes three features of scientific, representational actions: (I) the final (...) description in the means-end ordering of descriptions is some scientific aim; (II) that interaction with a vehicle distinct from its target stands as an earlier description which is ordered toward the final description as means to end; and (III) the means-end structure is licensed by scientific practice. After describing each of the components of the Means-End Account in greater detail through the example of the representational use of a mathematical model, I explain how it can demarcate scientific, representational actions from other sorts of actions. I close by describing some payoffs of the account, showing how it contributes to a more thorough understanding of the practice of representation in science and how it can be of use in understanding the close connection between representation and other forms of scientific activity. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn this we explore some of the ways in which a state scientific laboratory (Daresbury SERC) reacted to the rtetoric and forces of the marketpace in the 1980s. We describe laboratory attempts to create what we call “good customers” while converting itself into a “good seller” by developing a particulat set of costing practicting that were closely related to the implementation of a management accounting system. Finally, we consider how Daresbury response to “market forces” influenced scintific and organzational practice, (...) and arsponse that the social technologies of governmentality performed by accountancy — but also by scientific and bureaucratic practice are complex, discursively heterogeneou, and used in context-sensitive ways. This means, or so we suggest, that it is difficult to mount general argunents about “science” and “the market,” and that the use of such large-scale institions impedes impedes analysis. (shrink)

Standard philosophical discussions of theory-ladeness assume that observational evidence consists of perceptual outputs (or reports of such outputs) that are sentential or propositional in structure. Theory-ladeness is conceptualized as having to do with logical or semantical relationships between such outputs or reports and background theories held by observers. Using the recent debate between Fodor and Churchland as a point of departure, we propose an alternative picture in which much of what serves as evidence in science is not perceptual outputs or (...) reports of such outputs and is not sentential in structure. (shrink)

This paper examines two recent approaches to the nature and functioning of economic models: models as isolating representations and models as credible constructions. The isolationist view conceives of economic models as surrogate systems that isolate some of the causal mechanisms or tendencies of their respective target systems, while the constructionist approach treats them rather like pure constructions or fictional entities that nevertheless license different kinds of inferences. I will argue that whereas the isolationist view is still tied to the representationalist (...) understanding of models that takes the model-target dyad as the basic unit of analysis, the constructionist perspective can better accommodate the way we actually acquire knowledge through them. Using the example of Tobin’s ultra-Keynesian model I will show how many of the epistemic characteristics of modelling tend to go unrecognised if too much focus is placed on the model-target dyad. (shrink)

The article addresses the issue of dynamics of science, in particular of new sciences born in twentieth century and developed after the Second World War (information science, materials science, life science). The article develops the notion of search regime as an abstract characterization of dynamic patterns, based on three dimensions: the rate of growth, the degree of internal diversity of science and the associated dynamics (convergent vs. proliferating), and the nature of complementarity. The article offers a conceptual discussion for the (...) argument that new sciences follow a different pattern than established sciences and presents preliminary evidence drawn from original data in particle physics, computer science and nanoscience. (shrink)

What is cognition? Despite the existence of a science of cognition there is no clear agreement on what makes certain phenomena cognitive, and others not. Within cognitivism the issue was neglected. Human intelligence was used as a standard, and any process—natural or artificial—that fitted this standard sufficiently could be considered ‘cognitive’. For post-cognitivist psychology the situation is different. It cannot rely on the ‘human standard’ in the same way. One might even say that the need for a post-cognitivist psychology arose (...) because cognitivism began with this most complex of all cognitive systems without a good understanding and appreciation of more basic, biological cases. Embodied cognition approaches remedy this anthropocentric bias by addressing a more varied set of processes that are not strictly limited to humans. Under these circumstances the question what we take cognition to be is more urgent. Are phenomena like insect walking (Brooks) and goal-seeking missiles (O’Regan and Noë) examples of cognition or not? What criteria do we use to answer such questions? Given this problem, the notion of perception-action coupling (or sensorimotor contingencies) becomes an important and fairly obvious option to provide a foundation for the notion of cognition. However, and intriguingly, the same problem occurs again: What are perception-action couplings? What would make something an example of perception-action coupling? Where are we to draw a line, if anywhere? It is self-evident that O’Regan and Noë’s (2001) example of a goal-seeking missile is controversial, but why exactly? What is missing? Can we ever do more than making intuitive judgments here? A way out of this dilemma may be found by developing the claim that perception-action coupling must be grounded in a biological context (Keijzer, 2001), and following what Lyon (2005) calls a biogenic approach. This option raises a whole new field of issues and topics that is of central concern for a postcognitivist psychology. (shrink)

This review essay of two edited volumes sketches how STS scholars have analyzed scientific representation and visualization in recent work. Several key foci have emerged, among them attending closely to materiality, engaging the digital through embodied action, turning to ontology, as well as benefitting from artistic practice and critique. In diverse ways these choices are informed by a discontentment with the Cartesian split of mind and body as well as the picture theory of language. Yet, naturalism endures as a template, (...) an expectation, and sometimes a specter with and against which much representational work in science is done. What STS scholars have learnt about representation in laboratory and expert settings still awaits being employed more comprehensively for making sense of practices beyond the lab, especially in contested political, social and ecological environments. In setting out to do so, they ought to reflect on the kinds of logic that their practices of representing representation enact. (shrink)

The term Monte Carlo method indicates any computer-aided procedure for numerical estimation that combines mathematical calculations with randomly generated numerical input values. Today it is an important tool in high energy physics while physicists and philosophers also often consider it a sort of virtual experiment. The Monte Carlo method was developed in the 1940s, in the context of U.S. American nuclear weapons research, an event often regarded as the origin of both computer simulation and “artificial reality” (Galison 1997). The present (...) paper interrogates this strong claim by focusing on the emergence of Monte Carlo event generators in particle physics in the early 1960s. This historical case study shows how, as Monte Carlo computation became part of the toolbox of particle physicists around 1960, it was neither usually referred to as a “computer simulation” nor was it regarded as a surrogate for experimentation. In revising the history of this method, this paper asks, in what context did particle physicists of the 1960s decide to create FAKE, the first high-energy-physics Monte Carlo event simulator? What was their goal? And what epistemic role did FAKE play? In answering these questions, it is argued that Monte Carlo computations were not introduced into particle physics to simulate experiments, but rather they played the role of theoretical tools. The Monte Carlo method was able to do this thanks to its random component, a property which provided a means of modeling a specific phenomenon, so-called “(particle) resonances”. Indeed, in doing so, event generators even came to mutually assimilate and reshape the notions of particle and resonance, taking up an epistemic function which had previously been confined to physical-mathematical formulae: that of a medium which could express aspects of particle theory. (shrink)

Taking the visual appeal of the ‘bell curve’ as an example, this paper discusses in how far the availability of quantitative approaches (here: statistics) that comes along with representational standards immediately affects qualitative concepts of scientific reasoning (here: normality). Within the realm of this paper I shall focus on the relationship between normality, as defined by scientific enterprise, and normativity, that result out of the very processes of standardisation itself. Two hypotheses are guiding this analysis: (1) normality, as it is (...) defined by the natural and the life sciences, must be regarded as an ontological, but epistemological important fiction and (2) standardised, canonical visualisations (such as the ‘bell curve’) impact on scientific thinking and reasoning to a significant degree. I restrict my analysis to the epistemological function of scientific representations of data: This means identifying key strategies of producing graphs and images in scientific practice. As a starting point, it is crucial to evaluate to what degree graphs and images could be seen as guiding scientific reasoning itself, for instance in attributing to them a certain epistemological function within a given field of research. (shrink)

Maps, notes, descriptions, diagrams, flowcharts, photographs, paintings, and prints, all, in one way or another, manage to be about things or stand for them. This article looks at three ways in which philosophers have explained the way that pictures represent the world. It starts by describing some leading perceptual accounts and then surveys contemporary content and structural alternatives.

The authors' commentary on Bruno Latour's "Technology is society made durable" provides the reader with an opportunity to become acquainted with actor-network theory.

ABSTRACT This essay examines drawings of antiquities in the context of the history of early modern scientific illustration. The role of illustrations in the establishment of archaeology as a discipline is assessed, and the emergence of a graphic style for representing artifacts is shown to be closely connected to the development of scientific illustration in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The essay argues that the production of conventionalized drawings of antiquities during this period represents a fundamental shift in the (...) approach to ancient material culture, signifying the recognition of objects as evidence. As has been demonstrated in other scientific fields, the creation of a visual system for recording objects was central to the acceptance of artifacts as “data” that could be organized into groups, classified as types, and analyzed to gain knowledge of the past. (shrink)

By exploring the nature of scientific representative practices, I shall define a methodology that relates the use of symmetry to specific practical functions. In order to expound this approach, I shall investigate the role played by the conception of symmetry in representative practices from a philosophical and epistemological perspective. The paper proceeds as follows. In the first part, I introduce the reasons why our conception of representative practices should consider the aims and the objectives towards which they direct their interest. (...) Secondly, by using symmetry as a case study, I try to show that philosophy can find fruitful pathways of interaction with sciences, as it is the case when it deals with the practical implications of the employment of symmetry in modeling. In the third section of the paper I shall refer to other examples that highlight the use of symmetry in scientific representative practices. I shall conclude with some remarks on the implications that this approach involves in epistemology, especially on our conception of objectivity and symmetry. (shrink)

In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings (...) of explanatory pluralism both within philosophy of science and psychiatry – namely moderate/temporary pluralism, anything goes pluralism, isolationist pluralism, integrative pluralism and interactive pluralism. Next, I discuss the pros and cons of these different understandings of explanatory pluralism. Finally, I raise the question of how to implement or operationalize explanatory pluralism in scientific practice; how to structure the “genuine dialogue” or shape “the pluralistic attitude” Campaner is referring to. As tentative answers, I explore a question-based framework for explanatory pluralism as well as social-epistemological procedures for interaction among competing approaches and explanations. (shrink)

As recent studies in economic and financial sociology have underscored, calculation is central to economic practices. While some sociological accounts locate the performance of calculation within individual ability, networks of human agents or their cultural embeddedness, studies operating on the background of the sociology of (scientific) knowledge conceive of calculation as situated in the practice of the participants engaged, the technological tools used and their requirements. The article explores this point further, using a distinction which can be traced back to (...) Heidegger’s notion of Gestell (enframing): the ‘calculation of something’ and the ‘calculation with something’ are analysed taking the practices of risk management departments of big international banks as an example. It is argued that, through the use of calculation tools, the corporate clients are constituted anew and that written documents which are the outcome of this process constitute a social prosthesis for remote communication taking place between subsidiaries and the headquarters of international banks. (shrink)

ArgumentA growing cross-disciplinary literature has acknowledged the importance of verbal-visual interaction in the creation and communication of scientific texts. I contend that the proper understanding of these texts must flow from a hermeneutic model that takes verbal-visual interaction seriously, one that is firmly grounded in cognitive constraints and affordances. The model I propose has two modules, one for perception, derived from Gestalt psychology, the other for cognition, derived from Peirce's semiotics. I apply this model to an important but largely neglected (...) text in the history of nineteenth-century science, Charles Lyell'sThe Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, and to two accounts by well-respected historians of science, both of the same key discovery in quantum physics. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the advisability of incorporating the exegetical practices my model entails into the everyday practices of historians of science. (shrink)

ArgumentBiological drawings of newly described or revised species are expected to represent the type specimen with greatest possible accuracy. In taxonomic practice, illustrations assume the function of mobile representatives of relatively immobile specimens. In other words, such illustrations serve as “immutable mobiles” in the Latourian sense. However, the significance of drawing in the context of first descriptions goes far beyond that of illustration in the conventional sense. Not only does it synthesize the verbal catalogue of the type's morphological characteristics: it (...) also enables the examination of these traits. The efficacy of drawing is thus closely related to its power to direct and redirect observation; it is inextricably bound up with the act of making a drawing. Although the invariance of the “immutable mobiles” is a key virtue of the logistics of “paperwork,” the recovery of graphic knowledge requires a much stronger dynamic activity – a process of sequential processing that brings out differences by translating the phenomenon under examination into various modes of graphic representation. (shrink)

This article reports the results of an experiment involving 108 college students with varying backgrounds in biology. Subjects answered questions about the evolutionary history of sets of hominid and equine taxa. Each set of taxa was presented in one of three diagrammatic formats: a noncladogenic diagram found in a contemporary biology textbook or a cladogram in either the ladder or tree format. As predicted, the textbook diagrams, which contained linear components, were more likely than the cladogram formats to yield explanations (...) of speciation as an anagenic process, a common misconception among students. In contrast, the branching cladogram formats yielded more appropriate explanations concerning levels of ancestry than did the textbook diagrams. Although students with stronger backgrounds in biology did better than those with weaker biology backgrounds, they generally showed the same effects of diagrammatic format. Implications of these results for evolution education and for diagram design more generally are discussed. (shrink)

Thinkers from a variety of fields analyze the roles of imaging technologies in science and consider their implications for many issues, from our conception of selfhood to the authority of science. In what follows, I encourage scholars to develop an applied philosophy of imaging, that is, to collect these analyses of scientific imaging and to reflect on how they can be made useful for ongoing scientific work. As an example of this effort, I review concepts developed in Don Ihde’s phenomenology (...) of technology and refigure them for use in the analysis of scientific practice. These concepts are useful for drawing out the details of the interpretive frameworks scientists bring to laboratory images. Next, I apply these ideas to a contemporary debate in neurobiology over the interpretation of images of neurons which have been frozen at the moment of transmitter release. This reveals directions for further thought for the study of neurotransmission. (shrink)

Callender and Cohen argue that there is no need for a special account of the constitution of scientific representation. I argue that scientific representation is communal and therefore deeply tied to the practice in which it is embedded. The communal nature is accounted for by licensing, the activities of scientific practice by which scientists establish a representation. A case study of the Lotka-Volterra model reveals how licensure is a constitutive element of the representational relationship. Thus, any account of the constitution (...) of scientific representation must account for licensing, meaning that there is a special problem of scientific representation. (shrink)

While many recent accounts of scientific representation have given a central role to the agency and intentions of scientists in explaining representation, they have left these agential concepts unanalyzed. An account of scientific, representational actions will be a useful piece in offering a more complete account of the practice of representation in science. Drawing on an Anscombean approach to the nature of intentional actions, the Means-End Account of Scientific, Representational Actions describes three features of scientific, representational actions: the final description (...) in the means-end ordering of descriptions is some scientific aim; that interaction with a vehicle distinct from its target stands as an earlier description which is ordered toward the final description as means to end; and the means-end structure is licensed by scientific practice. After describing each of the components of the Means-End Account in greater detail through the example of the representational use of a mathematical model, I explain how it can demarcate scientific, representational actions from other sorts of actions. I close by describing some payoffs of the account, showing how it contributes to a more thorough understanding of the practice of representation in science and how it can be of use in understanding the close connection between representation and other forms of scientific activity. (shrink)

In this article I propose that a postphenomenological approach to science and technology can open new analytical understandings of how material artifacts, embodiment and social agency co-produce learned perceptions of objects. In particle physics, physicists work in huge groups of scientists from many cultural backgrounds. Communication to some extent depends on material hermeneutics of flowcharts, models and other visual presentations. As it appears in an examination of physicists’ scrutiny of visual renderings of different parts of a detector, perceptions vary in (...) relation to social and bodily experiences. Vision in physics has seemingly allowed an objective perception at a convenient distance of the body. This article challenges this view and proposes that the variations can be analysed as cultural at two echelons with the help of a postphenomenological approach combined with cultural psychological theory of artifacts. A third echelon presumably constitutes the phenomenological limit to culture in science. Even this last resort of subjectivity can be embraced by a postphenomenological approach. The process of culturalization in physics can be defined as a process of situating knowledge in a body whose continuous learning of micro-and macro perceptions makes scientific renderings unstable. Taken together postphenomenology, following the distinctions between body one and body two, and combined with cultural psychological learning theory, enables new insight into what constitutes culture in science. (shrink)

ArgumentDrawing and writing number among the most widespread scientific practices of representation. Neither photography, graphic recording apparatuses, typewriters, nor digital word- and image-processing ever completely replaced drawing and writing by hand. The interaction of hand, paper, and pen indeed involves much more than simply recording or visualizing what was previously thought, observed, or imagined. Both writing and drawing have the power to translate concepts and observations into two-dimensional, manageable, reproducible objects. They help to develop research questions and they open up (...) an interaction between the gathering of phenomena and the formation of theses. Related to the manifold studies of representational activities in the sciences and the humanities, this topical issue tries to refine our understanding of the capacities of drawing and writing as research techniques; i.e. as productive epistemic practices. In particular the contributions address three aspects: the material conditions and configurations of the “scene of drawing and writing,” the involved procedures of production, and the languages of inscription. (shrink)

This paper provides a starting point for thinking beyond a research–practice divide and discusses possible new conceptualizations of intervention and the role of IT research in contemporary organizational settings. ‘IT research’ denotes a conglomerate of overlapping research conducted under the headings of Information Systems, Systems Development, Critical IS Research and Participatory Design. The paper applies this joint notion of IT research and the IT researcher to draw parallels across these niches of research regarding the question of intervention. Through an analysis (...) of selected field study events, a prominent notion of intervention (as being active as opposed to being passive) is reworked in terms of intervention as circumstance, a circumstantial interplay of situated practices. In closing, subsequent possibilities for repositioning the IT researcher are discussed in terms of reflexivity, facilitation or being a trickster. (shrink)

Industrial production imposes geographical, economic and cultural distances between producers and consumers. The concept of constituting 'missing objects' can help shrink these distances by enabling actors to engage in discourses and practices about contexts beyond what is materially present. Since the mid-1990s, food miles have emerged as an example of missing objects, representing the distance that agricultural products travel from the farm to the dining table, and the environmental effects of transportation. I analyse how consumers, farmers, activists, industry and policy-makers (...) in the United States and Europe are building agency in making and using food miles. (shrink)

Scientific communities as social groupings and the role that such communities play in scientific change and the production of scientific knowledge is currently under debate. I examine theory change as a complex social interaction among individual scientists and the scientific community, and argue that individuals will be motivated to adopt a more radical or innovative attitude when confronted with striking similarities between model systems and a more robust understanding of specialised vocabulary. Two case studies from the biological sciences, Barbara McClintock (...) and Stanley Prusiner, help motivate the idea that sharing of models and specialised vocabulary fill the gap between discovery and scientific change by promoting the dispersal of important information throughout the scientific community. (shrink)

I develop an account of scientific representations building on Charles S. Peirce's rich, and still underexplored, notion of iconicity. Iconic representations occupy a central place in Peirce's philosophy, in his innovative approach to logic and in his practice as a scientist. Starting from a discussion of Peirce's approach to diagrams, I claim that Peirce's own representations are in line with his formulation of iconicity, and that they are more broadly connected to the pragmatist philosophy he developed in parallel with his (...) scientific work. I then defend the contemporary relevance of Peirce's approach to iconic representations, and specifically argue that Peirce offers a useful ‘third way’ between what Mauricio Suárez has recently described as the ‘analytical’ and ‘practical’ inquiries into the concept of representation. As a philosophically minded scientist and an experimentally inclined philosopher, Peirce never divorced the practice of representing from questions about what counts as a representation... (shrink)

The fascination and thrill of arts festivals relates to their capacity to host the unexpected, surprising and new. The economic model of novelty bundling markets presents a rare attempt to account for the potential impact of festivals on innovation. Its cognitive conception of festivals as sites of economic evolution offers a point of departure for this paper. The economic model is criticised and further developed, especially in two respects, drawing on sociological studies on science, technology and society and on empirical (...) data from two cases of innovatively used lighting technology in festivals. First, it is argued that festivals offer a fair space for the simultaneous discovery, display and valorisation of the new that is produced by performers, curators and audiences, and by innovators, intermediaries and consumers alike. Secondly, the production and consumption of newness in festivals is linked to the specific way in which their socio-material setting facilitates what has been termed framing and overflowing of cognitive formats. Finally, the analysis sheds new light not only on the innovative impact of festivals but also on the scholarly reserve to engage with this field of research. (shrink)

The ArgumentThere can be no doubt about the moral and epistemological significance of what Shapin calls the “physical place” of the scientific laboratory. The physical place is defined by the locales, barriers, ports of entry, and lines of sight that bound the laboratory and separate it from other urban and architectural environments. Shapin's discussion of the emergence of the scientific laboratory in seventeenth-century England provides a convincing demonstration that credible knowledge is situated at an intersection between physical locales and social (...) distinctions. In this paper I take up Shapin's theme of the “siting of knowledge production,” but I give it a different treatment – one based on ethnomethodological studies of work. Without denying all that can be witnessed in the spectacle of the scientist at the bench and of the architectural habitat of the bench, I argue that the “place” of scientific work is defined by locally organizedtopical contextures. The paper describes two examples of such spatial orders – “opticism” and “digitality” – associated with distinct complexes of equipment and practice. These topical spaces might initially be viewed as “ideal” or “symbolic” spaces, but I argue that they are no less material than the “physical setting” of the laboratory; indeed, they are the physical setting. (shrink)

The theme of visual representations in science was already central to our research when we aended the 6th European Spring School on History of Science and Popularization in Menorca, Spain, in 2011. As discussed in the review of this conference by Ignacio SuayMatallana and Mar Cuenca-Lorente (245), many participants not only described the particulars of the generation of individual images, but also broader issues surrounding the constitution of visual domains. We were impressed by the range of scholarship surrounding the production, (...) circulation, and interpretation of a wide variety of images, yet a nagging question remained: what issues unite this diversity of research and compel us to investigate such representations? Beyond their novelty, why study scientific images at all? (shrink)

Scientists typically use a variety of representations, including different kinds of figures, to present and defend hypotheses. In order to understand the justification of scientific hypotheses, it is essential to understand how visual representations contribute to scientific arguments. Since the logical understanding of arguments involves the truth or falsity of the representations involved, visual representations must have the capacity to bear truth in order to be genuine components of arguments. By drawing on Goodman's analysis of symbol systems, and on Tarski's (...) work on truth, I show that the figures used in science meet this criterion. (shrink)

Sociologists, philosophers and historians of science are gradually recognizing the importance of visual representation. This is part of a more general movement away from a theory-centric view of science and towards an interest in practical aspects of observation and experimentation. Rather than treating science as a matter of demonstrating the logical connection between theoretical and empirical statements, an increasing number of investigations are examining how scientists compose and use diagrams, graphs, photographs, micrographs, maps, charts, and related visual displays. This paper (...) focuses on diagrams in biology, and tries to demonstrate how diagrams are an integral part of the production of scientific knowledge. In order to disclose some of the distinctive practical and analytical uses of diagrams, the paper contrasts the way diagrams and photographs are used in biological texts. Both diagrams and photographs are shown to be “constructions” that separately and together mediate the investigation of scientific phenoman. (shrink)

To date, little is known about when and to what degree science students begin to participate in authentic scientific graphing practices. This article presents the results of a series of studies on the production, transformation, and interpretation of graphical representation from Grade 8 to professional scientific practice both in formal testing situations and in the course of field/laboratory work. The results of these studies can be grouped into two major areas. First, there is a discontinuity in the graph-related practices that (...) marks a boundary between people who engage in work that requires them to transform data into graphical representations and people who do not have such experiences. Second, the didactic practices of high school textbooks and university lectures exhibit a marked discontinuity relative to graphing practices in scientific journals. Graphs used in didactic circumstances may be associated with students’ difficulties in interpreting “real data.” It appears that school teachers and university professors do little to put their students on trajectories of increasing participation in authentic scientific graphing practices. (shrink)

Contemporary medical imaging technologies produce images on the level of human cells. As a result of such images, egg and sperm cells have become well-known artefacts of popular culture. Medical imaging technology has transformed these gametes from invisible matter integrated in biological processes within the body to identifiable objects. The visualisation of egg and sperm cells has literally lifted the process of human reproduction out of the female body and made the gametes appear as protagonists in the story of human (...) reproduction. The article argues that visualisation of the gametes and the central role they play in contemporary imaginations of reproduction may offer vital contributions to the rather rapid acceptance and normalisation of assisted reproduction. (shrink)

This paper is based on ethnographic research of data practices in a public health project called Weather Health and Air Pollution. I examine two different kinds of practices that make air pollution data, focusing on how they relate to particular modes of sensing and articulating air pollution. I begin by describing the interstitial spaces involved in making measurements of air pollution at monitoring sites and in the running of a computer simulation. Specifically, I attend to a shared dimension of these (...) practices, the checking of a numerical reading for error. Checking a measurement for error is routine practice and a fundamental component of making data, yet these are also moments of interpretation, where the form and meaning of numbers are ambiguous. Through two case studies of modelling and monitoring data practices, I show that making a ‘good’ measurement requires developing a feeling for the instrument–air pollution interaction in terms of the intended functionality of the measurements made. These affective dimensions of practice are useful analytically, making explicit the interaction of standardised ways of knowing and embodied skill in stabilising data. I suggest that environmental data practices can be studied through researchers’ materialisation of error, which complicate normative accounts of Big Data and highlight the non-linear and entangled relations that are at work in the making of stable, accurate data. (shrink)

With the introduction of the technique of auscultation in nineteenth-century medicine, the auditory became a most important means of producing diagnostic knowledge. The correct classification and interpretation of the sounds revealed by auscultation, however, remained an issue of negotiation and often controversy throughout the mid-nineteenth century. This article examines the codification of lung sounds within two cultural and geographic contexts: first, the original approach as it was developed by Laennec and his followers in Paris that came to be dominant in (...) French medicine, and second, the alternative approach that grew out of Joseph Skoda’s reception of Laennec’s method in Vienna and became widely adopted in the German-speaking world. On one hand, it will be argued that lung sound classifications attempted a standardization of the perception and the interpretation of auscultation sounds. On the other hand, it will be shown that the development of auscultation sounds was shaped by the local context in which it took place. This article seeks to shed light on the way in which auditory experiences were instrumentalized for epistemic purposes in medicine. Furthermore, it discusses the role of standardization both as a mechanism for the universalization of knowledge and as a contextually bounded practice. (shrink)