Is Big Data science a whole new way of doing research? And what difference does data quantity make to knowledge production strategies and their outputs? I argue that the novelty of Big Data science does not lie in the sheer quantity of data involved, but rather in the prominence and status acquired by data as commodity and recognised output, both within and outside of the scientific community and the methods, infrastructures, technologies, skills and knowledge developed to handle data. These developments (...) generate the impression that data-intensive research is a new mode of doing science, with its own epistemology and norms. To assess this claim, one needs to consider the ways in which data are actually disseminated and used to generate knowledge. Accordingly, this article reviews the development of sophisticated ways to disseminate, integrate and re-use data acquired on model organisms over the last three decades of work in experimental biology. I focus on online databases as prominent infrastructures set up to organise and interpret such data and examine the wealth and diversity of expertise, resources and conceptual scaffolding that such databases draw upon. This illuminates some of the conditions under which Big Data needs to be curated to support processes of discovery across biological subfields, which in turn highlights the difficulties caused by the lack of adequate curation for the vast majority of data in the life sciences. In closing, I reflect on the difference that data quantity is making to contemporary biology, the methodological and epistemic challenges of identifying and analysing data given these developments, and the opportunities and worries associated with Big Data discourse and methods. (shrink)

In recent years, the selective flow of knowledge has emerged as an important topic in historical and social studies of science. Related questions about the production of ignorance have also captured attention under the rubric of agnotology. This paper focuses on information control in interaction, examining how actors seek to control the flow of scientific knowledge as they interact with others, either in face-to-face encounters or in modes of communication involving circulating documents, data, materials and other entities containing knowledge. The (...) analysis uses an ethnographic approach to study how actors work to control which knowledge becomes available to whom, when, under what terms and conditions, and with what residual encumbrances. Secrecy, for example, is not framed as an isolated,sui generisphenomenon, nor as one side of a secrecy/openness dichotomy, nor even as a pole on a secrecy/openness continuum. Instead, the analysis explores how actors manage a dialectic of revelation and concealment through which knowledge is selectively made available and unavailable to others, often in the same act. The emphasis on selective revelation highlights partial transfers of knowledge, targeted distribution, matters of timing, and the rights and encumbrances that attach to knowledge at different points in its transit. Examples are drawn from genome research, a field marked by ongoing disputes about modes of information control. (shrink)

In this long-awaited compendium of new and newly revised essays, Alison Wylie explores how archaeologists know what they know. -/- Preprints available for download. Please see entry for specific article of interest.

During the last two centuries, the way economic science is done has changed radically: it has become a social science based on mathematical models in place of words. This book describes and analyses that change - both historically and philosophically - using a series of case studies to illuminate the nature and the implications of these changes. It is not a technical book; it is written for the intelligent person who wants to understand how economics works from the inside out. (...) This book will be of interest to economists and science studies scholars. But it also aims at a wider readership in the public intellectual sphere, building on the current interest in all things economic and on the recent failure of the so-called economic model, which has shaped our beliefs and the world we live in. (shrink)