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Data as environment, environment as data: One Health in collaborative data-intensive science
Abstract
This article analyses the operationalization of One Health in the context of data-intensive science in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Building on ethnographic field research and revisiting the lives of a knowledge infrastructure of interdisciplinary collaboration set up online in the early phase of the COVID-19 health emergency, the article develops the notion of “data as environment.” This environment is a contact structure that entangles knowledge systems, subjects, processing tools, and mediated bio-socialities in processes of data-intensive knowledge co-production. Claims for new collaborative approaches between the biomedical, environmental, and social sciences are increasingly marked by the emergence of digital knowledge-making infrastructure that leverages data, knowledge, and expertise from different disciplines and sectors to increase scientific productivity via data-sharing technologies. Yet, digital knowledge-making infrastructures appear self-evident when they are in place, while data are often conceived as inert and disembodied information units separated from social relations of research. The argument that data are an environment expands anthropological thinking on data and digital knowledge-making infrastructures by enlightening political-ethical questions that are at stake in the emerging technoscientific worlds of the Anthropocene.
... A narrowly conceived environment, such as the maternal uterine environment, can emerge as causally privileged and the predominant focus of research, while other aspects of the environment are backgrounded or neglected (Warin et al., 2011). The abstraction of the environment into data technologies and digital knowledge infrastructures also raises important questions and challenges (Barchetta & Raffaetà, 2024). Finally, the incorporation of developmental plasticity into health models economics, particularly to explain gaps or delays in the growth of human capital in the Global South, brings to light a literature where 'the environment' is equated with the accumulated effects of shocks that mechanistically and in a unilinear fashion impinge on allegedly damaged populations . ...
In the past twenty years, conceptual and technological shifts in the life sciences have unseated the causal primacy of the gene. The picture emerging from ‘postgenomic’ science is one that emphasises multifactorial dependencies between the environment, development, and the genome, and blurs boundaries between biological individuals, and between the body and the environment. Despite the rejection of genetic determinism within postgenomics, forms of determinism nevertheless persist. The environment is often conceptualised in postgenomic research in a narrow and constrained way, affording an outsized causal role to certain environmental factors while neglecting the influence of others. This carries ethical and social implications, including for understandings of race and motherhood. This topical collection interrogates the environmental determinisms developing within postgenomic science, through investigation of their conceptual foundations, histories, and social contexts across a range of postgenomic fields.
Introduction to the special issue ‘What counts as environment in biology and medicine: Historical, philosophical and sociological perspectives’
COVID-19 is a sign of a global malaise. The pandemic is an outcome of what we term a planetary dysbiosis, for which underlining drivers include inequality and the exploitation and extraction of human and non-human labours. The implication is that the usual fixes to outbreaks of infectious diseases (ie, surveillance, pharmaceutical measures, and non-pharmaceutical measures) will be insufficient without a thorough reappraisal of and investment in planetary health. Given the heterogeneity and diversity of environments and populations, we envisage these actions as a matter for the generation of new kinds of public, requiring widespread and multiple forms of engagement to generate lasting solutions. We use and extend the concept of healthy publics to suggest a movement that can start to reclaim planetary health as a collective and ongoing issue.
One Digital Health is a proposed unified structure. The conceptual framework of the One Digital Health Steering Wheel is built around two keys (ie, One Health and digital health), three perspectives (ie, individual health and well-being, population and society, and ecosystem), and five dimensions (ie, citizens' engagement, education, environment, human and veterinary health care, and Healthcare Industry 4.0). One Digital Health aims to digitally transform future health ecosystems, by implementing a systemic health and life sciences approach that takes into account broad digital technology perspectives on human health, animal health, and the management of the surrounding environment. This approach allows for the examination of how future generations of health informaticians can address the intrinsic complexity of novel health and care scenarios in digitally transformed health ecosystems. In the emerging hybrid landscape, citizens and their health data have been called to play a central role in the management of individual-level and population-level perspective data. The main challenges of One Digital Health include facilitating and improving interactions between One Health and digital health communities, to allow for efficient interactions and the delivery of near-real-time, data-driven contributions in systems medicine and systems ecology. However, digital health literacy; the capacity to understand and engage in health prevention activities; self-management; and collaboration in the prevention, control, and alleviation of potential problems are necessary in systemic, ecosystem-driven public health and data science research. Therefore, people in a healthy One Digital Health ecosystem must use an active and forceful approach to prevent and manage health crises and disasters, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
This groundbreaking, open access volume analyses and compares data practices across several fields through the analysis of specific cases of data journeys. It brings together leading scholars in the philosophy, history and social studies of science to achieve two goals: tracking the travel of data across different spaces, times and domains of research practice; and documenting how such journeys affect the use of data as evidence and the knowledge being produced.
The volume captures the opportunities, challenges and concerns involved in making data move from the sites in which they are originally produced to sites where they can be integrated with other data, analysed and re-used for a variety of purposes. The in-depth study of data journeys provides the necessary ground to examine disciplinary, geographical and historical differences and similarities in data management, processing and interpretation, thus identifying the key conditions of possibility for the widespread data sharing associated with Big and Open Data.
The chapters are ordered in sections that broadly correspond to different stages of the journeys of data, from their generation to the legitimisation of their use for specific purposes. Additionally, the preface to the volume provides a variety of alternative “roadmaps” aimed to serve the different interests and entry points of readers; and the introduction provides a substantive overview of what data journeys can teach about the methods and epistemology of research.
Silicon Valley donors have been investing heavily in a range of transhumanist longevity and immortality ventures. Theirs is a particular, culturally embedded endeavor, shaped by specific histories, ideologies, and futures that present new posthuman views of life, death, and survival. These projects aim for a future world in which the fundamental ontological categories of mind, life, and nonlife will have finally collapsed into one another thanks to the intercession of silicon-based digital or informatic technologies. The key term that denotes such a project is ‘convergence’ – used as much by transhumanists as by mainstream scientists and policymakers. Here I critically explore the ‘project of convergence’, tracing its history in the United States, and examining some of the projects and activities that have coalesced around it. These specifically include artificial intelligence, in which human persons are to be transferred from carbon-based to silicon-based substrates, and nanotechnology, in which work at the nano resolution aims at the reconstitution of the carbon-based or biochemical body. Although the concept of convergence emerges out of a transhumanist imaginary, the ideas and plans behind it have gained increasing traction in mainstream technoscientific projects. In contrast to some other health concepts that have been recently expanded to incorporate the organic nonhuman environment, these projects expand notions of health via robotic and computational formations in ways that, I argue, are moving health beyond the carbon barrier, pushing us toward an era in which intelligent existence deserving of care will not be understood as exclusive to carbon-based life forms.
As anthropologists we are increasingly confronted with attempts – be it by employers, the media, or policy makers – to regulate our work in ways that are both epistemologically and ethically counterproductive and threaten our scientific integrity. This document is written out of concern about the problems that occur when protocols for data management, integrity, and ethics, developed for sciences that employ a positivistic, hypothesis-testing and replicable style of research, are applied to different scientific practices, such as social and cultural anthropology, that are more explorative, intersubjective and interpretative. In social and cultural anthropology, issues of scientific governance and its ethics are strongly case-specific. Still, concerns about the imposition of scientific protocols from other disciplines require anthropologists to develop some general guidelines for data management, integrity and ethics of anthropological research. Rather than fixed rules, these are broad principles to guide work and adapt it to specific cases.
New protocols for scientific integrity and data management issued by universities, journals, and transnational social science funding agencies are often modelled on medical or psychological research, and do not take account of the specific characteristics of the processes of ethnographic research. These guidelines provide ethnographers with some of the most basic principles of doing such research. They show that the primary response of ethnographers to requests to share research materials with third parties should be to remain aware of the fact that these research materials have been co-produced with their research participants; that the collaborative ethnographic research process resists turning these materials into commodified, impersonal ‘data’ that can be owned and shared publicly; and that therefore the primary response of ethnographers should be to retain custody of research materials.
Recent demands for accountability in 'data management' by funding agencies, universities, international journals and other academic institutions have worried many anthropologists and ethnographers. While their demands for transparency and integrity in opening up data for scrutiny seem to enhance scientific integrity, such principles do not always consider the way the social relationships of research are properly maintained. As a springboard, the present Forum, triggered by such recent demands to account for the use of 'data', discusses the present state of anthropological research and academic ethics/integrity in a broader perspective. It specifically gives voice to our disciplinary concerns and leads to a principled statement that clarifies a particularly ethnographic position. This position is then discussed by several commentators who treat its viability and necessity against the background of wider developments in anthropology - sustaining the original insight that in ethnography, research materials have been co-produced before they become commoditised into 'data'. Finally, in moving beyond such a position, the Forum broadens the issue to the point where other methodologies and forms of ownership of research materials will also need consideration.
In this paper, we posit the notion of ‘situated biologies’ as a conceptual contribution to the often-polarised debate over the material human body as being either local or universal. To argue our case, we briefly recapitulate the medical anthropological concept of ‘local biologies’ before highlighting current molecular biological research on epigenetics and its implications. We discuss how different forms of ‘local’ arise in environment/human entanglements and how material agency becomes situated and contingent through various knowledge practices. We conclude by developing the overarching concept of ‘situated biologies’ to further a collaborative ethnographic agenda that explores the multiple effects of particularising or universalising material agency in research on environment/human entanglements.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
This book breaks new ground by situating animals and their diseases at the very heart of modern medicine. In demonstrating their historical significance as subjects and shapers of medicine, it offers important insights into past animal lives, and reveals that what we think of as ‘human’ medicine was in fact deeply zoological.
Each chapter analyses an important episode in which animals changed and were changed by medicine. Ranging across the animal inhabitants of Britain’s zoos, sick sheep on Scottish farms, unproductive livestock in developing countries, and the tapeworms of California and Beirut, they illuminate the multi-species dimensions of modern medicine and its rich historical connections with biology, zoology, agriculture and veterinary medicine. The modern movement for One Health – whose history is also analyzed – is therefore revealed as just the latest attempt to improve health by working across species and disciplines.
This book will appeal to historians of animals, science and medicine, to those involved in the promotion and practice of One Health today.
This article develops and mobilises the concept of ‘mundane data’ as an analytical entry point for understanding Big Data. We call for in-depth investigation of the human experiences, routines, improvisations and accomplishments which implicate digital data in the flow of the everyday. We demonstrate the value of this approach through a discussion of our ethnographic research with self-tracking cycling commuters. We argue that such investigations are crucial in informing our understandings of how digital data become meaningful in mundane contexts of everyday life for two reasons: first because there is a gap in our understanding of the contingencies and specificities through which big digital data sets are produced, and second because designers and policy makers often seek to make interventions for change in everyday contexts through the presentation of mundane data to consumers but with little understanding of how people produce, experience and engage with these data.
We propose a framework to describe, analyze, and explain the conditions under which scientific communities organize themselves to do research, particularly within large-scale, multidisciplinary projects. The framework centers on the notion of a research repertoire, which encompasses well-aligned assemblages of the skills, behaviors, and material, social, and epistemic components that a group may use to practice certain kinds of science, and whose enactment affects the methods and results of research. This account provides an alternative to the idea of Kuhnian paradigms for understanding scientific change in the following ways: (1) it does not frame change as primarily generated and shaped by theoretical developments, but rather takes account of administrative, material, technological, and institutional innovations that contribute to change and explicitly questions whether and how such innovations accompany, underpin, and/or undercut theoretical shifts; (2) it thus allows for tracking of the organization, continuity, and coherence in research practices which Kuhn characterized as ‘normal science’ without relying on the occurrence of paradigmatic shifts and revolutions to be able to identify relevant components; and (3) it requires particular attention be paid to the performative aspects of science, whose study Kuhn pioneered but which he did not extensively conceptualize. We provide a detailed characterization of repertoires and discuss their relationship with communities, disciplines, and other forms of collaborative activities within science, building on an analysis of historical episodes and contemporary developments in the life sciences, as well as cases drawn from social and historical studies of physics, psychology, and medicine.
Scholars in the humanities and social sciences are experimenting with novel ways of engaging with worlds around us. Passionate immersion in the lives of fungi, microorganisms, animals, and plants is opening up new understandings, relationships, and accountabilities. This introduction to the special issue offers an overview of the emerging field of multispecies studies. Unsettling given notions of species, it explores a broad terrain of possible modes of classifying, categorizing, and paying attention to the diverse ways of life that constitute worlds. From detailed attention to particular entities, a multiplicity of possible connection and understanding opens up: species are always multiple, multiplying their forms and associations. It is this coming together of questions of kinds and their multiplicities that characterizes multispecies studies. A range of approaches to knowing and understanding others-modes of immersion-ground and guide this research: engagements and collaborations with scientists, farmers, hunters, indigenous peoples, activists, and artists are catalyzing new forms of ethnographic and ethological inquiry. This article also explores the broader theoretical context of multispecies studies, asking what is at stake-epistemologically, politically, ethically-in learning to be attentive to diverse ways of life. Are all lively entities biological, or might a tornado, a stone, or a volcano be amenable to similar forms of immersion? What does it mean to live with others in entangled worlds of contingency and uncertainty? More fundamentally, how can we do the work of inhabiting and coconstituting worlds well? In taking up these questions, this article explores the cultivation of "arts of attentiveness": modes of both paying attention to others and crafting meaningful response.
This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Setting itself against standard accounts of interdisciplinary 'integration,' and rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines. Rethinking Interdisciplinarity does not merely advocate interdisciplinary research, but attends to the hitherto tacit pragmatics, affects, power dynamics, and spatial logics in which that research is enfolded. Understanding the complex relationships between brains, minds, and environments requires a delicate, playful and genuinely experimental interdisciplinarity, and this book shows us how it can be done. This book is open access under a CC-BY license and funded by The Wellcome Trust. It is available to read at: http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057/9781137407962?webSyncID=4e6d9e82-9ddc-63b8-ecc7-e7d76bb5e3e8&sessionGUID=ce44e55b-094d-6192-e325-8d384190674a
The epistemology of the life sciences has significantly changed over the last two decades but many of these changes seem to remain unnoticed amongst sociologists: both the majority who reject biology and the few minorities who want to biologize social theory seem to share a common (biologistic) understanding of 'the biological' that appears increasingly out of date with recent advances in the biosciences. In the first part of this article I offer an overview of some contemporary importations of biological and neurobiological knowledge into the sociological field. In the second section I contrast this image of biological knowledge circulating in the social sciences with the more pluralist ways in which biology is theorized in many sectors of the life sciences. The 'postgenomic' view of biology emerging from this second section represents a challenge for the monolithic view of biology present amongst social theorists and a new opportunity of dialogue for social theorists interested in non-positivist ways of borrowing from the life sciences.
The One Health concept is gathering momentum and, over the next 12 months, Veterinary Record will be publishing a series of articles to help encourage that process. Written by specialists in a range of fields, the articles will consider the meaning of One Health, the interactions between animal and human health and how a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach could help to solve emerging global problems. To set the scene, Paul Gibbs outlines the recent history of One Health, discusses current challenges and muses on what the future might hold.
This paper analyzes the initial phases of a large-scale custom software effort, the Worm Community System (WCS), a collaborative system designed for a geographically dispersed community of geneticists. Despite high user satisfaction with the system and interface, and extensive user feedback and analysis, many users experienced difficulties in signing on and use, ranging from simple lack of resources to complex organizational and intellectual trade-offs. Using Bateson's levels of learning, we characterize these as levels of infrastructural complexity which challenge both users and developers. Usage problems may result from different perceptions of this complexity in different organizational contexts.
Bringing together a motley crew of social scientists and data scientists, the aim of this special theme issue is to explore what an integration or even fusion between anthropology and data science might look like. Going beyond existing work on the complementarity between ‘thick’ qualitative and ‘big’ quantitative data, the ambition is to unsettle and push established disciplinary, methodological and epistemological boundaries by creatively and critically probing various computational methods for augmenting and automatizing the collection, processing and analysis of ethnographic data, and vice versa. Can ethnographic and other qualitative data and methods be integrated with natural language processing tools and other machine-learning techniques, and if so, to what effect? Does the rise of data science allow for the realization of Levi-Strauss’ old dream of a computational structuralism, and even if so, should it? Might one even go as far as saying that computers are now becoming agents of social scientific analysis or even thinking: are we about to witness the birth of distinctly anthropological forms of artificial intelligence? By exploring these questions, the hope is not only to introduce scholars and students to computational anthropological methods, but also to disrupt predominant norms and assumptions among computational social scientists and data science writ large.
The Open Science [OS] movement aims to foster the wide dissemination, scrutiny and re-use of research components for the good of science and society. This Element examines the role played by OS principles and practices within contemporary research and how this relates to the epistemology of science. After reviewing some of the concerns that have prompted calls for more openness, it highlights how the interpretation of openness as the sharing of resources, so often encountered in OS initiatives and policies, may have the unwanted effect of constraining epistemic diversity and worsening epistemic injustice, resulting in unreliable and unethical scientific knowledge. By contrast, this Element proposes to frame openness as the effort to establish judicious connections among systems of practice, predicated on a process-oriented view of research as a tool for effective and responsible agency. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The world is talking ‘data’. The early cross‐disciplinary, business‐orientated hype around the potential of ‘big’ data, with its promises of unprecedented insight into social life, has given way. Data now motivates a sweep of dystopian visions, from rampant commodification to the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, and shadowy data doubles. Yet anthropologists have been cautious in taking data itself as their object, even as the social life of data practices becomes manifest in our ethnographies. In this introduction, we argue for an anthropology of data that is ethnographically specific and theoretically ambitious, putting forward a case for why anthropological engagements with the data moment might be not only politically important but also conceptually generative. Introduction : Vers une anthropologie des données Résumé « Données » : le mot est sur toutes les lèvres. L'engouement initial, interdisciplinaire et à vocation commerciale, autour du potentiel des « mégadonnées », et leurs promesses d’éclairage inédit de la vie sociale, est retombé. Les données inspirent désormais une déferlante de visions dystopiques, de la marchandisation effrénée à l'invasion de la vie privée, en passant par les manipulations politiques et les mystérieux doubles numériques. Les anthropologues, cependant, sont prudents lorsqu'il s'agit de prendre les données elles‐mêmes comme objet d’étude, alors même que leur place dans la vie sociale devient manifeste dans nos travaux ethnographiques. Cette introduction défend une anthropologie des données ethnographiquement spécifique et théoriquement ambitieuse, expliquant pourquoi l'intérêt des anthropologues pour l’ère des données pourrait s'avérer non seulement politiquement important, mais aussi conceptuellement constructif.
The current discourse around Open Science has tended to focus on the creation of new technological platforms and tools to facilitate sharing and reuse of a wide range of research outputs. There is an assumption that once these new tools are in place, researchers—and at times, members of the general public—will be able to participate in the creation of scientific knowledge in more accessible and efficient ways. While many of these new tools have indeed assisted in the ease of collaboration through online spaces and mechanisms, the narrowness of how infrastructure is imagined by open science practitioners tends to put the use of technology ahead of the issues that people are actually trying to solve, while failing to acknowledge the systemic constraints that exist within and between some communities. Drawing on an analytical framework grounded in Black feminist intersectionality (Noble, “A Future”), this paper highlights the need for more inclusive knowledge infrastructures, particularly in the context of fair and sustainable development. Three case studies from the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet), are outlined in order to illustrate the importance of moving beyond a definition of infrastructure as merely a technical or physical entity. These cases, arising from research conducted in South Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean, demonstrate how more sustainable and nuanced forms of collaboration and participation may be enabled through broader understandings of knowledge infrastructures. This paper further argues that leveraging the feminist concept of intersectionality when conceptualizing the development of knowledge infrastructures could be one way to move from narrow assumptions about standardized knowledge “users” towards more inclusive reimaginings of how a plurality of knowledge can be produced and shared via networked technologies.
Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters explore both the promises and failures of infrastructure. Tracing the experimental histories of a wide range of infrastructures and documenting their variable outcomes, the volume offers a unique set of analytical perspectives on contemporary infrastructural complications. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.
The technosphere metabolizes not only energy and materials, but information and knowledge as well. This article first examines the history of knowledge about large-scale, long-term, anthropogenic environmental change. In the 19th and 20th centuries, major systems were built for monitoring both the environment and human activity of all kinds, for modeling geophysical processes such as climate change, and for preserving and refining scientific memory, i.e. data about the planetary past. Despite many failures, these knowledge infrastructures also helped achieve notable successes such as the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the ozone depletion accords of the 1980s, and the Paris Agreement on climate change of 2015. The article’s second part proposes that knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene might not only monitor and model the technosphere’s metabolism of energy, materials and information, but also integrate those techniques with new accounting practices aimed at sustainability. Scientific examples include remarkable recent work on long-term socio-ecological research, and the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In terms of practical knowledge, one key to effective accounting may be ‘recycling’ of the vast amounts of ‘waste’ data created by virtually all online systems today. Examples include dramatic environmental efficiency gains by Ikea and United Parcel Service, through improved logistics, self-provision of renewable energy, and feedback from close monitoring of delivery trucks. Blending social ‘data exhaust’ with physical and environmental information, an environmentally focused logistics might trim away excess energy and materials in production, find new ways to re-use or recycle waste, and generate new ideas for eliminating toxic byproducts, greenhouse gas emissions and other metabolites.
This article asks methodological questions about studying infrastructure with some of the tools and perspectives of ethnography. infrastructure is both relational and ecological-it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them. It also is frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms. Some of the difficulties of studying infrastructure are how to scale up from traditional ethnographic sites, how to manage large quantities of data such as those produced by transaction logs and how to understand the interplay of online and offline behavior: Some of the tricks of the trade involved in meeting these challenges include studying the design of infrastructure, understanding the paradoxes of infrastructure as both transparent and opaque, including invisible work in the ecological analysis, and pinpointing the epistemological status of indictors.
This paper was first published in Socialist Review, no. 80, 1985. The essay originated as a response to a call for political thinking about the 1980s from socialist-feminist points of view, in hopes of deepening our political and cultural debates in order to renew commitments to fundamental social change in the face of the Reagan years. The "Cyborg Manifesto" tried to find a feminist place for connected thinking and acting in profoundly contradictory worlds. Since its publication, this bit of cyborgian writing has had a surprising half-1ife. It has proved impossible to rewrite the cyborg. Cyborg's daughter will have to find its own matrix in another essay, starting from the proposition that the immune system is the bio-technical body's chief system of differences in late capitalism, where feminists might find provocative extra-terrestrial maps of the networks of embodied power marked by race, sex, and class. The essay below is substantially the same as the 1985 version, with minor revisions and correction of notes.
Book description: Drawing upon the work of some of the most influential theorists in the field, Thinking Through Things demonstrates the quiet revolution growing in anthropology and its related disciplines, shifting its philosophical foundations. The first text to offer a direct and provocative challenge to disciplinary fragmentation - arguing for the futility of segregating the study of artefacts and society - this collection expands on the concerns about the place of objects and materiality in analytical strategies, and the obligation of ethnographers to question their assumptions and approaches.
The team of leading contributors put forward a positive programme for future research in this highly original and invaluable guide to recent developments in mainstream anthropological theory.
: Biodiversity is a data-intense science, drawing as it does on data from a large number of disciplines in order to build up a coherent picture of the extent and trajectory of life on earth. This paper argues that as sets of heterogeneous databases are made to converge, there is a layering of values into the emergent infrastructure. It is argued that this layering process is relatively irreversible, and that it operates simultaneously at a very concrete level (fields in a database) and at a very abstract one (the coding of the relationship between the disciplines and the production of a general ontology). Finally, it is maintained that science studies as a discipline is able to (and should) make a significant contribution to the design of robust and flexible databases which recognize this performative character of infrastructure. Introduction The form of scientific work which has been most studied by sociologists of science is that which leads from the laboratory to the scientific pap...
Ann Arbor: Deep Blue
- P N Edwards
- S J Jackson
- M K Chalmers
Heath and Environment Reports 7
- A Leboeuf
Data collaboratives: Exchanging data to improve people’s lives
- S G Verhulst
PhD diss. UC San Diego
- D Ribes