Christine Hine

Multi-sited Ethnography as a Middle Range Methodology for Contemporary STS

The paper draws its inspiration from the provocation which Merton offered sociology both to engage with empirical data and to perform analyses adequate to guide intervention beyond the particular case. Whilst contemporary STS is very different both in its models of theory and its forms of methodology, this paper suggests Mertons concerns with engagement and adequacy provide a useful way to interrogate current approaches. Specifically, the paper explores some recent anthropological conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork that have provided potent models for the study of scientific and technological cultures. These multi-sited approaches have also provided the opportunity to develop new notions of intervention and explore alternative ways of making contributions to development of theory and practice. In the process of pursuing the goals of engagement and adequacy notions of ethnography have however become stretched. This sense of detachment from methodological canons accentuates the need for methodological debate and skill-sharing in STS.

Databases as scientific instruments and their role in the ordering of scientific work

Speculation on the implications of increased use of information and communication technologies in scientific research suggests that use of databases may change the processes and the outcomes of knowledge production. Most attention focuses on databases as a large-scale means of communicating research, but they can also be used on a much smaller scale as research tools. This paper presents an ethnographic study of the development of a mouse genome mapping resource organized around a database. Through an examination of the natural, social and digital orderings that arise in the construction of the resource, it argues that the use of databases in science, at least in this kind of project, is unlikely to produce wholesale change. Such changes as do occur in work practices, communication regimes and knowledge outcomes are dependent on the orderings that each database embodies and is embedded within. Instead of imposing its own computer logic, the database provides a focus for specifying and tying together particular natural and social orderings. The database does not act as an independent agent of change, but is an emergent structure that needs to be embedded in an appropriate set of work practices.

Systematics as Cyberscience: Computers, Change, and Continuity in Science

The use of information and communication technology in scientific research has been hailed as the means to a new larger-scale, more efficient, and cost-effective science. But although scientists increasingly use computers in their work and institutions have made massive investments in technology, we still have little idea how computing affects the way scientists work and the kind of knowledge they produce. In Systematics as Cyberscience, Christine Hine explores these questions by examining the developing use of information and communication technology in one discipline, systematics (which focuses on the classification and naming of organisms and exploration of evolutionary relationships). Her sociological study of the ways that biologists working in this field have engaged with new technology is an account of how one of the oldest branches of science transformed itself into one of the newest and became a cyberscience. Combining an ethnographic approach with historical review and textual analysis, Hine investigates the emergence of a virtual culture in systematics and how that new culture is entwined with the fields existing practices and priorities. Hine examines the policy perspective on technological change, the material culture of systematics (and how the virtual culture aligns with it), communication practices with new technology, and the complex dynamics of change and continuity on the institutional level. New technologies have stimulated reflection on the future of systematics and prompted calls for radical transformation, but the outcomes are thoroughly rooted in the heritage of the discipline. Hine argues that to understand the impact of information and communication technology in science we need to take account of the many complex and conflicting pressures that contemporary scientists navigate. The results of technological developments are rarely unambiguous gains in efficiency, and are highly discipline-specific.

Connective ethnography for the exploration of e-science

E-science comprises diverse sites, connected in complex and heterogeneous ways. While ethnography is well established as a way of exploring the detail of the knowledge production process, some strategic adaptations are prompted by this spatial complexity of e-science. This article describes a study that focused on the biological discipline of systematics, exploring the ways in which use of a variety of information and communication technologies has become a routine part of disciplinary practice. The ethnography combined observation and interviews within systematics institutions with mailing list participation, exploration of web landscapes, and analysis of expectations around information and communications technologies as portrayed in policy documents. Exploring connections among these different activities offers a means of understanding multiple dimensions of e-science as a focus of practice and policy. It is important when studying e-science to engage critically with claims about the transformative capacity of new technologies and to adopt methodologies that remain agnostic in the face of such claims: A connective approach to ethnography offers considerable promise in this regard.

Internet Research and the Sociology of Cyber-Social-Scientific Knowledge

Perspectives from the sociology of scientific knowledge are deployed to explore the birth of Internet research, focusing in particular on the development of methodological approaches. For a researcher based in the sociology of scientific knowledge, being an Internet researcher has been a vivid opportunity to experience at firsthand a phenomenon usually studied from the outside. The article begins by assessing some models of the process of scientific change. Characterizing Internet research as new has been a potent resource for enrolling researchers into the field and positioning research responses. The development of virtual methods for doing social research illustrates the process of methodological innovation in social science and the negotiation of methodological adequacy. Methodological discussions have been enlivened by the advent of the Internet as an object of study. Internet research has arguably been a valuable reflexive opportunity for the traditional disciplines that have fed its development.

WEB PAGES, AUTHORS AND AUDIENCES: The meaning of a mouse click

One popular framework for analysing web pages has been to think of them as identity performances on the part of the author. This framework opens up possibilities for analysis of the ways in which identity performances are composed. The personal web pages to which this perspective is most immediately applicable, are, however, now only a small proportion of the overall amount of information available on the World Wide Web. It would be possible, by extension, to analyse institutional web pages as performances of the institutional identity. It is the contention of this paper that to do so is to miss out on some important aspects of web page design: namely that the production of a web page involves understandings not only of the audience for the page but also of the capacities of the technology. In addition, web page production has to become a socially meaningful act for the individual web page developer and the institution concerned. It is, therefore, argued that the analysis of web pages can usefully learn from media studies and the sociology of technology in this respect. An interview-based study of the developers of web pages for the service departments of a UK university is described. The ideas of audience which the authors use are far from homogeneous: they include an institutional offline audience for the page, a pre-existing imagined audience, developers themselves as audience, and the technology of the browser as a stand-in audience. The audience and the capacities of the technology are developed in context through the practices of designers.

Towards ethnography of television on the internet: A mobile strategy for exploring mundane interpretive activities

This article aims to expand on the currently popular practice of conducting ethnographic studies of individual online fan groups to find other ways of using the internet ethnographically for television studies. The example of the Antiques Roadshow is used to explore a strategy for ethnographic attention to the diversity of mundane engagements with a particular television text via the internet. The development of this strategy draws on recent thinking on the constitution of ethnographic field sites, focusing on conceptualization of the field as a made object, and development of multi-sited approaches as appropriate forms of engagement with contemporary culture. This strategy also builds on recent debates about the significance of ‘found’ digital data for social research. Potential problems with this approach include loss of depth and contextualizing information, and the risk of only focusing on that data which is easily found by dominant search engines. These problems can be offset to some extent by increased focus on reflexivity, and by allowing the field site to spill out beyond the internet as the ethnographer finds it necessary and useful in order to explore particular practices of meaning-making.

Headlice eradication as everyday engagement with science: An analysis of online parenting discussions

This paper focuses on the way in which people deploy scientific knowledge alongside other resources in everyday interactions. In the UK headlice are common amongst schoolchildren, and treatment is viewed as a parental responsibility. Choice between treatment options lies with individual parents, with official guidance giving no clear steer. In the face of this combination of responsibility and uncertainty, users of an online parenting forum justify their actions using a variety of resources, including claims to scientific knowledge of both headlice and the action of various treatments, but also drawing on the authority of having direct experience, trust in brand-named products and generalised suspicion of “chemical” treatments. These discussions occasion expression of knowledge as part of portraying oneself as a responsible parent, and thus while they do not necessarily represent public knowledge about science more generally, they do offer a useful site to explore what people do with science.

Representations of Information Technology in Disciplinary Development: Disappearing Plants and Invisible Networks

This article describes developments in the use of information technology (IT) in the biological discipline of taxonomy, using both a historical overview and a detailed case study of a particular information systems project. Taxonomy has experienced problems with both its scientific legitimacy and its utility to other biologists. IT has been introduced into the discipline m response to these perceived problems. The information systems project described here served as a means of managing the tensions between scientific legitimacy and utility. It is argued that this project represents an example of the use of a technological development m an attempt to re-engineer a discipline. The development of the information system is analyzed as an attempt to develop a scientific instrument that will embody a particular model of the discipline. The concerns of taxonomy with status and legitimacy make it appropriate that this new technology should be introduced at the interface between the discipline and the rest of biology as a means of disseminating results, and thus come to represent the discipline and the plants described to outsiders, just as the system represents outsiders to taxonomists.

Cyberscience and Social Boundaries: The Implications of Laboratory Talk on the Internet:

This paper examines the use of an online forum for the discussion of laboratory science. It is argued that such forums are significant in the light of claims made for the impact of information and communications technologies (ICTs) on scientific research, and of broader debates about the role of ICTs in reconfiguring social boundaries. It appears that the impacts of ICTs on scientific research are likely to be diverse and unpredictable, in line with emerging findings in other application domains. In particular, the potential to break down the boundaries between science and lay persons, and between different areas of scientific research, is likely to be limited by the ways in which particular forums are preserved as bounded spaces for specific specialisms. In the case of the forum studied in this paper, discursive practices function to re-establish laboratory boundaries in the online setting. Laboratory talk on the Internet may help to break down barriers between individual laboratories, but is not, in itself, any more accessible to lay people than talk in the private spaces of the laboratory.