Laboratory Meeting as a Site of Public Work: A Bioinformatic Shop Floor

• In Event: 402 - Regular Session. Ethnomethodology

Abstract

Bioinformatics is a data science, concerned with large-scale digital representations of biology experiments. Although embodied interaction is downplayed by the computational nature of bioinformatic work, it is essential in collaboration. This collaborative work is prominent in laboratory meetings, particularly in interdisciplinary laboratories. This study investigates a site of such interdisciplinary collaboration, a cellular and molecular medicine laboratory which combines work in bioinformatics and molecular genetics. In laboratories such as the one represented here, laboratory meetings provide a space in which members attempt to communicate their work to the laboratory as a whole. In these situations, the work of establishing the significance of a member’s work becomes a public project for laboratory members. This study focuses on how members in this laboratory collaborate to make relevant and intelligible the work of a presenter in laboratory meeting. The distributed resources of laboratory meeting, including the working areas of the laboratory more typically thought of as “the shop floor”, as well as large-scale, multi-sited biological consortia and the practical standards of bioinformatic work, are specified in the course of this work. In this way, the field of bioinformatics is made local and meaningful within laboratory meeting.

Author

• Donald A. Everhart, UCSD