More Instrument than Data: Attuning to the Apparatus - I

Abstract

From waterproof field notebooks, petabyte-scale databases and repositories, surveys, the lighting of fires on beaches to indicate distance and mass spectrometers, to sensor-equipped drones, IoT enabled personal quantification, geosynchronous satellites and LIDAR mapping, accounts of instrumentation are vital to the constitution, interpretation and capacity of scientific practice and knowledge work. The design and implementation of particular instruments not only elucidates significant negotiations that occur within the scientific community but also impacts and embodies epistemology and daily practice, while novel instrumentation disrupts extant practice and spurs innovative work, resource management and research. Instrumentation potentially enables movement from the complex to the complicated, from local to global, and from observation into productive data. Scientific instrumentation fundamentally informs the work, capacity, and potential outcomes of knowledge production, while a variety of forms of instrumentation characterize the infrastructure of evidence-based policy interventions. And yet, discussions around scientific practice have largely focused on instruments’ more favorable counterpart -- data. The ongoing focus on the re-use, sharing and deployment of data itself has recently been a focus of work in science studies, but often leaves instrumentation itself ill-considered or occluded in practice. In this open panel, we foreground instrumentation in its diversity of implementations in order to refocus our attention to the heterogeneous and varied instruments through which we parse, interpret, and translate observations of the world and pre-existing data. We welcome papers discussing the sociotechnical, interpretive, and innovative aspects of instrumentation, broadly conceived, that often remain unconsidered in studies of data, its practices, and analyses.

Individual Presentations

• Instrumenting Sustainability Transitions, Calibrating Marine Energy Futures - Shana Lee Hirsch, University of Washington

• The Lowly Thermometer in an Era of Big Data - Sarah Catherine Inman, University of Washington

• Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Data: A Case Study of Knowledge Production in an Immersive Virtual Reality Environment - Przemyslaw Matt Lukacz, University of Illinois at Chicago

Session Organizer

• Stephen Slota, University of California, Irvine