In Genomics with Care Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics, ... more In Genomics with Care Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics, analyzing science as a complex amalgam of cognition and affect, formal logics and tacit knowledge, statistics, and ethics. Fortun examines genomics in terms of care—a dense composite of affective and cognitive forces that drive scientists and the relations they form with their objects of research, data, knowledge, and community. Reading genomics with care shows how each resists definition yet is so entangled as to become indistinguishable. Fortun analyzes four patterns of genomic care—curation, scrupulousness, solicitude, and friendship—seen in the conceptual, technological, social, and methodological changes that transpired as the genetics of the 1980s became the genomics of the 1990s, and then the “post-genomics” of the 2000s. By tracing the dense patterns made where care binds to science, Fortun shows how these patterns mark where scientists are driven to encounter structural double b...
New features, Updates and fixes on User Interface. Add Platform Director user role Add new Card v... more New features, Updates and fixes on User Interface. Add Platform Director user role Add new Card view mode (Card - Full text) to not trim artifact's description Allow users add Restricted and/or Private artifacts on PECE Essay Add Bulk upload media files Add Bulk import Artifacts (Audio, Image, PDF, Text, Video, Website)
This paper describes work-in-progress to build an interactive, data-base driven website that crea... more This paper describes work-in-progress to build an interactive, data-base driven website that creates a space for collaborative thinking about the ethical dimensions of information technology. The site is associated with the Center for Ethics and Complex Systems at Rensselaer, which supports social science research that develops data, methodologies and theory to understand how ethics are affected by rapid technological development. The CECS website materializes a commitment to inclusion of diverse voices in the development of new ethical analyses. Failure to include diverse kinds of expertise in the development of ethical analyses is particularly problematic in an era when so many people - including social scientists themselves - acknowledge that ways of thinking about society have not kept pace with its technical development.
In this chapter the editors interview Dr. Deborah Winslow about her work at the National Science ... more In this chapter the editors interview Dr. Deborah Winslow about her work at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the evolution of data management plans (DMPs) in Anthropology and the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). She outlines what the NSF expects to see in a DMP and what not to include. The conversation moves into how anthropologists collaborate with “adjacent disciplines” and how the ideas and terms for data, and the expectations of data change. She emphasizes thinking about the kind of data you will collect and what you plan to do with those data later, in terms of requirements for sharing and ultimately archiving them. The conversation ends with a discussion about student research and formulating appropriate research questions.
This chapter points out different ways involvement with collaborative projects share form, shape,... more This chapter points out different ways involvement with collaborative projects share form, shape, or style, and may be imagined as nested within each other, like matryoshka dolls. It deals with the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), the digital infrastructure that support new collaborative projects in anthropology. It also cites the long-standing collaboration of The Asthma Files (TAF), which is an experimental ethnographic research project that eventually led to the conceptualization and development of PECE. The chapter mentions the Digital Practices in History and Ethnography Interest Group (DPHE-IG) that was organized within the Research Data Alliance (RDA), a global collaboration of individuals and institutions working to make data more easily and openly shareable. It emphasizes how the collaborative form is the experimental form analyzed by Hans-Jorg Rheinberger as essential to a modern scientific style.
In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical... more In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on ...
In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that ‘push back’ aga... more In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that ‘push back’ against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency’s EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network’s maps of real-time ozone levels in Houston. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, we analyse how critical data designers turn scientific data and findings into claims and visualisations that are meaningful in contemporary political terms. The skills of critical data designers cross scales and domains; they must identify problems calling for public consideration, and then locate, access, link, and create visualisations of data relevant to the problem. We conclude by describing hazards ahead in work to leverage Big Data to understand a...
A convincing case can be made that the principal events shaping the twentieth century until the n... more A convincing case can be made that the principal events shaping the twentieth century until the nineteen nineties have been wars: World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. The two world wars changed the practice of science. Among many other things, both wars highlighted the value to the state of scientists and scientific institutions. But in contrast to the first world war, the second altered the character of science in a fundamental and irreversible way.1 The importance and magnitude of the contribution to the war effort of engineers and scientists, particularly physicists, changed the relationship between scientists and the state. Already during the war, and with ever greater emphasis after the war with the onset of the Cold War, the armed forces in the United States, particularly the Navy and the Army Air Force, realizing that the future security of the nation and its dominance as a world power depended on the creativity of its scientific communities and the strength of its institutions of higher education, invested heavily in their support and expansion. From the mid-forties to the mid-fifties a close relationship was cemented between scientists and the military. Physicists played a key role in these developments and our paper was an outgrowth of an inquiry into the special skills and characteristics that made their contributions so central until the early sixties.
The appearance of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 was a landmark... more The appearance of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 was a landmark in history, philosophy, and sociology of science.1 It provoked a crisis among those who had constructed an ahistorical and superrational image of scientific practice. In the heady and questioning days of the 1960s Kuhn seemed to be a revolutionary or an irrationalist.2 Of the many protean ideas embedded in Structure, there was an underlying anthropological notion that did not receive widespread attention at first. Some 20 years later he made explicit the hidden anthropological perspective of his philosophy and historiography: My way of using concepts like “revolution” and “gestalt switch” was drawn from and continues appropriately to represent what historians must often go through to recapture the thought of a past generation of scientists. Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that the natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those that they themselves bring to home. And they must take as their objective the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language. “Whig history” has been the term reserved for failure in that enterprise, but its nature is better evoked by the term “ethnocentric.”3
In Genomics with Care Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics, ... more In Genomics with Care Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics, analyzing science as a complex amalgam of cognition and affect, formal logics and tacit knowledge, statistics, and ethics. Fortun examines genomics in terms of care—a dense composite of affective and cognitive forces that drive scientists and the relations they form with their objects of research, data, knowledge, and community. Reading genomics with care shows how each resists definition yet is so entangled as to become indistinguishable. Fortun analyzes four patterns of genomic care—curation, scrupulousness, solicitude, and friendship—seen in the conceptual, technological, social, and methodological changes that transpired as the genetics of the 1980s became the genomics of the 1990s, and then the “post-genomics” of the 2000s. By tracing the dense patterns made where care binds to science, Fortun shows how these patterns mark where scientists are driven to encounter structural double b...
New features, Updates and fixes on User Interface. Add Platform Director user role Add new Card v... more New features, Updates and fixes on User Interface. Add Platform Director user role Add new Card view mode (Card - Full text) to not trim artifact's description Allow users add Restricted and/or Private artifacts on PECE Essay Add Bulk upload media files Add Bulk import Artifacts (Audio, Image, PDF, Text, Video, Website)
This paper describes work-in-progress to build an interactive, data-base driven website that crea... more This paper describes work-in-progress to build an interactive, data-base driven website that creates a space for collaborative thinking about the ethical dimensions of information technology. The site is associated with the Center for Ethics and Complex Systems at Rensselaer, which supports social science research that develops data, methodologies and theory to understand how ethics are affected by rapid technological development. The CECS website materializes a commitment to inclusion of diverse voices in the development of new ethical analyses. Failure to include diverse kinds of expertise in the development of ethical analyses is particularly problematic in an era when so many people - including social scientists themselves - acknowledge that ways of thinking about society have not kept pace with its technical development.
In this chapter the editors interview Dr. Deborah Winslow about her work at the National Science ... more In this chapter the editors interview Dr. Deborah Winslow about her work at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the evolution of data management plans (DMPs) in Anthropology and the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). She outlines what the NSF expects to see in a DMP and what not to include. The conversation moves into how anthropologists collaborate with “adjacent disciplines” and how the ideas and terms for data, and the expectations of data change. She emphasizes thinking about the kind of data you will collect and what you plan to do with those data later, in terms of requirements for sharing and ultimately archiving them. The conversation ends with a discussion about student research and formulating appropriate research questions.
This chapter points out different ways involvement with collaborative projects share form, shape,... more This chapter points out different ways involvement with collaborative projects share form, shape, or style, and may be imagined as nested within each other, like matryoshka dolls. It deals with the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), the digital infrastructure that support new collaborative projects in anthropology. It also cites the long-standing collaboration of The Asthma Files (TAF), which is an experimental ethnographic research project that eventually led to the conceptualization and development of PECE. The chapter mentions the Digital Practices in History and Ethnography Interest Group (DPHE-IG) that was organized within the Research Data Alliance (RDA), a global collaboration of individuals and institutions working to make data more easily and openly shareable. It emphasizes how the collaborative form is the experimental form analyzed by Hans-Jorg Rheinberger as essential to a modern scientific style.
In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical... more In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on ...
In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that ‘push back’ aga... more In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that ‘push back’ against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency’s EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network’s maps of real-time ozone levels in Houston. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, we analyse how critical data designers turn scientific data and findings into claims and visualisations that are meaningful in contemporary political terms. The skills of critical data designers cross scales and domains; they must identify problems calling for public consideration, and then locate, access, link, and create visualisations of data relevant to the problem. We conclude by describing hazards ahead in work to leverage Big Data to understand a...
A convincing case can be made that the principal events shaping the twentieth century until the n... more A convincing case can be made that the principal events shaping the twentieth century until the nineteen nineties have been wars: World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. The two world wars changed the practice of science. Among many other things, both wars highlighted the value to the state of scientists and scientific institutions. But in contrast to the first world war, the second altered the character of science in a fundamental and irreversible way.1 The importance and magnitude of the contribution to the war effort of engineers and scientists, particularly physicists, changed the relationship between scientists and the state. Already during the war, and with ever greater emphasis after the war with the onset of the Cold War, the armed forces in the United States, particularly the Navy and the Army Air Force, realizing that the future security of the nation and its dominance as a world power depended on the creativity of its scientific communities and the strength of its institutions of higher education, invested heavily in their support and expansion. From the mid-forties to the mid-fifties a close relationship was cemented between scientists and the military. Physicists played a key role in these developments and our paper was an outgrowth of an inquiry into the special skills and characteristics that made their contributions so central until the early sixties.
The appearance of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 was a landmark... more The appearance of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 was a landmark in history, philosophy, and sociology of science.1 It provoked a crisis among those who had constructed an ahistorical and superrational image of scientific practice. In the heady and questioning days of the 1960s Kuhn seemed to be a revolutionary or an irrationalist.2 Of the many protean ideas embedded in Structure, there was an underlying anthropological notion that did not receive widespread attention at first. Some 20 years later he made explicit the hidden anthropological perspective of his philosophy and historiography: My way of using concepts like “revolution” and “gestalt switch” was drawn from and continues appropriately to represent what historians must often go through to recapture the thought of a past generation of scientists. Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that the natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those that they themselves bring to home. And they must take as their objective the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language. “Whig history” has been the term reserved for failure in that enterprise, but its nature is better evoked by the term “ethnocentric.”3
Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, 2013
Recent research indicates that asthma is more complicated than already recognized, requiring a mu... more Recent research indicates that asthma is more complicated than already recognized, requiring a multilateral approach of study in order to better understand its many facets. Apart from being a health problem, asthma is seen as a knowledge problem, and as we argue here, a cultural problem. Employing cultural analysis we outline ways to challenge conventional ideas and practices about asthma by considering how culture shapes asthma experience, diagnosis, management, research, and politics. Finally, we discuss the value of viewing asthma through multiple lenses, and how such explanatory pluralism advances transdisciplinary approaches to asthma.
Uploads
Papers by Mike Fortun