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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 Merton's 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.

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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.

The notion of immersion implies that the "field" that ethnographers enter exists as an independently bounded set of relationships and activities that is autonomous of the fieldwork through which it is discovered. Yet in a world of infinite interconnections and overlapping contexts, the ethnographic field cannot simply exist, awaiting discovery. It has to be laboriously constructed, pulled apart from all the other possibilities for contextualization to which its constituent relationships and connections could also be referred.

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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 paper describes a study which 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 between these different activities offers a means to 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 which remain agnostic in the face of such claims: a connective approach to ethnography offers considerable promise in this regard.