Reconfiguring Evidence: Interacting with Digital Objects in Scientific Practice

Abstract

This paper analyzes how scientists working in a multidisciplinary team produce scientific evidence through building and manipulating scientific visualizations. The research is based on ethnographic observations of scientists' weekly work meetings and the observation of videotapes of these meetings. The scientists observed work with advanced imaging technologies to produce a 4D computer model of heat transfer in human prostate tissues. The idea of 'digital objects' is proposed in order to conceptually locate their 'materiality', observed in the practices of producing evidence through the handling of three-dimensional renderings of data. The manipulation of digital objects seeks to establish meaningful differences between parameters of interest, both when building and when analyzing them. These digital objects are dealt with as part of the empirical evidence used in the course of practices of visualizing and modeling natural phenomena. This process, which can be contextualized historically in terms of the development of imaging technologies, becomes crucial in understanding what counts as empirical evidence in current scientific work.

Computer Versus Microscope: Visual Activity Fields of Instruments in the Information Age

“…As we have already mentioned, cyborg visuality has provided an interesting way to appreciate the role of embodied practices and the relationship between humans and instruments (computers) in the process of visualization (eg. Alač 2008;2011;Monteiro 2010a;Myers 2008). This paper insists on the similarly neglected aspect of the materiality of visualization-the instrument of visualization.…”

“…To rephrase the title of her monograph, visual representation opens up new ways of handling scientific objects. Likewise, other works on digital visualization have shown how the dynamic character of digital images has to do not only with the way they are represented, but also with the ways in which they are constructed and pragmatically treated as material objects (Monteiro 2010a;Myers 2008). Drawing on this literature, the specificities of the instrumental fields of two alternative imaging technologies-the microscope and the computer-are analysed here as intersubjective spaces through which the concrete organization of the scientific laboratory is achieved and where different manners of visualizing and viewing the same scientific objects-human chromosomes-are deployed.…”

Ethnography and interdisciplinary work: experiences from the US and Brazil

“…As one participant said: "Okay, we made our way through the definitions! (laughs) Let's now look at actually what we're using" (Monteiro 2010b). In this project, since the work was mainly related to the building of a computer model, many meetings dealt with specific images produced by different PhD students and professors: images of heat, MRI images, visualizations of cells, and cell death rates due to heat, or images from graphs, which caused many times confusion among participants.…”

Construindo imagens e territórios: pensando a visualidade e a materialidade do sensoriamento remoto

“…Estudos etnográficos de visualização científica vêm mostrando como o processo de produção de imagens/inscrições enquanto evidência se configura num processo altamente incorporado e interativo (Lynch, 1990;Kraut, Fussel, Siegel, 2003;Lynch, 2006;Monteiro, 2010b). A imagem torna-se evidência como etapa final de um longo processamento, durante o qual aspectos dela são constituídos enquanto elementos significativos (Myers, 2007;Ala, 2008).…”