CIM researcher Michael Dieter will co-present a keynote with David Gauthier titled 'Recounting Media Art and Net Criticism Mailinglists (1995-2019)' at the Data Science Institute, Lancaster University on 19th March as part of the Data Visualisation Workshop for Critical Computational Discourse. The presentation will draw primarily from material on computational methods and media art mailinglists recently published in the journal Internet Histories - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24701475.2019.1674580.

For more information and to register, see: https://portal.lancaster.ac.uk/intranet/news/article/data-visualisation-workshop-for-critical-computational-discourse-19th-march

This paper examines recent street tests of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the UK and makes the case for an experimental approach in the sociology of intelligent technology. In recent years intelligent vehicle testing has moved from the laboratory to the street, raising the question of whether technology trials equally constitute tests of society. To adequately address this question, I argue, we need to move beyond analytic frameworks developed in 1990s Science and Technology Studies, which stipulated “a social deficit” of both intelligent technology and technology testing. This diagnosis no longer provides an effective starting point for sociological analysis, as real‐world tests of intelligent technology explicitly seek to bring social phenomena within the remit of technology testing. I propose that we examine instead whether and how the introduction of intelligent vehicles into the street involves the qualification and re‐qualification of relations and dynamics between social actors. I develop this proposal through a discussion of a field study of AV street trials in three cities in the UK—London, Milton Keynes, and Coventry. These urban trials were accompanied by the claim that automotive testing on the open road will enable cars to operate in tune with the social environment, and I show how iterations of street testing undo this proposition and compel its reformulation. Current test designs are limited by their narrow conception of sociality in terms of interaction between cars and other road users. They exclude from consideration the relational capacities of vehicles and human road users alike—their ability to co‐exist on the open road. I conclude by making the case for methodological innovation in social studies of intelligent technology: by combining social research and design methods, we can re‐purpose real‐world test environments in order to elucidate social issues and dynamics raised by intelligent vehicles in society by experimental means, and, possibly, test society.

Link to paper: https://digitalsts.net/essays/digital-visualizations-for-thinking-with-the-environment/

As part of the collectively edited volume digitalSTS: A Field Guide for Science & Technology Studies (Princeton University Press and Open Access), Calvillo’s contribution draws on the air pollution visualisation project In the Air to suggest the production of visualizations as an STS, material, feminist research method, particularly suited to examine the invisible materiality of environmental agents and to think with the environment. Considering air pollution and pollen visualisations as affective airscapes, the chapter reflects on their interfering capacity in re-thinking environmental justice and multispecies urban relations.

The difference a method makes: methods as epistemic objects in computational science

Matt Spencer

Abstract

Computational science is intrinsically interdisciplinary; the methods of one scientist may be the objects of study for another. This essay is an attempt to develop an interdisciplinary framework that can analyse research into methods as a distinctive kind of epistemic orientation in science, drawing on two examples from fieldwork with a group of specialists in computer modelling. Where methods for simulation are objects of research in their own right, they are distinct in kind to the objects of simulation, and raise a different set of sociological and philosophical questions. Drawing on the historian Hans-Jorg Rheinberger’s theory of epistemic objects, I ask: what kind of epistemic object does a method make, and how is research organized around it? I argue that methods become objects of research as purposeful things, in terms of their enrolment in the intentional structure of the experimental system. And, as methods research tends to be interventionary, in the sense that its mode of study creates and modifies its objects, we therefore observe a practical recursion, a dynamic of scientific reinvention, a ‘tuning’ of experimental systems that sheds light on the form of these systems’ historicity, their differential self-reproduction.

 https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/VaCBm8ZMM3AXhcz9FmJa/full?target=10.1080/1600910X.2019.1610018