Wrestling with Digital Objects and Technologies in Studies of Work

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198860679.003.0002 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 25-47

Author(s):

Diane E. Bailey ◽

Stephen R. Barley ◽

Paul M. Leonardi

Keyword(s):

Structural Engineering ◽

Technical Training ◽

Social Scientists ◽

Automotive Engineering ◽

Technical Work ◽

Digital Objects ◽

Technical Terms

Studying technical work at digital interfaces, especially the work of engineers, poses challenges for ethnographers. In addition to the difficulties of understanding and documenting what engineers do at their computers, engineers use concepts and vocabularies that are foreign to social scientists without technical training. The authors describe the methods they developed over a decade to deal with these and related issues in their ethnographies of three engineering occupations: structural engineering, hardware engineering, and automotive engineering. Using dual observers, developing glossaries of technical terms, recording streams of behaviour, developing task tables, creating technology inventories, and creating databases of digital artefacts cross-referenced to one’s fieldnotes are among the 14 techniques discussed and illustrated.

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Designing Digital Infrastructure: Four Considerations for Scholarly Publishing Projects

Cultural Anthropology ◽

10.14506/ca29.2.05 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 29 (2) ◽

pp. 264-287 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Ali Kenner

Keyword(s):

Open Access ◽

Cultural Anthropology ◽

Scholarly Publishing ◽

Social Scientists ◽

Technical Work ◽

Digital Infrastructure ◽

Infrastructure Design ◽

Publishing Infrastructure ◽

Scholarly Production

As we move discussions around publishing forward and adopt open-access models, social scientists need to consider how digital infrastructure opens and closes possibilities for scholarly production and engagement. Attention to changes in publishing infrastructure—which, like most infrastructure, is often rendered invisible—is needed, not only because it allows us to make sense of socio-technical transitions at various scales and for differently invested communities, but because we need more informed participants, users who can question the system in ways that make it more robust. This essay suggests that digital infrastructure design and development should be organized around (1) platform affordances, (2) support for labor, (3) emerging circulation practices, and (4) opportunities for collaboration. By tracing the long-term socio-technical work that made it possible for Cultural Anthropology to go open access earlier this year, this essay works to make visible some behind-the-scenes details to be considered when thinking about the future of scholarly publishing.

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Managing the Fears of Studying Technical Work

Work and Technological Change ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198795209.003.0004 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 116-144

Author(s):

Stephen R. Barley ◽

Diane E. Bailey

Keyword(s):

Social Dynamics ◽

Social Worlds ◽

Clerical Work ◽

Technical Work ◽

The Social ◽

Technical Terms ◽

The Way

Technical work differs significantly from most other forms of work. This chapter explores those differences and how the differences pose important challenges for ethnographers who seek to study engineers, scientists, and other technical workers. The chapter summarizes the experience of thirty-five years’ of studying technical work to capture the social dynamics of technical worlds in the way that an earlier generation of scholars captured the social worlds of industrial, craft, and clerical work. The discussion revolves around how to handle six fears that ethnographers face when studying technical work: the fear of looking stupid, the fear of mishearing, the fear of failing to understand what technical terms mean, the fear of not capturing the complexity of the work, the fear of not finishing the study, and the fear of not being able to make sense of one’s data.

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Stewardship in the "Age of Algorithms"

First Monday ◽

10.5210/fm.v22i12.8097 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Clifford Lynch

Keyword(s):

Machine Learning ◽

Decision Making ◽

Social Scientists ◽

The Past ◽

Large Complex ◽

The Future ◽

Total Failure ◽

Digital Objects ◽

Research Questions ◽

Technical Systems

This paper explores pragmatic approaches that might be employed to document the behavior of large, complex socio-technical systems (often today shorthanded as “algorithms”) that centrally involve some mixture of personalization, opaque rules, and machine learning components. Thinking rooted in traditional archival methodology — focusing on the preservation of physical and digital objects, and perhaps the accompanying preservation of their environments to permit subsequent interpretation or performance of the objects — has been a total failure for many reasons, and we must address this problem. The approaches presented here are clearly imperfect, unproven, labor-intensive, and sensitive to the often hidden factors that the target systems use for decision-making (including personalization of results, where relevant); but they are a place to begin, and their limitations are at least outlined. Numerous research questions must be explored before we can fully understand the strengths and limitations of what is proposed here. But it represents a way forward. This is essentially the first paper I am aware of which tries to effectively make progress on the stewardship challenges facing our society in the so-called “Age of Algorithms;” the paper concludes with some discussion of the failure to address these challenges to date, and the implications for the roles of archivists as opposed to other players in the broader enterprise of stewardship — that is, the capture of a record of the present and the transmission of this record, and the records bequeathed by the past, into the future. It may well be that we see the emergence of a new group of creators of documentation, perhaps predominantly social scientists and humanists, taking the front lines in dealing with the “Age of Algorithms,” with their materials then destined for our memory organizations to be cared for into the future.

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