What Time Should We Arrive at the Party? The Historical and the Contemporary in Studies of Science and Technology**

Abstract

As the field of science and technology studies (STS) matures, phenomena that STS scholars investigated decades ago are becoming the subject of historical research. By one of those coincidences more common in fiction than in everyday life, I received a short email from an American historian of science on the very day that I began working in earnest on this essay. Referring to my book on the coproduction of knowledge and control during the Human Genome Project, he wrote: “I came across this early trace of Reordering Life in the archive!” Attached was a letter that a famous genome scientist sent me in 1990 welcoming me to “to attend laboratory meetings, to observe work in progress, to talk with members of the staff, and to request, on an individual basis, to interview them.” This coincidence not only underlines how the contemporary inevitably becomes the historical, it also captures some differences between archive-based investigations and field research using ethnographic and interviewing methods. My colleague “came across” the letter. I participated in bringing it into existence, not least to enable the action authorized by its final sentence: “Please feel free to attach a copy of this letter to your research proposals.” Field research depends on the cooperation of the actors studied, without which work simply cannot be done. Archival work does not require such direct assistance, although it does depend on what various actors wrote and kept, not to mention their maneuvers to strategically shape the documentary evidence that constitutes the historical record. Archivists’ judgments about what merits preservation also matter. Clearly, the epistemic and ethical constraints of contemporary and archival research differ. At times, these differences are translated into normative questions framed in disciplinary terms. Do scholars who study the contemporary arrive too early? Do historians arrive too late? Or less chauvinistically phrased: What time should we arrive at the party? Focusing on timing, I argue, directs attention away from more important matters, and the party analogy helpfully illustrates why. In everyday life, the