Pub Date : 2024-05-06DOI: 10.1177/01622439241249573
Susan Halford, Mark Weal, Faranak Hardcastle, Nicholas Gibbins, Samantha Pearman-Kanza, Catherine Pope
In the past thirty years, the Web has developed from its inception as a layer of protocols on top of the Internet to use by more than 5 billion people and organizations. This has driven the creation of vast quantities of data and led to deep concerns about the politics of digital data and computational methods. To date, critical investigation of these concerns has focused on large commercial platforms built on top of the Web, and their use of machine learning methods. Meanwhile, less attention has been paid to the underlying design and protocols of Web itself, and how these might be implicated in the very same process and concerns. We explore ongoing endeavors to transform the Web from a library of documents intended for humans to a “semantic Web” using symbolic artificial intelligence to enable machine reasoning across multiple heterogenous data sources. In principle, this would transform the production and circulation of knowledge at Web scale. We present the findings from an experimental, interdisciplinary study exploring the epistemological politics and sociomaterial practices involved in situated accomplishment of the semantic Web. Our findings have consequences for the future of the Web and the future of Web-based platforms.
{"title":"Semantic Web Practices: Infrastructural Politics and the Future of the Web","authors":"Susan Halford, Mark Weal, Faranak Hardcastle, Nicholas Gibbins, Samantha Pearman-Kanza, Catherine Pope","doi":"10.1177/01622439241249573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241249573","url":null,"abstract":"In the past thirty years, the Web has developed from its inception as a layer of protocols on top of the Internet to use by more than 5 billion people and organizations. This has driven the creation of vast quantities of data and led to deep concerns about the politics of digital data and computational methods. To date, critical investigation of these concerns has focused on large commercial platforms built on top of the Web, and their use of machine learning methods. Meanwhile, less attention has been paid to the underlying design and protocols of Web itself, and how these might be implicated in the very same process and concerns. We explore ongoing endeavors to transform the Web from a library of documents intended for humans to a “semantic Web” using symbolic artificial intelligence to enable machine reasoning across multiple heterogenous data sources. In principle, this would transform the production and circulation of knowledge at Web scale. We present the findings from an experimental, interdisciplinary study exploring the epistemological politics and sociomaterial practices involved in situated accomplishment of the semantic Web. Our findings have consequences for the future of the Web and the future of Web-based platforms.","PeriodicalId":48083,"journal":{"name":"Science Technology & Human Values","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140882097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-16DOI: 10.1177/01622439241245746
Marina Fedorova, Melissa Mazmanian, Paul Dourish
In this article, we analyze the productive role of aesthetics in organizing technoscientific work. Specifically, we investigate how aesthetic judgments form and inform code-writing practices at a large web services company in Russia. We focus on how programmers express aesthetic judgments about code and software design in everyday practice and explore how language with positive and negative valences is deployed. We find that programmers label code as “beautiful” without defining or establishing agreement about the term and are thereby able to maintain different ideals of beauty within the same organization. However, by learning how to avoid what senior developers deem to be “ugly” code, developers become socialized into producing code with a similar style and logic that we describe as “not ugly.” The fieldwork suggests that aesthetic language can function simultaneously as a mechanism that supports professional diversity within an organization and as a tool for producing consistencies in software design. Studying manifestations of both positive and negative aesthetic language in technoscientific work provides insight into professional practices and the various roles aesthetic language can play in organizational life.
{"title":"Coding Beauty and Decoding Ugliness: The Role of Aesthetic Concerns in Programming Practices","authors":"Marina Fedorova, Melissa Mazmanian, Paul Dourish","doi":"10.1177/01622439241245746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241245746","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we analyze the productive role of aesthetics in organizing technoscientific work. Specifically, we investigate how aesthetic judgments form and inform code-writing practices at a large web services company in Russia. We focus on how programmers express aesthetic judgments about code and software design in everyday practice and explore how language with positive and negative valences is deployed. We find that programmers label code as “beautiful” without defining or establishing agreement about the term and are thereby able to maintain different ideals of beauty within the same organization. However, by learning how to avoid what senior developers deem to be “ugly” code, developers become socialized into producing code with a similar style and logic that we describe as “not ugly.” The fieldwork suggests that aesthetic language can function simultaneously as a mechanism that supports professional diversity within an organization and as a tool for producing consistencies in software design. Studying manifestations of both positive and negative aesthetic language in technoscientific work provides insight into professional practices and the various roles aesthetic language can play in organizational life.","PeriodicalId":48083,"journal":{"name":"Science Technology & Human Values","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140616334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-09DOI: 10.1177/01622439241240411
Ashwin Jacob Mathew
Scripts can help us understand the designer–user relationship, by offering analysis of designers’ intent in technological objects and examination of users’ behaviors through willingness (and unwillingness) to take on scripts. But how are we to understand these relationships in the context of cybersecurity, in the face of adversaries determined to gain unauthorized access to computer systems by actively subverting scripts? In effect, cybersecurity attacks involve re-scripting of computing systems to gain unauthorized access through unscripted features of these systems. Cybersecurity attacks are always uncertain events: attackers can never be certain when re-scripting will be successful, and defenders can never be certain when or where to expect an attack, as unscripted features are difficult to know until they are exploited. In this paper, I study practices of cybersecurity incident response to examine how cybersecurity engineers respond to the novel attacks they encounter daily. I show how these are fundamentally unscripted practices emerging in response to unstable scripts, structured through the uncertainties inherent in cybersecurity engineering practice. The improvised practices and changing networks of social relations which I trace demonstrate the limits of stable scripts and provide new tools for analyzing unstable scripts.
{"title":"Unscripted Practices for Uncertain Events: Organizational Problems in Cybersecurity Incident Management","authors":"Ashwin Jacob Mathew","doi":"10.1177/01622439241240411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241240411","url":null,"abstract":"Scripts can help us understand the designer–user relationship, by offering analysis of designers’ intent in technological objects and examination of users’ behaviors through willingness (and unwillingness) to take on scripts. But how are we to understand these relationships in the context of cybersecurity, in the face of adversaries determined to gain unauthorized access to computer systems by actively subverting scripts? In effect, cybersecurity attacks involve re-scripting of computing systems to gain unauthorized access through unscripted features of these systems. Cybersecurity attacks are always uncertain events: attackers can never be certain when re-scripting will be successful, and defenders can never be certain when or where to expect an attack, as unscripted features are difficult to know until they are exploited. In this paper, I study practices of cybersecurity incident response to examine how cybersecurity engineers respond to the novel attacks they encounter daily. I show how these are fundamentally unscripted practices emerging in response to unstable scripts, structured through the uncertainties inherent in cybersecurity engineering practice. The improvised practices and changing networks of social relations which I trace demonstrate the limits of stable scripts and provide new tools for analyzing unstable scripts.","PeriodicalId":48083,"journal":{"name":"Science Technology & Human Values","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140571121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-09DOI: 10.1177/01622439241239768
Marieke Meesters, Annet Pauwelussen, Esther Turnhout
This paper explores the consequences of a shift in Dutch coastal management. The management approach transitioned from aiming to keep the sea at bay toward the stimulation of dynamic sea-land relations. This shift toward “dynamic management” can be seen as part of wider trends in both ecological and science, technology, and society thinking on coasts as amphibious more-than-human entanglements. We draw on a case study of the Wadden Sea barrier island Ameland to develop the notion of amphibious response-ability. We show that while dynamic management enabled amphibiousness in the land–sea interface, it limited other types of amphibiousness, with consequences for the possibilities to respond to coastal changes. These consequences for amphibious response-abilities became critical when rapid coastal erosion threatened and partially destroyed a gas platform. Our case shows that even when coastal management regimes are amphibious because they unleash and build on natural processes, they can still have harmful consequences, and they can in fact limit the possibilities for integrated responses to coastal change. We conclude by suggesting that heterogeneous knowledge alliances are needed to expose and work with the politics of (amphibious) coastal management regimes.
{"title":"The Politics of Amphibiousness: Shifting Coastal Management in the Netherlands","authors":"Marieke Meesters, Annet Pauwelussen, Esther Turnhout","doi":"10.1177/01622439241239768","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241239768","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the consequences of a shift in Dutch coastal management. The management approach transitioned from aiming to keep the sea at bay toward the stimulation of dynamic sea-land relations. This shift toward “dynamic management” can be seen as part of wider trends in both ecological and science, technology, and society thinking on coasts as amphibious more-than-human entanglements. We draw on a case study of the Wadden Sea barrier island Ameland to develop the notion of amphibious response-ability. We show that while dynamic management enabled amphibiousness in the land–sea interface, it limited other types of amphibiousness, with consequences for the possibilities to respond to coastal changes. These consequences for amphibious response-abilities became critical when rapid coastal erosion threatened and partially destroyed a gas platform. Our case shows that even when coastal management regimes are amphibious because they unleash and build on natural processes, they can still have harmful consequences, and they can in fact limit the possibilities for integrated responses to coastal change. We conclude by suggesting that heterogeneous knowledge alliances are needed to expose and work with the politics of (amphibious) coastal management regimes.","PeriodicalId":48083,"journal":{"name":"Science Technology & Human Values","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140571086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-05DOI: 10.1177/01622439241240796
Mascha Gugganig
Vertical farming is an emerging urban food growth proposal that has gained considerable attention for its ability to be space-efficient, independent of outside weather conditions, and to address a dismal agricultural system and ecoclimatic crises. VF is also a field riddled with debates on the unsustainability and high (energy) costs of a highly automated, indoor growth system that produces only a small range of perishable food. This paper explores arguments, visions, and internal disagreements among scientists, engineers, consultants, and entrepreneurs who form a heterogeneous, elite group of sociotechnical vanguards that popularize not yet widely accepted vanguard visions of future urban food production. It demonstrates that for the dominant vertical farm vanguard vision, a majority of vanguards borrow popular concepts and imaginaries from other sectors: containment of plant growth, cleanliness, the capability to feed the world, and the land-sparing narrative. The findings suggest three dimensions that add to the theorization of vanguard visions: the central role of mobilized problem-scripts; internal disagreements that indicate the contingency of vanguard visions and the existence of fringe visions; and that disagreements can reveal caveat politics, where a technical system, like VF, is not seen as the solution, but one of many.
{"title":"Vanguard Visions of Vertical Farming: Envisaging and Contesting an Emerging Food Production System","authors":"Mascha Gugganig","doi":"10.1177/01622439241240796","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241240796","url":null,"abstract":"Vertical farming is an emerging urban food growth proposal that has gained considerable attention for its ability to be space-efficient, independent of outside weather conditions, and to address a dismal agricultural system and ecoclimatic crises. VF is also a field riddled with debates on the unsustainability and high (energy) costs of a highly automated, indoor growth system that produces only a small range of perishable food. This paper explores arguments, visions, and internal disagreements among scientists, engineers, consultants, and entrepreneurs who form a heterogeneous, elite group of sociotechnical vanguards that popularize not yet widely accepted vanguard visions of future urban food production. It demonstrates that for the dominant vertical farm vanguard vision, a majority of vanguards borrow popular concepts and imaginaries from other sectors: containment of plant growth, cleanliness, the capability to feed the world, and the land-sparing narrative. The findings suggest three dimensions that add to the theorization of vanguard visions: the central role of mobilized problem-scripts; internal disagreements that indicate the contingency of vanguard visions and the existence of fringe visions; and that disagreements can reveal caveat politics, where a technical system, like VF, is not seen as the solution, but one of many.","PeriodicalId":48083,"journal":{"name":"Science Technology & Human Values","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140571197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-19DOI: 10.1177/01622439241236544
Warwick Anderson
The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annually awards the John Desmond Bernal Prize to one or more individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies. Past winners have included founders of the field, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This article is the revised text of Warwick Anderson's 2023 Bernal Lecture.
{"title":"Islands and Beaches in Science and Technology Studies","authors":"Warwick Anderson","doi":"10.1177/01622439241236544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241236544","url":null,"abstract":"The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annually awards the John Desmond Bernal Prize to one or more individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies. Past winners have included founders of the field, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This article is the revised text of Warwick Anderson's 2023 Bernal Lecture.","PeriodicalId":48083,"journal":{"name":"Science Technology & Human Values","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140167965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-07DOI: 10.1177/01622439231225531
Diane M. Nelson
This essay is written in the wake of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war, grounded in the Cold War–Doctrine of National Security which understood Indigenous people as “internal enemy.” People who joined social movements were also seeking security: bodily integrity, land, a living wage. For Indigenous people, it was security to be who they are: speaking their languages, practicing their spirituality and lifeways. Before, during, and after the war, hydroelectric projects have been identified with security, given their promises of light and progress. I explore how “scripts” like Race, The State, Citizenship, and The Plantation are inscribed into such objects and how obdurate such prescriptions are. Yet Akrich says that users may define quite different roles of their own. If this happens the objects remain a chimera (p. 208). Through several moments over the last seventy years in Guatemala, I show how various forms of “security”—bodily, communal, productive, national, and financial—are at stake and how hydroelectrics are always under contestation, always chimera.
{"title":"Hydroelectric Chimeras and “Our” Mayan Rivers: De-inscribing Security in Guatemala","authors":"Diane M. Nelson","doi":"10.1177/01622439231225531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439231225531","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is written in the wake of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war, grounded in the Cold War–Doctrine of National Security which understood Indigenous people as “internal enemy.” People who joined social movements were also seeking security: bodily integrity, land, a living wage. For Indigenous people, it was security to be who they are: speaking their languages, practicing their spirituality and lifeways. Before, during, and after the war, hydroelectric projects have been identified with security, given their promises of light and progress. I explore how “scripts” like Race, The State, Citizenship, and The Plantation are inscribed into such objects and how obdurate such prescriptions are. Yet Akrich says that users may define quite different roles of their own. If this happens the objects remain a chimera (p. 208). Through several moments over the last seventy years in Guatemala, I show how various forms of “security”—bodily, communal, productive, national, and financial—are at stake and how hydroelectrics are always under contestation, always chimera.","PeriodicalId":48083,"journal":{"name":"Science Technology & Human Values","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140074366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-07DOI: 10.1177/01622439241233946
Hannah Landecker
Anthropogenic pressures now shape the development, interrelations, and evolution of microbes, plants, animals, and humans. In an age of oxidative stress and failures of DNA repair, cytokine storms and microbial dysbiosis, social scientific theory stutters in the face of biological consequences of forces it masterfully detailed, from biopower to looping kinds. Concepts of the fallibility of knowledge from the unanticipated consequence to the wicked problem are too generic to fathom the nature of the living within reconfigured biotic-abiotic relations in the aftermath of industrialization. Working through examples—genetic modification in weed control, and solvents in cryobiology—this paper offers a novel analytic for anthropogenic biology specific to the relations between knowledge and life in the wake of the industrial twentieth century: a novel patterning of living matter and process from the molecular to the ecological arising with forms of biological control. Changes in pathogens and hosts, targets and bystanders are specific to the form of control but not anticipated by it, illegible within its originating logics. Hubris gone moldy, anthropogenic biology grows from forms of power that overestimate the comprehensiveness of their own efficacy, mistaking the ability to temporarily control living things for full knowledge of them.
人类活动的压力现在影响着微生物、植物、动物和人类的发展、相互关系和进化。在一个氧化应激和 DNA 修复失败、细胞因子风暴和微生物菌群失调的时代，社会科学理论在面对它所擅长的生物力量（从生物力量到循环种类）所造成的生物后果时显得步履蹒跚。从意料之外的后果到棘手的问题，关于知识易错的概念过于笼统，无法理解工业化之后生物-生物关系重构下的生命本质。本文通过杂草控制中的基因修饰和低温生物学中的溶剂等实例，针对 20 世纪工业化之后知识与生命之间的关系，提出了一种新的人为生物学分析方法：生物控制形式所产生的从分子到生态的生命物质和过程的新模式。病原体和宿主、目标和旁观者的变化是控制形式所特有的，但并不在控制形式的预料之中，在其起源逻辑中无法辨认。人类生物学的傲慢已经发霉，它源于高估自身效力的权力形式，将暂时控制生物的能力误认为是对生物的全面了解。
{"title":"Life as Aftermath: Social Theory for an Age of Anthropogenic Biology","authors":"Hannah Landecker","doi":"10.1177/01622439241233946","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241233946","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropogenic pressures now shape the development, interrelations, and evolution of microbes, plants, animals, and humans. In an age of oxidative stress and failures of DNA repair, cytokine storms and microbial dysbiosis, social scientific theory stutters in the face of biological consequences of forces it masterfully detailed, from biopower to looping kinds. Concepts of the fallibility of knowledge from the unanticipated consequence to the wicked problem are too generic to fathom the nature of the living within reconfigured biotic-abiotic relations in the aftermath of industrialization. Working through examples—genetic modification in weed control, and solvents in cryobiology—this paper offers a novel analytic for anthropogenic biology specific to the relations between knowledge and life in the wake of the industrial twentieth century: a novel patterning of living matter and process from the molecular to the ecological arising with forms of biological control. Changes in pathogens and hosts, targets and bystanders are specific to the form of control but not anticipated by it, illegible within its originating logics. Hubris gone moldy, anthropogenic biology grows from forms of power that overestimate the comprehensiveness of their own efficacy, mistaking the ability to temporarily control living things for full knowledge of them.","PeriodicalId":48083,"journal":{"name":"Science Technology & Human Values","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140074148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-06DOI: 10.1177/01622439231203445
Christian Greiffenhagen
Peer review has never been a uniform practice but is now more diverse than ever. Despite a vast literature, little is known of how different disciplines organize peer review. This paper draws on ninety-five qualitative interviews with editors and publishers and several hundred written reports to analyze the organization of peer review in pure mathematics. This article focuses on the practice of “quick opinions” at top journals in mathematics: asking (senior) experts about a paper’s importance, and only after positive evaluation sending the paper for a full review (which most importantly means checking the paper’s correctness). Quick opinions constitute a form of “importance only” peer review and are thus the opposite of the “soundness only” approach at mega-journals such as PLOS ONE. Quick opinions emerged in response to increasing submissions and the fact that checking correctness in mathematics is particularly time-consuming. Quick opinions are informal and are often only addressed to editors. They trade on, indeed reinforce, a journal hierarchy, where journal names are often used as a “members’ measurement system” to characterize importance. Finally, quick opinions highlight that a key function of the peer-reviewed journal today, apart from validation and filtration, is “designation”—giving authors items on their CV.
{"title":"Judging Importance before Checking Correctness: Quick Opinions in Mathematical Peer Review","authors":"Christian Greiffenhagen","doi":"10.1177/01622439231203445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439231203445","url":null,"abstract":"Peer review has never been a uniform practice but is now more diverse than ever. Despite a vast literature, little is known of how different disciplines organize peer review. This paper draws on ninety-five qualitative interviews with editors and publishers and several hundred written reports to analyze the organization of peer review in pure mathematics. This article focuses on the practice of “quick opinions” at top journals in mathematics: asking (senior) experts about a paper’s importance, and only after positive evaluation sending the paper for a full review (which most importantly means checking the paper’s correctness). Quick opinions constitute a form of “importance only” peer review and are thus the opposite of the “soundness only” approach at mega-journals such as PLOS ONE. Quick opinions emerged in response to increasing submissions and the fact that checking correctness in mathematics is particularly time-consuming. Quick opinions are informal and are often only addressed to editors. They trade on, indeed reinforce, a journal hierarchy, where journal names are often used as a “members’ measurement system” to characterize importance. Finally, quick opinions highlight that a key function of the peer-reviewed journal today, apart from validation and filtration, is “designation”—giving authors items on their CV.","PeriodicalId":48083,"journal":{"name":"Science Technology & Human Values","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135680904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-18DOI: 10.1177/01622439231200170
Sarah Perret, Claudia Aradau
Data have become a vital device of border governance and security. Recent scholarship on the datafication of borders and migration at the intersection of science and technology studies and critical security studies has privileged concepts attuned to messiness, contingency, and friction such as data assemblages and infrastructures. This paper proposes to revisit and expand the analytical vocabulary of script analysis to understand what comes to count as data, what forms of data come to matter and how “drawing data together” reconfigures power and agency at Europe’s borders. Empirically, we analyze controversies about the practices of asylum decision-making and age assessment in Greece. We show that agency of “users” is unequally distributed through anticipations of subscription and dis-inscription, while asylum seekers are conscripted within security scripts that restrict their agency. Moreover, as a multiplicity of inscriptions are produced, migrants’ claims can be disqualified through circumscriptions of data and ascriptions of expertise.
{"title":"Drawing Data Together: Inscriptions, Asylum, and Scripts of Security","authors":"Sarah Perret, Claudia Aradau","doi":"10.1177/01622439231200170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439231200170","url":null,"abstract":"Data have become a vital device of border governance and security. Recent scholarship on the datafication of borders and migration at the intersection of science and technology studies and critical security studies has privileged concepts attuned to messiness, contingency, and friction such as data assemblages and infrastructures. This paper proposes to revisit and expand the analytical vocabulary of script analysis to understand what comes to count as data, what forms of data come to matter and how “drawing data together” reconfigures power and agency at Europe’s borders. Empirically, we analyze controversies about the practices of asylum decision-making and age assessment in Greece. We show that agency of “users” is unequally distributed through anticipations of subscription and dis-inscription, while asylum seekers are conscripted within security scripts that restrict their agency. Moreover, as a multiplicity of inscriptions are produced, migrants’ claims can be disqualified through circumscriptions of data and ascriptions of expertise.","PeriodicalId":48083,"journal":{"name":"Science Technology & Human Values","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135884937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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