The majority of Tousignant’s sources are historical: laboratory spaces and equipment that have remained, documents that have been archived, left, or put away, and stories told about what was (oral histories). The last chapter is based more substantially on ethnographic observation.
She notes that she paid attention to the sites where she found documents (most were not formally archived, but kept or left in situ) and where she conducted interviews, and spent additional time interacting with these spaces and their occupants informally. In terms of responsibility, she notes that she does not fully share the sense of nostalgia and optimism her interlocutors often projected, and instead she underscores past constraints on their capacity to detect and to protect, and its future uncertainty. But she notes that she takes seriously memories and hopes of “better times” as indices of “better toxicology.” She notes that she studied the topic over a period of about eight months between January 2010 and March 2011.
Tousignant includes some direct excerpts from her interlocutors within her text. In chapter 5 she notes in footnote 1: “I attended weekly staff meetings; conversed, mostly informally, with staff members during their workday; participated in the design and data collection for the envenomation survey; hung out in the common office and, later, the helpline room.” She does not describe how she managed her own ethnographic data. She cites within some of the footnotes her interview sources.
In chapter 2 she mentions: The sources of information I obtained about the lab during this period are the following…”
