Life In The Trading Zone Of Digital STS

The last two decades have seen digital STS engaging with a range of computational techniques for data harvesting, analysis and visualization. Inevitably, this has created new patterns of collaboration between STS and adjacent fields, as well as new types of projects that attempt to combine digital methods with established analytical approaches in STS. Drawing on Galison’s analysis of trading zones in Physics – a tool-heavy discipline par excellence – this paper examines the types of pragmatic exchanges and pidgin languages that have developed at the Techno-Anthropology Lab in Copenhagen since it was established five years ago. Finally, the paper discusses whether Galison’s key argument that the disunity of the field (of physics) is the source of its strength, has a bearing on the current pattern of concurrent tool and theory developments in Digital STS.