Digital Experiments in the Making: Methods, Tools, and Platforms in the Infrastructuring of STS
Digital infrastructures are ubiquitous in the technosciences and in everyday life, and have become crucial objects of analysis for diverse STS researchers and their arrays of approaches. Digital infrastructures are also emerging as instruments for STS research itself, composed of an expanding array of methods, modules, data tools, visualizations, and platforms that create new possibilities and places for experiments in how we “do STS”, and for academic knowledge production writ large. At the same time, our new sociotechnical research infrastructures raise their own technical, epistemological, and ethical questions and difficulties, asking us to re-visit and re-invent some of our own methodological assumptions, analytic habits, and goals, scholarly and political.
This open panel invites contributions from researchers engaged in fresh ways of developing and using digital technologies for ethnographic and other kinds of qualitative research on the technosciences. We are especially interested in presentations from researchers developing or using new digital technologies and media in their own research, experimenting with new approaches to data sharing and analysis, and to open access publishing and other forms of scholarly communication with engaged publics. We encourage epistemological and ethical analyses and reflections on these digital modes of knowledge production in STS, including presentations that explore new tools and concepts pertaining to privacy and related issues in the digital realm.
Panel Chairs: Lina Franken, Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun, Gertraud Koch
