![17
Unfolding Digital Materiality
How Engineers Struggle
to Shape Tangible and
Fluid Objects
Alexandre Camus and Dominique Vinck
Grasping a Matter-
Network
In this chapter we address two issues related to the notion of digital materiality.
The first one concerns the fluidity: On what rests the fluidity of the digital? And
how can we qualify the process leading to the production of objects that can circu-
late? The second one concerns the mode of existence (Souriau [1954] 2009; Latour
2013) of digital artifacts: What does becoming digital imply for an artifact? How to
qualify the dynamic of becoming digital? We deal with these questions, keeping
distance from an understanding of digital as a matter, which can be defined ac-
cording to an opposition container/content or matter/form. We do not propose a
new minimal unit that is supposed to reduce the composition of a digital matter.
On the contrary, we chose to tackle the digital materiality from the more dynamic
angle of the material, which we define as the matter mobilized in activity and
which is transforming as the interactions between the craftsman and the materi-
als unfold. First, a constantly growing number of people are involved in the pro-
duction of information and digital craftsmanship: these interactions remain to be
studied. Second, following the moves of the material will enable us to overtake the
vain quest to establish the minimal unit of the digital.
STS scholars have given renewed importance to the materiality of information,
revealing the machines and invisible workers (Star 1991; Denis and Pontille 2012)
that allow them to function—
as well as the protocols and organizations that sup-
port them (Bowker et al. 2010). The attempt to conceive information materiality in
terms of material infrastructure and extended embedded artifacts led to the birth
of a subfield that Bowker et al. (2010) call “Information Infrastructure Studies”
(IIS). As a major result IIS have gone behind the screen, revealing the invisible infra-
structures (Star and Ruhleder 1996; Star and Strauss 1999) that produce information.1
In a nutshell, these works have led us to think about information and the digital as
a complex and heterogeneous assemblage. These works also question the under-
standing of information and the digital as an intrinsically fluid content that is
ontologically distinct from and superior to materiality. In the wake of laboratory
ethnographies (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Lynch 1985; Pinch 1986), IIS conceptualize](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25975730-250512114222-2c3a5ae9/85/Digitalsts-A-Field-Guide-For-Science-Technology-Studies-35-320.jpg)
![29
Unfolding Digital Materiality
example, the Archive Discovery Application to explore videos of concerts in the
media player playlist of an iPad, but also allowing Genezik to analyze musical sim-
ilarity of pieces.
On their arrival at the lab, the dozen new temporary employees are trained for a
week and receive 13 pages of guidelines that remind them of the goals and steps to
follow:
• “Locate transitions between songs and events, placing markers in [the audio
edition window] and naming them from the provided concert setlist;
• Build the setlist associated to the .WAV file in progress, copying information
from the concert setlist. If mismatch is observed, compared with the audio,
apply the corrections; and,
• Generally speaking, consider that each song will be isolated and played back
alone, or as a part of a playlist, making use of fade out and fade in
transitions.” (Indexing user guide, lab internal document, p. 9)
They must scrutinize the whole tape in order to describe the content and mark
events. To do this, they have a list of typical events:
• Intro: the whole recorded area before the first song, including silence,
applause, speeches
• Song
• Interlude: short piece of music, instrument tests
• Applause: includes “thank you” and song introduction speeches by the
artists
• Speech: something more than just simple song introduction, including
applause
• Come back: long applause time before come back of an artist, may include
speeches
• Silence: rarely used
• To check: in case something does not fit the previous types (Indexing user
guide, lab internal document, p. 9)
The guidelines for indexing, setlists, and the graphical representation of the
waveform on the screen are used as support for the temporary employees to guide
their work of qualifying file content but always need to be interpreted. This work
leads to the emergence of quasi-objects, including songs that are not separate enti-
ties and detached from the flow of the concert but that anticipate their potential
extraction and their establishment as new objects. At this stage, they are tempo-
rary objects made for the construction of new objects, which include songs and
playlists.
Feeling and Touching the Sound Material before Modifying It:
The Songs as Quasi-
Objects
The first of these supports is the setlist, listing the songs as so many music-
digital
objects supposed to have been recorded and stored on tape. It orients the work of
the temporary employees who, without this support, cannot a priori know what to](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25975730-250512114222-2c3a5ae9/85/Digitalsts-A-Field-Guide-For-Science-Technology-Studies-47-320.jpg)
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are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
Title: Darstellende Geometrie des Geländes
Author: Rudolf Rothe
Release date: October 21, 2018 [eBook #58148]
Language: German
Credits: Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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GEOMETRIE DES GELÄNDES ***](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25975730-250512114222-2c3a5ae9/85/Digitalsts-A-Field-Guide-For-Science-Technology-Studies-60-320.jpg)
Digitalsts A Field Guide For Science Technology Studies
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- 5. digitalSTS
- 7. digitalSTS A Field Guide for Science & Technology Studies EDITED BY Janet Vertesi & David Ribes CO-EDITED BY Carl DiSalvo Yanni Loukissas Laura Forlano Daniela K. Rosner Steven J. Jackson Hanna Rose Shell PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS / PRINCETON & OXFORD
- 8. Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press.princeton.edu Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved LCCN 2018955221 ISBN 978-0-691-18707-5 ISBN (pbk.) 978-0-691-18708-2 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available Editorial: Eric Crahan, Pamela Weidman, Kristin Zodrow Production Editorial: Terri O’Prey Production: Jacquie Poirier Publicity: Alyssa Sanford, Julia Hall Copyeditor: Joseph Dahm This book has been composed in IBM Plex Serif Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
- 9. v Contents Preface: The digitalSTS Community ix Introduction 1 Introduction / Materiality 11 Laura Forlano Unfolding Digital Materiality: How Engineers Struggle to Shape Tangible and Fluid Objects 17 Alexandre Camus and Dominique Vinck The Life and Death of Data 42 Yanni Loukissas Materiality Methodology, and Some Tricks of the Trade in the Study of Data and Specimens 43 David Ribes Digital Visualizations for Thinking with the Environment 61 Nerea Calvillo Introduction / Gender 77 Daniela K. Rosner If “Diversity” Is the Answer, What Is the Question? Understanding Diversity Advocacy in Voluntaristic Technology Projects 81 Christina Dunbar-Hester Feminist STS and Ubiquitous Computing: Investigating the Nature of the “Nature” of Ubicomp 99 Xaroula (Charalampia) Kerasidou Affect and Emotion in digitalSTS 117 Luke Stark The Ambiguous Boundaries of Computer Source Code and Some of Its Political Consequences 136 Stéphane Couture
- 10. vi Contents Introduction / Global Inequalities 157 Steven J. Jackson Venture Ed: Recycling Hype, Fixing Futures, and the Temporal Order of Edtech 161 Anita Say Chan Dangerous Networks: Internet Regulations as Racial Border Control in Italy 178 Camilla A. Hawthorne Social Movements and Digital Technology: A Research Agenda 198 Carla Ilten and Paul- Brian McInerney Living in the Broken City: Infrastructural Inequity, Uncertainty, and the Materiality of the Digital in Brazil 221 David Nemer and Padma Chirumamilla Sound Bites, Sentiments, and Accents: Digitizing Communicative Labor in the Era of Global Outsourcing 240 Winifred R. Poster Introduction / Infrastructure 263 Janet Vertesi Infrastructural Competence 267 Steve Sawyer, Ingrid Erickson, and Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi Getting “There” from the Ever- Changing “Here”: Following Digital Directions 280 Ranjit Singh, Chris Hesselbein, Jessica Price, and Michael Lynch Digitized Coral Reefs 300 Elena Parmiggiani and Eric Monteiro Of “Working Ontologists” and “High- Quality Human Components”: The Politics of Semantic Infrastructures 326 Doris Allhutter The Energy Walk: Infrastructuring the Imagination 349 Brit Ross Winthereik, James Maguire, and Laura Watts Introduction / Software 365 Carl DiSalvo From Affordances to Accomplishments: PowerPoint and Excel at NASA 369 Janet Vertesi
- 11. vii Contents Misuser Innovations: The Role of “Misuses” and “Misusers” in Digital Communication Technologies 393 Guillaume Latzko- Toth, Johan Söderberg, Florence Millerand, and Steve Jones Knowing Algorithms 412 Nick Seaver Keeping Software Present: Software as a Timely Object for STS Studies of the Digital 423 Marisa Leavitt Cohn Introduction / Visualizing the Social 447 Yanni Loukissas Tracing Design Ecologies: Collecting and Visualizing Ephemeral Data as a Method in Design and Technology Studies 451 Daniel Cardoso Llach Data Sprints: A Collaborative Format in Digital Controversy Mapping 472 Anders Kristian Munk, Axel Meunier, and Tommaso Venturini Smart Artifacts Mediating Social Viscosity 497 Juan Salamanca Actor- Network versus Network Analysis versus Digital Networks: Are We Talking about the Same Networks? 510 Tommaso Venturini, Anders Kristian Munk, and Mathieu Jacomy Acknowledgments 525 Contributors 529 Index 539
- 13. ix Preface The digitalSTS Community The contributions to this volume are the outcome of a five- year community- building endeavor under the title digitalSTS: an effort to theorize the next generation of STS encounters with digital artifacts, environments, and interactions. These published contributors are only a small selection of all those participants who— across multiple conference panels, workshops, and online submissions and reviews— helped to produce an emerging understanding of digital studies rooted in the fields and commitments that constitute science and technology studies (STS). This edited collection is a product of that emergent, experimental, and participant- driven process. These events deserve an introduction as they shaped the voices in this collection and beyond. digitalSTS got its start at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) meeting in Cleveland in the fall of 2011 when over 80 people gathered for a participant- driven conversation about the challenges that digital tools, practices, and platforms posed for theory and practice, for the career trajectories of scholars identifying with digital scholarship, and for communicating our findings to STS and beyond. Eight panel- ists, ranging from junior to senior scholars and drawn from anthropology, history, communication, sociology, STS, and other interdisciplinary fields, issued brief provocations to a packed room; two hours of lively discussion followed. Among the many inspiring comments from panelists were those of anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, who exhorted the assembled STS scholars in the audience not to cede public discourse on digital topics to media pundits, where revolutionary rhetoric would dominate the subject. This prompt and the remarkable energy and vivacity in the room inspired us to turn a one- time event into the platform for a broader discussion, to open avenues for addressing “the digital” within STS, and to serve as a springboard to push the conversation forward. Over the subsequent five years we convened four workshops, deployed an on- line platform, hosted events at 4S meetings and elsewhere, and set about building a community for scholarship on digital topics in STS. At 4S in Copenhagen in 2012, 40 workshop participants convened to specify the challenges that digital studies and scholarship posed to STS. This discussion was the source of the idea for a pub- lished “fieldguide” of cases, tools, and born- digital projects. Realizing that “mak- ing and doing” needed further elaboration within STS, co- editors Laura Forlano and Yanni Loukissas took the lead organizing a three- day follow- up workshop at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University in 2013. This hands- on meeting gath- ered STS scholars and makers (broadly construed) to explore the field’s specific intersections with design and to more strongly theorize what might set STS making apart from other forms of DIY or digital intellectual endeavors. Later, as projects began to crystallize and develop, we established an online open platform for
- 14. x Preface peer- to- peer discussion of abstracts and papers, and workshopped precirculated drafts in person. Many of these meetings were sponsored by the Community for Sociotechnical Systems Researchers (CSST— www.sociotech.net), by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure, and by the NSF Science, Technology and Society program, with additional event sponsorship from the Sloan Foundation and Microsoft Research. We embraced the concept of open scholarship and digital publishing from the outset, for instance by deploying practices from collaborative peer production and online communities. The first round of review, editing, and feedback for this volume was conducted on a platform (adapted from the alt.CHI community of human- computer interaction researchers) that allowed anyone to register, submit a paper, and review a colleague’s work. Those whose interest was piqued by an article posted reviews, cross- talk among reviewers was encouraged, and neither authors nor reviewers were blinded. This fostered a collaborative reviewing environment as authors sought to help each other, point to key references or theories, and offer constructive critiques in preparation for the traditional blind review process conducted by Princeton University Press. As the result of considerable bottom- up work, this volume stands as an achieve- ment of many complementary community- building aims. We sought to bring to- gether those scholars with one foot in STS and the other in information technology fields to encourage more cross- talk and to incorporate lessons learned from pro- gramming, design, and development into STS scholarship and practice. We also hoped to open a space for STS scholars studying digital topics to develop their con- tributions, and for those in relevant neighboring fields to identify with and con- tribute to STS scholarship through the events and engagements of digitalSTS. We purposefully integrated opportunities for junior academics to work together and alongside mid-and senior- career scholars in an effort to elaborate and develop relevant conceptual vocabulary and themes in the STS register. Community building can easily produce exclusions instead of inclusions, or homogeneity instead of heterogeneity. Our continued interest in developing the diversity of participation sets this volume apart. Our goal was not to definitively theorize “the digital” or to identify an overarching perspective on digital work that all must share. Instead, the shape and scope of the topic were defined by the self- selected community, with the editorial board serving as organizers and shepherds along the way. Hence, it was conversations among community mem- bers that actively shaped the volume and its approach from the outset, with topics emerging from among the many active and interactive discussions. It is our hope that this will ensure a volume with broad scope and reach across STS and its sister disciplines. Fortunately, digital scholarship no longer seems such a marginal topic in STS as it did in 2011. Perhaps this reflects a changing public consciousness, as data, algo- rithms, infrastructure, and a host of other digital objects have taken on a heightened relevance in the press and in politics. It may also reflect a changing membership in STS, as those who have grown up with devices always in hand or in pocket seek to reflect that ubiquity in their scholarly work. The question of whether or not “digi- talSTS” marked something truly unique haunted our discussions from the very first. However, at our final workshop, held in advance of the 2015 4S meeting in Denver, Matt Ratto noted that perhaps the term “digital” “marked time” for this project, capturing a sensibility toward this emerging scholarship between 2011
- 15. xi Preface and 2016. The contributions to this volume are simply “doing STS,” albeit with dig- ital subject matter, tools, and products. If not carving out a new intellectual do- main, then, the moniker of digitalSTS serves instead as a rallying call to push our field forward, to seize the public conversation surrounding “the digital revolu- tion,” to engage with policy and design practice, and to knit together a robust, thoughtful community of scholars dedicated to both the core principles and the continued future of STS in the world.
- 17. digitalSTS
- 19. 1 Introduction The field of science and technology studies (STS) was born well into the era of com- putation. One would be hard- pressed to find an investigation from the 1970s or 1980s of a contemporary scientific or technological site that did not include a rec- ognizable computational artifact: a machine in the corner of a lab, an instrument dependent on algorithms, an expert system at center stage. Studies of infrastruc- ture, such as the work of Thomas Hughes or Susan Leigh Star, were inflected by systems theory, cybernetics, and even the budding milieu of artificial intelligence. Some of STS’s early central concepts originate from intellectual movements entan- gled with computation: Thomas Hughes and Bruno Latour’s black box (a systems theory concept), Leigh Star’s boundary object that she described as influenced by “both its computer science and pragmatist senses” (Leigh Star 2010, 603), or Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1991). If STS has long been (in some way) digital, then why should this volume call for a digitalSTS? Since another long- standing intellectual commitment of STS is “situ- atedness” (Suchman 1987; Haraway 1988), we must admit that our situations have changed. To paraphrase Latour and Woolgar (1979), rats are no longer being turned (only) into paper; now they are transformed into PowerPoint files and archival doc- ument placeholders. Laboratory work today involves distant collaborations en- acted through communication tools, incompatible file formats, and a dizzying array of software analytic tools. Lay- expert groups find solidarity on online fora or social network sites, coordinate via Twitter feeds, and deploy bots for community management and mediation. Microchips are no longer confined to hefty machines in the corner of the laboratory or even the workplace desktop: they are in our homes, our pockets, our clothing, sometimes under our skin. In short, the textures of scientific and daily life at the beginning of the 21st century are suffused with online platforms and heterogenous informational environments. Scholars drawing from STS are well placed to analyze this contemporary turn of events and to inspect their long- arc historical trajectories. The field maintains a commitment to unpacking the layered, social, and gradual aspects of scientific and technical change, undermining common accounts of revolution, disruption, or inevitable progress. STS scholarship provides tools for locating the politics in technical and scientific decision making, for examining the global yet unevenly distributed tools of computing, and for unearthing the power- laden absences and silences in small and large- scale systems alike. Examinations of science and tech- nology written from the STS perspective have long focused on topics like quantifi- cation, standardization, classification, and representation—all themes that sustain an importance to the digital—and have done so with close attention to the practical, local, situated elements of knowledge construction and technological develop- ment. STS scholarship ultimately addresses how what we consider to be universal,
- 20. 2 Introduction ubiquitous, or inevitable—such as a contemporary digital lifestyle—is accomplished in a certain time and place, by specific actors and with particular materials at hand. The chapters in this volume sustain these commitments and bring them to the encounter with the digital anew. They do so through exploring once- familiar sites reconfigured by digital technologies, by investigations that grapple with novel tools, and through efforts that tackle design and making rather than treating tech- nology as (only) an object of social and humanistic investigation. In doing so, these essays pose new questions for scholarship in STS. What is revealed about labora- tory life when the “shop floor” goes digital? What can we learn about expertise when new constituencies of laypeople come together online at great distances? How do we incorporate computational artifacts like bots, algorithms, and hidden taxonomies into our extant concepts of distributed or hybrid agency? And how do our theories of materiality map onto digital objects and practices, and vice versa? Responding to these questions, the chapters in this volume examine digital field sites and mediated interactions as opportunities for theory building, speaking to the field’s core assumptions about the construction, shaping, or hybridity of knowl- edge, objects, and expertise. The authors deploy the emerging tools of digital scholarship, such as critical making and large- scale data analytics, to enhance the analysis of core concepts like representation, quantification, and materiality. The volume as a whole aims to populate our scholarly toolkit by adding contemporary examples to our field’s repertoire of cases, theories, and methods. These examples aim to sit alongside, rather than replace, the classic “evocative objects” (Turkle 2007) of our field in our course syllabi and beyond: for instance, the bicycle (Pinch and Bijker 1987), the speed bump (Latour 1992), or the reactor beam (Traweek 1988). They also complement several already- influential studies of digital systems in STS such as the DVD player (Gillespie 2007), the trader’s screen (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002; MacKenzie 2006), the configured user (Woolgar 1990), or the “always on” worker (Wajcman 2015). digitalSTS as Departures Calling something digitalSTS does not denote a standalone branch of STS, or a bracing theoretical departure, but it does mark a series of disruptions for STS scholarship, even while sustaining intellectual continuities. Let us examine the differences first. The study (and sometimes making) of digital systems is alive and thriving in sister fields: certainly from the engineering and information sciences, but also al- ways already in sociology and anthropology, communication, and the digital hu- manities. Classic STS theories and cases have played a role formulating many of these approaches as our concepts and exemplary objects have traveled. For in- stance, information scientists use “boundary objects” (Star and Griesemer 1989) or “infrastructural inversion” (Bowker 1994) to describe the social work of data management, while studies of algorithmic inequality among Internet researchers have frequently been inspired by Langdon Winner’s (1986) account of how the Long Island Expressway overpasses prohibited bus- riding access by poorer citi- zens. This speaks to an existing exchange of ideas across these disciplines. But an imbalance persists with STS ideas influencing “outward” rather than welcoming concepts, topics, and framings “inward.” This, despite the fact that there is much to learn from how digital scholarship, artifacts, and systems are
- 21. 3 Introduction evolving, changing, and challenging assumptions in sister fields. If there is novelty in the concept of a digitalSTS, it is in bilateral bridge building between STS and fields that have embraced digital studies and making. Some of these fields are already known to STS: prior studies of public understanding of science established ties with communications and media studies (Lewenstein 1995; Kirby 2011), while classic ethnographies of machine work engaged with computer- supported coop- erative work and other design- oriented enterprises (Orr 1996; Suchman 1987). Other fields are new configurations, such as the digital humanities (Gold 2012), digital sociology (Daniels et al. 2017; Marres 2017), and scholarship in the emerging information schools. This volume therefore extends this conversation and broadens our field’s scope to include voices from scholars engaged in digital studies across many fields. The chapters combine approaches, topics, artifacts, and literatures from multiple dis- ciplines to demonstrate their relevance for STS scholarship, embracing them as subjects for STS analysis. At the same time, however, the volume is grounded in the core concepts and literature of STS. The authors herein not only address digital topics as core matters of concern but also speak back to classic concepts and cases as they do so, developing new theoretical tools for further analysis. The essays therefore demonstrate a way forward for digital studies writ large that take the primary tenets of STS seriously. We hope that this perspective will prove valuable to scholars engaging with digital topics within, across, and beyond STS. Second, digital methods are animating scholarship across the academy. STS has been slow to take up these techniques largely due to our resistance to the un- reflexive use of systematizing or formal tools and methods (e.g., Law 2004; Lury and Wakeford 2012). Another goal for this volume is to provide examples of a kind of reflexive, digital methodological inquiry. Inspecting how such systems are con- stitutive and destructive, revealing and blinding, or powerful here but weak there is an essential feature of STS work. In sum, the sentiment is that STS cannot incor- porate the configurations of epistemic tools and methods offered by digital media— from network analysis to data mining and topic modeling— without some (even if inevitably incomplete) archaeology of these tools’ assumptions, methods, and roles in situated knowledge production. The contributions herein deploy such tools while inspecting with care the emerging technique, technology, internal logic, rhetoric, or broader milieu of digital methods. They also describe connections and challenges to classic STS theories, to inspire the next generation of critique. Another thread of contributions has taken on the challenge of “making” by combining the design and use of digital tools, artifacts, or methods in tandem with explicit reflection and inquiry on the approach itself. When we began our explora- tions of the relationship between STS, making, and design in 2012, the field had only the most tenuous of spaces dedicated to these modes of inquiry. We assert that design techniques not only have a place in STS: they are an important locus for the exploration of concepts and analysis, and a site for scholarly intervention with technologists and publics. An online curated collection of notable STS maker projects accompanies this volume to stimulate the scholarly imagination with ex- amples of objects, experiences, or software tools designed with the intention to “make durable” STS concepts through design, participation, and critical making. These contributions demonstrate what is possible when we embrace digital methods of knowledge production— not as revolutionary or straightforwardly objective, but rather as a matter of inquiry involving varying doses of agnosticism, reflexivity, symmetry, and critical perspectives on knowledge construction itself.
- 22. 4 Introduction Finally, the reader may notice that we do not offer any singular definition or criteria for “the digital” in the volume. Throughout this project, we purposefully suspended any propositions for a universal definition or methodology for the digital. Partici- pants in the workshops that led to this volume were especially concerned not to draw rigid boundaries or produce residual categories by enforcing strict defini- tions. The volume therefore embraces a dynamic and grounded approach to the study of digital systems, treating the category of the digital as an emergent feature among communities of users, designers, and maintainers, and inspecting socio- technical architectures in long- arc development trajectories. In essence, the category “digital” as it appears here was also itself emergent through the process that led to the volume (see the preface). Although this may appear disruptive for a collection of papers about digitality, the collected papers demonstrate the methodological value of digital agnosticism, pluralism, or symmetry as a point of departure for STS studies of digital phenomena. digitalSTS as Continuities In addition to new ground, the volume sustains important continuities. Arguably, what sets this volume apart is its continued commitment to core STS principles as deployed in the analysis of digital systems and interactions, broadly construed. Such commitments will be familiar to STS scholars; their novelty lies in their considered, thorough application to the digital spheres of action, and vice versa. However, these principles may be less familiar to the wider group of scholars who explore digital topics, especially those who may be newcomers to STS. We there- fore review these animating commitments here for both sets of readers, outlining their contours for those who may be unfamiliar with STS themes and intellectual traditions, and demonstrating their connection to digital topics for those grounded in these traditions. This list is not exhaustive, but taken together, these renewed commitments demonstrate the unique voice that STS writ large brings to digital scholarship. First, the contributions in this volume examine digital objects and practices in sociohistorical context, locating them in time and place and demonstrating their grounded, emergent contingencies. In line with foundational scholarship by Thomas Kuhn, Ludwig Fleck, and others, STS scholars do not embrace any notion of drastic social change effected by a “digital revolution” (Kuhn 1962; Fleck 1979; see also Shapin 1996). Instead, scholars look for historical continuities and attend to everyday cultural practices, revealing the “normal science” side of digital and technical work. This also means turning away from lofty “great man” stories, te- leological narratives of discovery (aka Whig histories), and discussions of the ex- ceptional nature of scientific or technical work. STS scholars of the digital continue to advance the field’s claim that knowledge and technology alike are responsive to, in dialog with, and reflective of social and political context— but that they do not, on their own, drive social or political change. Further, digitalSTS contributors remain committed to the principle that there is no equal contest of ideas in which the best ideas or inventions win out because they are true. Truth is a consequence rather than an antecedent. STS studies scholars in the 1980s adopted the principle of “symmetry” to underline that “truth” and “falsity” are not determining inputs or preconditions, but are rather outcomes of the work called science, research, scholarship, and so on (Bloor 1991; Collins 1985;
- 23. 5 Introduction David 1985; Cowan 1984). This same sense of symmetry and historicism must illuminate any STS analysis of digital systems— today the site of considerable hyperbolic rhetoric about their transformational, disruptive, and revolutionary potential— if we are to uncover the social and historical mechanisms that give rise to ubiquitous systems, devices, and infrastructures. In tandem with this commitment to contextual and historically grounded fac- tors is our continued investigation of the practical, situated, local, and grounded nature of digital work. This commitment animated the accounts of sociologists and anthropologists who first ventured into laboratories to observe the work of scientists and engineers for themselves. STS scholars do not hold scientific and technical work in isolation from the pressures of society or cultural norms, but instead show how fields “advance” stepwise due to their messy work, culturally laden communities, practical activity, and everyday achievements. Whether in the preparation of protein gels or papers for publication (Lynch 1985; Latour and Woolgar 1979), or the local temporalities that govern scientific activity (Traweek 1988), con- tingent social practices are the order of the day (Collins 1985; Pickering 1995), with scientists responding to pressures of funding, publication, and reputation instead of lofty ideals such as replicability or skepticism (Merton 1942; Mitroff 1974). This sensibility also suffuses technology studies, where approaches such as the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) program, social shaping (MacKenzie and Wajc- man 1999), and theories of technological politics (Winner 1986; Jasanoff and Kim 2015) investigate the culturally situated and power- laden battles over knowledge and artifacts alike. While STS theories have certainly been elaborated since these early days of the field, the work herein reflects commitments that tie knowledge production and technical achievement to observable action and interaction. Con- tributions to this volume, then, frequently rely on ethnographic experience and attenuation to lived, enacted, embodied work with digital systems on the ground, whether the mundane software tools of coordination work (Vertesi), the transfor- mation of reefs into bits (Parmiggiani and Monteiro) or the simple act of navigating via GPS (Singh et al.). An increasing number of studies of digital technologies and online life deploy the tools of the social construction of technology or social shaping to show the grounded nature of technical artifacts. But perhaps more unique to STS is the sen- sibility toward networked agency that we bring to our digital objects (and sub- jects!) of study. Not to be confused with theories of digital networks or networked publics, this line of thinking instead stems from several related strands of STS theory related to materiality and its intersection with the social world. A formative instance is actor- network theory (ANT; see Latour 2005), which posits that agency does not arise from singular objects, devices, or individuals but rather that people, technologies, and scientific objects act by virtue of being embedded in a network composed of humans and nonhumans (Callon 1986). This makes digital devices or software tools inherently unstable and unable to act or circulate freely on their own; indeed, a small shift in the network can affect an object’s—or an individual’s!— ability to act. In a classic case, a light bulb kit made in France for deployment in West Africa cannot follow its “script” and reliably provide light when placed in the local contexts of, say, village generator ownership or taxation through electric bills (Akrich 1992). This lesson continues to hold in the context of digital device ecosys- tems, whether in the favelas of Brazil or the One Laptop Per Child project in Peru (Nemer and Chirumamilla; Chan). As networked thinking takes hold in a variety of academic fields (e.g., social network analysis and networked publics among them),
- 24. 6 Introduction this also raises methodological questions about the overlaps with actor- networks (Venturini et al.). Objects are also fluid and hybrid when considered through the lenses of femi- nist theory and new materialism. These prominent theoretical approaches reject any clear line between “the social” and “the technical” (or between “science” and “technology”), and instead look to where and how such objects and categories are constructed in action (Haraway 1997; Barad 2007; Suchman 2011). Scholars who work in this vein resist dichotomous vocabulary, preferring portmanteau words such as “sociotechnical” or “technoscience” or hybrid figures such as the cyborg (Haraway 1991) to denote their analytical inseparability. They also describe how practices “enact” objects into being and “entangle” both matter and meaning (Moll 2002; Barad 2007). This strand of thinking is influential in this volume. It animates our own editorial agnosticism about the nature of digital materials and bounded nature of digitality as a concept. It is also present in essays that examine where ac- tors themselves draw the boundaries around “the material” and “the digital,” for instance in the case of digitizing musical recordings (Camus and Vinck), data or specimens (Ribes), or locally encoded software ontologies as representational taxonomies (Allhutter). And it is present in provocative “maker” products in this volume that inspire contemplation on our place in the environment (Calvillo, Winthereik et al.) or our interaction with archival data (Loukissas). Boundaries themselves are long- standing themes for STS scholarship that have developed tools for investigating the production and maintenance of closed spaces like laboratories or expert communities, and the circulation between and across these sealed spaces. Boundaries can be a source of strength, though they always exact costs. Classic STS studies of laboratories and experiments, for in- stance, noted that it was only within the effortfully ordered spaces of a laboratory that anthrax could be isolated from cows (Latour 1988), genomes from organisms (Lynch 1985), plans from actions (Suchman 1987). To this end, much of the work herein is not concerned with public spheres— e.g., use of social media or search engines writ large— but examines particular groups and their use of digital tools to effect or efface boundaries. Not only the objects but also the subjects of such spaces are inspected: scientists and technologists may cultivate particular and changing forms of objectivity (Daston and Galison 2007), cast divides between basic science and applied engineering (Gieryn 1999), or distinguish findings from policy concerns (Jasanoff 1987). This boundary work may generate useful prod- ucts such as the vaccine and the treatment, but the isolation involved can also pro- duce myopic overgeneralization such as the standard human (Epstein 2007), or facilitate distancing the design of technologies from their consequences in use (Abbate 2012). Similarly, pieces herein examine the boundary work of drawing women in and out of computing (Kerasidou, Dunbar- Hester; see also Light 1999; Ensmenger 2010; Abbate 2012), circumscribing migrant use of digital systems (Hawthorne), and identifying system “misuse” in opposition to innovation (Latzko- Toth et al). One result of boundary drawing is the inclusion and exclusion of different groups in the production of objects or knowledge, a process that also accompanies socially produced categorization and standardization regimes. For instance, Steve Epstein (2007) has tracked the coalitions that formed in the 1980s and 1990s to overturn the white male as the standard human for biomedical investigations in favor of studies inclusive of women, racial minorities, the elderly, and the young. The specter of exclusion animates branches of STS, including both infrastructural
- 25. 7 Introduction categories (Bowker and Star 1999) and the systematic production of ignorance (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008; Oreskes and Conway 2010), as well as how such systematic un- incorporations often take place along existing lines of power. The initiative to surface the excluded reverberates across the volume, but especially animates studies of digital systems in transnational, racialized, or gendered con- texts: for instance, the distributed invisible laborers in the Global South for whom voice technologies that standardize accents become part of their embodied prac- tice (Poster) or the software workers who craft boundaries around source code, thereby excluding and occluding female participation (Couture). Inclusions, exclusions, boundary making, and boundary crossings also actively draw the line around sanctioned forms of expertise as credible knowledge. This long- standing thread of work in STS has inspired scholars to take stock of lay knowledge as well as its productive and antagonistic intersections with profes- sionals and other experts (Wynne 1992; Collins and Evans 2009). For instance, Ruha Benjamin (2013) and Alondra Nelson (2016) describe complex intersections between race and medicine in the context of sickle cell anemia or DNA ancestry, describing the fraught participation of racialized medical subjects in research and practice. Benjamin argues for a radical, participatory approach to scientific and medical work: an approach resonant with work in critical design that invites lay publics to participate in knowledge making and analysis (see Balsamo 2011; Ver- tesi et al. 2016). Such concerns are visible in this volume too, such as with the mak- ing of digital tools for visualizing controversies and publics (Munk et al.) or coordinating activists via digital tools (Ilten and McInerney). Finally, inclusion, exclusion, and expertise recall the importance of visibility and invisibility to technopolitics. Infrastructure scholars like Paul Edwards (2013), Christine Borgman (Borgman et al. 2014), and Susan Leigh Star (1999) have been keen to retrieve the otherwise invisible architectures of the digital— software, servers, cables, technical laborers, crowdworkers, data points— all of which are the products of human labor in their creation and maintenance but otherwise backgrounded, rendered as infrastructure ready to hand. Recent work has also surfaced the role of algorithms in the production of social control (Schüll 2017; Noble 2017; Eubanks 2018). Several chapters in the volume therefore follow Geoffrey C. Bowker’s call for infrastructural inversion (1994), seeking to re- reveal the work, debates, and decisions that subtend digital action, as well as the accom- panying role of visibility in the workplace. Scholarship in this volume also plays with the relationship between the visible and the invisible, surfacing the work of keeping systems up and running effectively (Cohn, Sawyer et al.), deploying digital systems to visualize and trace interactions or experience energy lines (Cardoso Llach, Salamanca, Winthereik et al.), or revealing the work of scholarly tools such as affect (Stark) or algorithms (Seaver). This theme, especially relevant to the study of infrastructures, continues to play a key role in digital knowledge and object pro- duction today. How to Read This Volume This volume is organized into six sections, each of which analyzes a different topic that speaks to long- standing issues in STS: infrastructure, gender, global inequal- ities, materiality, visualizing the social, and software. An editorial essay at the start of each section lays out the continuities and departures in that section,
- 26. 8 Introduction situating the contributions among relevant literatures. As an effort to mitigate the dangers of residual categories, the essays themselves are also tagged in the online volume according to different cross- categorizations, some related to theories in use and others topics of interest: the mobility of objects, standardization, exper- tise, hybridity, or the role of instrumentation, to name a few. The print volume of- fers one pathway through the book, the online version others; we welcome readers to forge their own. In addition to these thematic sections, the chapters align with a typology that emerged from the workshops that led to this volume. These different types of essays were each curated by a different group of editors and speak to a different set of con- cerns. This includes case studies that develop robust theoretical insights (edited by Janet Vertesi and Steve Jackson), research that brings reflexive perspectives to digital methods (edited by David Ribes and Daniela Rosner), and examples of criti- cal making (curated by Laura Forlano, Yanni Loukissas, Carl DiSalvo, and Hanna Rose Shell). Among the last category, an online gallery complements the essays in the volume. Annotated in the text, each of these types of contributions stakes out a different approach to the question of how digital studies meets STS and collec- tively offer a “fieldguide” to the diversity of approaches that enliven the field today. Far from abandoning our commitments to STS or calling for a reenvisioning of the field, then, the present volume argues that paying explicit attention to digital sites, environments, and methods requires returning to STS’s classic orienting theories and scholarship, while developing new articulations. Bringing information technologies into view as they are embedded in multivariate contexts of use, of practice, of development, and of knowledge making presents an exciting opportu- nity to bring the agenda of the field forward, to continue our productive conversation with emerging disciplines, and to develop new pedagogical tools. Ultimately, the moniker of digitalSTS reminds us that there are many, many opportunities in the analysis of digital systems to return to our core commitments, while at the same time pushing the boundaries of our field. Works Cited Abbate, Janet. 2012. Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. History of Comput- ing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Akrich, Madeline. 1992. “The De- scription of Technological Objects.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society, edited by Wiebe E Bijker and John Law, 205– 24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Balsamo, Anne. 2011. Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work. Durham, NC: Duke Uni- versity Press. Barad, Karen Michelle. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Benjamin, Ruha. 2013. People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Bloor, David. 1991. Knowledge and Social Imagery. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Borgman, Christine L., Peter T. Darch, Ashley E. Sands, Jillian C. Wallis, and Sharon Traweek. 2014. “The Ups and Downs of Knowledge Infrastructures in Science: Implications for Data Management.” In Proceedings of the 14th ACM/IEEE- CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 257– 66. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2740769.2740814. Bowker, Geoffrey C. 1994. Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlum- berger, 1920–1940. Inside Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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- 29. 11 Introduction Materiality Laura Forlano STS is well known for its unique approaches to the study of materiality, a central topic for inquiry since the founding of the field. The late 1980s saw the develop- ment of actor- network theory (ANT): an approach that provocatively assumed the analytical equivalence (“symmetry”) of human and nonhuman actors (Callon 1986, 1987; Latour 1996, 2005; Law and Hassard 1999). Microbes, electrons, plants, animals, test tubes, people, and laboratory equipment therefore all played a role in scientific discoveries and technological developments. For ANT scholars, agency is not embedded in a single device, object, or person, but emerges from its distri- bution among this network of human and nonhuman actors. By the early 21st cen- tury, STS scholars regularly took such objects, devices, and tools as “matters of concern” (Latour 2004) by examining how they incorporate mixed agencies and politics: in other words, examining hybrid ontologies (Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). A similar focus on materiality appeared in the work of feminist technoscience around the same time. This strand of research focuses on the ways in which gen- der and identity are constructed in and through science and technology, while em- phasizing how knowledge is situated, embodied, and localized in such a way as to exclude minority voices (Haraway 1988). The recent development of new material- ism synergizes this approach with ontologies research by paying attention to the hybrid agencies and ethics of living and nonliving things (Barad 2007; Bennett 2009; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). We are asked to “meet the universe half- way” by viewing objects like quarks as imbued with both social understandings and material agencies. New materialism often takes up questions related to human relations with other beings in order to contribute to questions around climate change and the environment and has been particularly influential in multispecies anthropology (Kirksey 2014; Haraway 2008). These core approaches in STS define the field’s attention to materiality not as a static, obdurate, or objective constraint upon social life, but as hybrid matter constituted through the arrangements of people and things, talk, and practice. Along with text- based scholarship about materiality in STS, scholars have ex- plored the topic through research methodologies that offer new ways of thinking about and engaging publics around complex sociotechnical issues (DiSalvo 2009; Michael 2012). These projects make representations and visualizations; design things, prototypes, and experiments; create opportunities for intervention and participation; and explore the topic through art and performance (Felt et al. 2016; Latour and Weibel 2005). Examples include Natalie Jeremijenko’s Environmental
- 30. 12 Forlano Health Clinic and Feral Robotic Dog project (Bratton and Jeremijenko 2008; Lane et al. 2006), Trevor Paglen’s critical geography (2009a, 2009b; Paglen and Thomp- son 2007), Carl DiSalvo’s adversarial design and speculative civics (2012, 2016; DiSalvo et al. 2016), Natasha Myers and Joseph Dumit’s gaming and visualizations (Burri and Dumit 2008; Dumit 2014; Myers and Dumit 2011), Matt Ratto and Garnet Hertz’s critical making (Hertz and Parikka 2012; Ratto 2011), and Hanna Rose Shell’s films (2012a, 2012b). Within this tradition, the making of digital technolo- gies and systems is of particular interest to this volume (Vertesi et al. 2016). As evi- dence for the growing interest in these more inventive and engaged forms of scholarship within STS, we have also explored design and making at workshops (Forlano et al. 2012; Loukissas et al. 2013) and in a “Making and Doing” exhibition at the Society for the Social Studies of Science conference since 2015. Despite this focus on materiality in STS over the past several decades, emerging scholarship on the digital and the social in the 1990s initially emphasized the de- materialized, virtual nature of online human relations, rejecting earlier material- ist theory. Drawing upon media studies or communication theory, the digital and material were essentialized and separated into discrete units. Digital essentialism still haunts many studies of emerging technology today, in part due to the linguis- tic difficulties of articulating the mutual shaping and interdependence of the ma- terial and the digital. Still, more recent work on digital systems in STS and related fields has gravitated toward more complex, even hybrid understandings of digital materiality (Blanchette 2011; Dourish and Mazmanian 2011; Pink et al. 2016). Such scholars explore the ways in which the digital can be understood to be material (Dourish 2017) or explore digital work as practical action. They also reclaim the material, social, and environmental conditions of digital production, use, and dis- card through investigations into maintenance (Graham and Thrift 2007), repair (Jackson 2014), failure and breakdown (Rosner and Ames 2014; Rosner and Fox 2016), and care (Mol 2008). The chapters in this section serve to advance and deepen our understanding of digital materiality. Rather than offering generalizations about the properties of materiality or digitality, the essays explore how digital materialities emerge in their sites of inquiry. Alexandre Camus and Dominique Vinck, for example, offer an ethnographic account of the digitization of the extensive concert archives of the Montreux Jazz Festival over the past 50 years. For the archives, “becoming digital” is a dynamic and interactive process of digital craftsmanship that requires the embodied, material labor (physical, cognitive, visual, and aural), time, and effort of engineers. In this case, the digital materiality of music takes on specific qualities such as tangibility and fluidity as well as textures such as softness, thickness, weight,boundaries,spatiality,relations,andnetworks.Astheconcertsaredigitized— rather than becoming immaterial— they are rematerialized into new forms such as individual songs, playlists, and setlists. These new material forms are clickable, taggable, searchable, and indexable; as such, they have new associations with one another as well as with networks. The authors thus illustrate the ways in which the digital is distributed into networks that “do and undo the concerts,” thereby saving the archives and allowing them to circulate. They also demonstrate how the digital and the material are not discrete categories or properties, but emerge locally in dynamic relation to each other. Yanni Loukissas’s interactive visualization and essay, which is presented as an online “data documentary,” complements this volume. The piece investigates the “life and death of data” through engagement with the plant collection of Harvard
- 31. 13 Materiality University’s Arnold Arboretum, which includes 71,250 accessions between 1872 and 2012. This project draws on social and cultural research as well as the making of a longitudinal digital visualization in order to inquire into the social, material, and institutional histories of data. It also questions how to study the institutions that create, maintain, and share large digital collections. The visual and literal di- mensions of this piece inspire us to examine data differently, developing notions of “hybrid materialities.” Specifically, Loukissas highlights the tension between the virtual, ancillary, freely accessible, open, and transparent qualities that are often attributed to digital data on the one hand, and their materiality, centrality, locality, and situated significance on the other. David Ribes considers the methodological implications of studying digital ma- teriality by drawing on four intellectual traditions: ethnomethodology, actor- network theory, the anthropology of classification, and historical ontology and epistemology. Specifically, he asks, “How do we approach studies of things, ob- jects, stuff, and materials, their agencies and interrelations, in action and across time?” Drawing on empirical cases from two large ethnographic studies, the Mul- ticenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) and Long- Term Ecological Research (LTER), Ribes argues that researchers must “discover” the digital and the material through fieldwork. In these cases, blood and water samples as well as related datasets ex- hibit tremendous flexibility, allowing them to be understood as either digital or material in nature depending on the specific context. As a result, Ribes argues that interpretations about the nature of materiality must be read through multiple, sometimes competing, theoretical traditions. Nerea Calvillo deploys digital visualizations as an inventive research method (Lury and Wakeford 2012) for “thinking with the environment.” Across two projects— In the Air and Pollen In the Air— Calvillo describes the process of hands- on collaborative making of visualizations as a means of investigating the materiality of invisible gases and the politics around public air quality datasets. The visualiza- tions are speculative in that they bring to life new imaginaries and worlds that en- gage with environmental issues. The resulting airscapes—aerial maps that present “air as a landscape that can be inhabited”— are a form of ethnographic engagement with the air. Calvillo’s visualizations do not merely represent scientific data about air, but also reimagine the relations between humans and gaseous nonhumans through embodied, affective experiences. Most significantly, these projects recon- figure the politics around “air as a harm” to humans in favor of a feminist, multi- species encounter predicated on collective values and environmental justice. As a group, then, these essays offer a perspective upon digital encounters that embraces the material without essentializing its properties. This requires engag- ing with digital materiality as hybrid, shifting, and situated; an emic category to be analyzed in context; and a property to be played with and ultimately troubled. Works Cited Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blanchette, Jean-François. 2011. “A Material History of Bits.” Journal of the American Society for Informa- tion Science and Technology 62 (6): 1042– 57. Bratton, Benjamin H., and Natalie Jeremijenko. 2008. Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces. New York: Architectural League of New York.
- 32. 14 Forlano Burri, Regula Valérie, and Joseph Dumit. 2008. “Social Studies of Scientific Imaging and Visualization.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, 297– 317. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Callon, Michel. 1986. “The Sociology of an Actor- Network: The Case of the Electric Vehicle.” In Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology, edited by Michel Callon, John Law, and Arie Rip, 19– 34. Lon- don: Macmillan. ———. 1987. “Society in the Making: The Study of Technology as a Tool for Sociological Analysis.” In The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, 83– 103. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DiSalvo, Carl. 2009. “Design and the Construction of Publics.” Design Issues 25 (1): 48– 63. ———. 2012. Adversarial Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2016. “The Irony of Drones for Foraging: Exploring the Work of Speculative Interventions.” In De- sign Anthropological Futures, edited by J. H. Rachel Clark and Kapser Tang Vangkilde, 139– 54. New York: Bloomsbury. DiSalvo, Carl, Tom Jenkins, and Thomas Lodato. 2016. “Designing Speculative Civics.” Paper presented at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose, CA. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin, eds. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Dourish, Paul. 2017. The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dourish, Paul, and Melissa Mazmanian. 2011. “Media as Material: Information Representations as Ma- terial Foundations for Organizational Practice.” Paper presented at the Third International Sympo- sium on Process Organizational Studies, Corfu, Greece. Dumit, Joseph. 2014. “Writing the Implosion: Teaching the World One Thing at a Time.” Cultural Anthro- pology 29 (2): 344– 62. Felt, Ulrike, Rayvon Fouché, Clark A. Miller, and Laurel Smith- Doerr, eds. 2016. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Forlano, Laura, Dehlia Hannah, Kat Jungnickel, Julian McHardy, and Hannah Star Rogers. 2012. “Ex- periments In (and Out of) the Studio: Art and Design Methods for Science and Technology Studies.” https://www.hastac.org/opportunities/4seasst-workshop-experiments-and-out-studio-art-and -design-methods-science-and. Graham, S., and N. Thrift. 2007. “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance.” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (3): 1– 25. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575– 99. ———. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hertz, Garnet, and Jussi Parikka. 2012. “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method.” Leonardo 45 (5): 424– 30. Jackson, Steven J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Material- ity, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot, 221–39. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kirksey, Eben. 2014. The Multispecies Salon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lane, Giles, Camilla Brueton, George Roussos, Natalie Jeremijenko, George Papamarkos, Dima Diall, . . . Karen Martin. 2006. “Public Authoring & Feral Robotics.” Proboscis, no. 11:1– 12. Latour, Bruno. 1996. “On Actor- Network Theory: A Few Clarifications.” Soziale Welt 47:369–81. ———. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225– 48. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor- Network- Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Law, John, and John Hassard. 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. Loukissas, Yanni, Laura Forlano, David Ribes, and Janet Vertesi. 2013. “digitalSTS and Design.” http:// stsdesignworkshop.tumblr.com. Lury, Celia, and Nina Wakeford. 2012. Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social. New York: Routledge. Michael, Mike. 2012. “‘What Are We Busy Doing?’ Engaging the Idiot.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 37 (5): 528– 54. Mol, Annemarie. 2008. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge.
- 33. 15 Materiality Myers, Natasha, and Joseph Dumit. 2011. “Haptic Creativity and the Mid- embodiments of Experimental Life.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, edited by Frances E. Mascia- Lees, 239– 61. New York: Wiley- Blackwell. Paglen, Trevor. 2009a. Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. New York: Penguin. ———. 2009b. “Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space.” Brooklyn Rail, March 6. Paglen, Trevor, and Adam Clay Thompson. 2007. Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights. London: Icon Books. Pink, Sarah, Elisenda Ardevol, and Debora Lanzeni, eds. 2016. Digital Materialities: Design and Anthropol- ogy. New York: Bloomsbury. Ratto, Matt. 2011. “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life.” In- formation Society 27 (4): 252– 60. Rosner, Daniela K., and Morgan Ames. 2014. “Designing for Repair? Infrastructures and Materialities of Breakdown.” Paper presented at the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, Baltimore. Rosner, Daniela K., and Sarah E. Fox. 2016. “Legacies of Craft and the Centrality of Failure in a Mother- Operated Hackerspace.” New Media & Society 18:558– 80. doi:10.1177/1461444816629468. Shell, Hanna Rose. 2012a. “Blind: The Phenomenology of Camouflage.” Sensate, December. http://sensate journal.com/hanna-rose-shell-blind-on-the-phenemology-of-camouflage/. ———. 2012b. “Locomotion in Water.” Journal of Short Film, Spring. Vertesi, Janet, David Ribes, Laura Forlano, Yanni Loukissas, and Marisa Cohn. 2016. “Engaging, Design- ing and Making Digital Technologies.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Ulrike Felt, Rayvon Fouché, Clark A. Miller, and Laurel Smith- Doerr, 169– 94. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Winner, Langdon. 1986. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” In The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, edited by Langdon Winner, 19– 39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Woolgar, Steve, and Javier Lezaun. 2013. “The Wrong Bin Bag: A Turn to Ontology in Science and Tech- nology Studies?” Social Studies of Science 43 (3): 321– 40.
- 35. 17 Unfolding Digital Materiality How Engineers Struggle to Shape Tangible and Fluid Objects Alexandre Camus and Dominique Vinck Grasping a Matter- Network In this chapter we address two issues related to the notion of digital materiality. The first one concerns the fluidity: On what rests the fluidity of the digital? And how can we qualify the process leading to the production of objects that can circu- late? The second one concerns the mode of existence (Souriau [1954] 2009; Latour 2013) of digital artifacts: What does becoming digital imply for an artifact? How to qualify the dynamic of becoming digital? We deal with these questions, keeping distance from an understanding of digital as a matter, which can be defined ac- cording to an opposition container/content or matter/form. We do not propose a new minimal unit that is supposed to reduce the composition of a digital matter. On the contrary, we chose to tackle the digital materiality from the more dynamic angle of the material, which we define as the matter mobilized in activity and which is transforming as the interactions between the craftsman and the materi- als unfold. First, a constantly growing number of people are involved in the pro- duction of information and digital craftsmanship: these interactions remain to be studied. Second, following the moves of the material will enable us to overtake the vain quest to establish the minimal unit of the digital. STS scholars have given renewed importance to the materiality of information, revealing the machines and invisible workers (Star 1991; Denis and Pontille 2012) that allow them to function— as well as the protocols and organizations that sup- port them (Bowker et al. 2010). The attempt to conceive information materiality in terms of material infrastructure and extended embedded artifacts led to the birth of a subfield that Bowker et al. (2010) call “Information Infrastructure Studies” (IIS). As a major result IIS have gone behind the screen, revealing the invisible infra- structures (Star and Ruhleder 1996; Star and Strauss 1999) that produce information.1 In a nutshell, these works have led us to think about information and the digital as a complex and heterogeneous assemblage. These works also question the under- standing of information and the digital as an intrinsically fluid content that is ontologically distinct from and superior to materiality. In the wake of laboratory ethnographies (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Lynch 1985; Pinch 1986), IIS conceptualize
- 36. 18 Camus and Vinck information as the result of concrete operations from which it cannot be dissoci- ated. The question “what is digital information made of?” can be reformulated into another question: “how is digital information produced?” The answer rests on the study of the sociotechnical networks that participate in shaping information and constitute its eminently material being (Denis and Pontille 2012). Digital information is indeed difficult to grasp. Understanding it often means understanding the pipes, machines, invisible work, protocols, classifications, and standards through which it is produced and flows, with particular attention to col- lective data shaping. In IIS, the emphasis was put on aggregated entities such as collaborative research systems (Star and Ruhleder 1996), transnational databases (Bowker 2000; Millerand 2012; Heaton and Proulx 2012; Heaton and Millerand 2013; Van Horn et al. 2001), health information systems (Hanseth and Monteiro 1997), and digital library systems (Gal et al. 2004). These very interesting works can lead to the strange impression that everything depends on the infrastructure. ISS already suggested that interactions between operators and the material are important to study, but we still lack a close look at the practical way the shaping is engaged. In order to extend ISS results with a closer look at how information is produced, this chapter draws on the analysis of a process of digitization, that of the concert recordings of the Montreux Jazz Festival. Within this ambitious project of digitiza- tion, we focus on a specific activity, that of indexing events (speeches, musical per- formances, applause, etc.) in the digitized files. To complete this work, operators must “tag” the events that occurred onstage at the time of recording. In order to do so, the lab team is often confronted with the need to remove a number of uncer- tainties that “primary digitization” (conversion of the analog signal into a digital signal) has not dispelled: What is recorded on the digitalized tapes? In what state are they? What does their video and video signal say? What songs were played that evening onstage? By working on the case of soft and very light artifacts— the shaping of digital pieces of music from recorded live concerts— we challenge the “hardness/soft- ness” of things and look at specific textures of the digital such as digital spatiality, relations and embedded networks, enabling and constraining. The challenge here is that of working on a seemingly double immateriality: music and digital. Follow- ing Hennion (2015b), we propose to consider digital (music) as something that has no proper matter of its own while only manifesting its presence to those who inter- act concretely with it. It is made of matter in the sense of Latour (2013), that is to say, “the set of all the other beings upon which any given entity depends” (Mode of Existence n.d.).2 This conception of matter as a network of relations allows to free the question “what is digital made of?” from the quest for an essence by providing a relational understanding of materiality. The matter-network proposed by Latour relates to a sociotechnical network, that is to say a set of associations between het- erogeneous entities, human or not (Callon 1986), an assemblage (Latour 2005) that makes beings exist. Since a thing is made through movements and the process of associating all the elements that constitute it, there is no reason to seek which of these elements is the most important or ontologically superior, nor even of what “ingredients” it is composed. Understanding what a thing is made of thus equates to unfolding the operations that shape and maintain the sociotechnical network that underlies the existence of this thing. The aim of the analysis is then to describe this network of associations, paying attention to all the actions and actors that contribute to the assemblage that is the
- 37. 19 Unfolding Digital Materiality thing. Since the network is not defined nor delimited a priori, the concept of matter- network does not provide any limit to the associations that are to be taken into account; this means that we have to follow the associations (Latour 1987). This points to the relational dimension of the notion of materiality and to the interac- tions that are needed for the matter- network to exist. Such an analysis is empiri- cally grounded in the description of observable interactions between the elements of this matter- network. Through this study, we aim to contribute to theoretical and methodological de- bates about the ways in which STS can help to think about and engage with digi- tality. Considering the digital shaping of music recordings helps to theorize the question of materiality and the ways in which it can be taken into account through a variety of practices studied by STS scholars, such as producing knowledge or shaping a theory. Our main question is, what does “becoming digital” imply for the digitized artifacts? In fact, following ISS we consider that doing digitality takes ma- terial work, time, and effort by human beings, but we also propose to add an analy- sis of what making digital things implies. We consider digital things as a contingent result of a process of association, which is, at the same time, precisely aiming for reducing the contingence of the existence of digital productions. Then, the key point is to account for this crucial issue by proposing an analysis of the dynamic of reducing the contingence of digital things.3 An Ethnography Inside the Shaping of Cultural Digital Beings In this chapter we describe how digital information is produced through a case study in the field of digitization of cultural heritage. Carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in the lab of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in charge of this archive, we follow the process of digitizing the archives of the Montreux Jazz Festival. In this lab, a few dozen researchers, engineers, and technicians work daily on the digital files of 10,000 hours of audiovisual recordings. Ethnographic investigation allows us to grasp the process of shaping digital entities and, as par- ticipating observers, to take part in it and to understand its phenomenological im- plications. Through this inquiry, we show how the methodology and results of IIS can be completed and deepened not only by going behind the screen (Jaton 2017) but also by taking a closer look at, and accounting for, the experiences made inside and with the screen. In order to do so, we have personally experienced the set of tasks of shaping digital beings. Alongside the lab team for six months, we took part in the digitization process. This experience, together with informal interviews and observations of work situations over one year, allows us to provide a precise account of the constitution of digital beings.4 Then the work of information is grasped in its materiality: stages, operators, and tools, and some tangible (comput- ers, keyboards, and mouse) but also more evanescent ones, such as a signal pro- cessing software. This work remains difficult to describe, as undemonstrative as a mouse click that positions a cursor on the screen. However, the click’s almost silent action has irreversible consequences on the inherently material destiny of information. In the first part of the chapter, we briefly present the history of the recordings of the festival concerts. We describe the evolution of the network that supports the conservation of the tapes, that is, their forced rescue through digitization. We set the context, which explains why an engineering university took into its hands the
- 38. 20 Camus and Vinck destiny of a segment of cultural heritage. It then becomes possible to understand the switch from conservation to promotion in the process of transforming heritage into raw material for innovation. In the second part, we enter the lab where digital files are monitored, digitized, and processed, starting with the investigation initi- ated by the lab, to determine what there is on the digital files corresponding to the tapes. We will see how the team builds objects that can be manipulated and quali- fied. We describe how they interact with physical media, tools, and interfaces, pro- ducing holds (Bessy and Chateauraynaud 2003; Hennion 2015a) on the digital files.5 We show that the existence of the informational material becomes more and more certain as they build its equipment (Vinck 2011). We account for the negotiations between these operators and the “pieces of concerts” they manipulate, leading to the transformation of the archive into an original artwork. We focus on the pro- cess of establishing the boundaries for the musical pieces identified within the concerts. These operations of building pieces of digital music often face objects that resist the definition of their boundaries. In the last section, we discuss some of the results of this study in the light of works dealing explicitly with the issue of materi- ality and of a nonessentialist understanding of materiality. Part 1: Digitization to Rescue Concerts Tapes Threatened by an Eroding Network Since its foundation, the Montreux Jazz Festival’s organizers have recorded con- certs. The archive now represents about 5,000 hours of audio and video record- ings. Endorsed as Memory of the World by UNESCO in 2013, this unique collection covers 50 years of jazz, blues, and funk music. As famous US artists and politicians (e.g., Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, Hillary Clinton) have participated, the Montreux archive is one of the most valuable testimonies to American contemporary music. The records were made in the most innovative formats of the time: stereo multi- tracks since 1975, HDTV since 1991, 3- D experiments in the 2010s. According to the leaders of the digitization project, the decision to put together the archive dates back to 1988, when a manager of the festival made a request to the national televi- sion network, which was supposed to preserve the recordings. He asked them to provide a given recording and discovered that the tape had been reused to record a football match between two small towns. There was no other copy of the record- ing; the memory of that concert was therefore lost. Worried, the festival’s founder decided to retrieve the records and construct a building on his property to house safely the tapes whose number increased year by year. However, the “bunker,” as aficionados call it, was quick to show its limits. Seem- ingly safe in Compactus storage that housed them for 20 years, the tapes were again threatened, this time by oxidation. In order to be read, some formats re- quired technologies that were becoming scarce (two- inch audio and U- matic for example). Some machines could no longer be found; others were very bulky. In ad- dition, the knowledge required to run them was not easily available; it was some- times concentrated in a few specialized companies, sometimes possessed by only a few people no longer working actively in the field. The 18 different formats used during 50 years for recordings and the rarity of some of them give value to the ar- chive and, at the same time, make the perennial conservation of the archive difficult. Technology and the knowledge on which the archive depended were endangered.
- 39. 21 Unfolding Digital Materiality Other elements that support the existence of the tapes and their contents are stable and constitute good allies in the preservation of the recordings: the bunker of the archive (regularly maintained and built according to the best standards of the time); up- to- date inventories; contracts with artists who rely on the wide network of the copyright; amateurs who continue to listen to edited or pirated cop- ies; collectors who maintain their collection and sometimes enrich it with tapes acquired when organizations that held copies let them go. All those elements were thereby compensating somewhat for the erosion of the network of organizations and actors supposed to ensure the preservation. However, these mediators associ- ated with the archive who converge on “concerts that have taken place” were not enough to ensure the sustainability of their recordings. Gradually, their mediation weakened and the network supporting the recordings crumbled in places. This threat highlights the network- constitutive mediations of memory and il- lustrates the relational dimension of maintaining in existence the concerts. If the recorded concerts (their materiality) depend on such a network to exist and not to disappear, the question may arise, what is their content? Thus formulated, the ques- tion assumes, however, a dichotomy between material form (media) and content that we believe should be abandoned in order fully to grasp the relational dimension of materiality (Law and Mol 1995; Hennion 2003; Ingold 2011; Latour 2013). Examin- ing the network of associations that constitutes the existence of the “concerts that have taken place” also allows us to understand how this existence is threatened and the dynamics of the interaction between the elements of the network that do and undo the concerts. From Conservation to Promotion and Exploitation: Rescuing the Concerts by Making Them Fluid and Able to Circulate The destiny of the concert recordings of Montreux brings together actors whose collaboration may be surprising. People originating from the worlds of culture and technology agree on an operation to rescue the recordings. Because of its concern for preserving this heritage and awareness of the importance of the technical and financial investment required for the sustainability of the archive, the responsible Heritage Foundation has signed a partnership with EPFL, which seeks to develop its practice in the field of the digitization of cultural heritage. Access to large digitized corpora and to an already shaped data territory (Vinck and Camus, forth- coming) will provide resources for the development of its laboratories. In 2011, on the basis of these contacts and agreements, an ambitious and large- scale project of digitization of audiovisual archives was born. Over five years, more than 15 million Swiss francs were allocated to digitize 10,000 tapes cover- ing the 50 years of the festival in order to preserve this heritage. But the aim was also to promote the festival and its archives and to generate added value (academic publications, design of products and services, creation of start- up). At the time of the survey, although 75% of the tapes were digitized and available on the five- petabyte storage system hosted in a secure room beside the computing machinery and other sensitive data from the engineering university, the destiny of the archive re- mains uncertain. Conservation does not happen by itself; our interlocutors state that there is no permanent solution other than the systematic and regular transfer of the archive from one format to another following their evolution, coupled with a copy in at least three different media and locations. To cope with the uncertainty
- 40. 22 Camus and Vinck of conservation, the hypothesis formulated by those responsible for the lab—which was, in fact, created at the occasion of this digitization project— is that the sustain- ability of the archive will be achieved through its promotion and exploitation, in- cluding by offering it as raw material for innovation to different laboratories of the university. Thus, with the material attached to new sociotechnical networks, the risk of its disappearance would be reduced, including the risk of missing out on new computer formats, through the monitoring of technological developments by researchers from the university for their own needs. The lab thus achieves a trans- lation (Callon 1986) between the preservation of a cultural archive and the scien- tific life of a state- of- the- art lab network. The digitization of the festival archive is therefore driven by a goal of promotion of the labs involved and of the university that hosts these labs. The association of the archive with this network of labs should also produce a dynamic of innovation from which archive promotion should benefit. Between 2011 and 2014, five labs and over 30 researchers worked on the digi- tized archive, resulting, for example, in the development of a musical suggestion application and automatic playlist generation (Genezik) and in an application al- lowing one to browse the festival’s archives on an iPad (Archive Discovery Applica- tion). These devices form new sociotechnical extensions of the archive and thus extend its existence. They feed on the digitization of the archive and, at the same time, guide the treatment of the digital archive according to their specific needs. They depend, in particular, on a music content classification system used by contemporary media players: the playlist. To serve these applications, recorded and digitized concerts must be formatted so as to generate a playlist. Through this way of processing digital files, the suggestion algorithm is able to offer a “musical journey” based upon the analysis of the first piece selected by the user. From this first selection, the application developed by researchers in signal processing analyzes the musical content (they call it the “musical DNA”) and calculates the supposed tastes of the user so as to offer song transitions as “soft” as possible ac- cording to “audio only” parameters (rhythmic structure, timbre, harmonic pro- gression).6 The application thus distinguishes itself from its competitors whose algorithmic recommendations depend on metadata (for example, qualification of the “style”)— an unreliable criterion according to the researchers of the project. The application allows users to discover pieces they had forgotten and should nev- ertheless enjoy. However, it assumes that the digital files it handles are equipped with tags transforming concerts into a world of independent musical pieces, that is, clearly marked with a beginning and an end. For this application, an entire con- cert is not suitable material for deployment; it needs pieces. The lab accordingly shapes digital files, allowing the archived concerts to be deployed in new socio- technical networks, at the price of a musical-material translation of concerts into playlists. The Archive Discovery Application offers users the possibility to navigate the festival concerts on an iPad by selecting a year, a concert, or a song. The con- cert as a digital entity is not a problem as long as it is equipped with tags that allow it to be read and translated as if it were a playlist of the concert. This playlist allows the user to switch from one song to another. Both applications briefly presented here highlight the fact that the rescue of en- dangered tapes involves the creation of new networks of relations between entities that are themselves also new. The association of the archive with these technological artifacts offers it new conditions for digital existence; however, this association
- 41. 23 Unfolding Digital Materiality involves a series of transformations of the archive and concerts. The temporality of recordings and concerts does not remain intact; it does not become what it would have been in a classical conservation process of archives where the integ- rity of the document is an end in itself. Embedded in a dynamic of digitization, the archive is put to the test, employed and transformed in order to participate in its promotion, which is posed as a condition of its preservation. The renewed vitality of the concerts, through the sociodigital treatment they undergo, suggests that they are on track to be saved. Digitization is the opportunity to decouple threat- ened concert tapes and to embed them into a new network under construction. The survival of the festival concerts depends on the success of this construction and association with new entities that are, from now on, protective of the hence- forth digital existence of the recordings. Part 2: Multiplying Mediators in Order to Obtain Tangible Material In this part of the chapter, we continue the investigation of the digital deployment of the music archive by entering the lab in which this digital music material, which is intended to circulate in other labs, is prepared. We begin by operating an “infra- structural inversion” (Bowker 1994) to highlight the operations that make and unmake the digital material. We situate our analysis upstream of the circulation outside the lab, at the time when a collection of digitized tapes acquires circula- tion potential. This preparation for circulation involves manipulations of digitized records and qualification operations of what there is “in” the files. Getting Acquainted with the Digital Material In order to create mobile units and tag concert sequences (songs of playlists), re- searchers transform digital files into a material with which interactions become possible. They begin by looking for a way to manipulate the material and “catch the tapes.” Their investigation consists in qualifying what these tapes may be and what they might be made of. At its arrival at the lab, the tape is digitized and copied onto two durable storage media.7 A unique ID and a digitizing report available in the project database are already associated and linked to the magnetic tape data storage. These are the basic handles available for researchers to locate files in the collection under construc- tion. They also provide them with a set of clues concerning their probable state: if the digitization has gone well, the signal is probably in good condition. This is pre- cisely what they will begin to verify. The investigation they initiate shows that digi- tization means not dematerialization but rather another materialization The primary digitization transforms a single magnetic tape into six files stored on two physical supports (LTO cartridges). To each file corresponds a unique ID that takes the formalism of the analog archive inventories, to which is added the file name extension (e.g., WAV, AVI). These indications enable them to manage the unloading of the files from one of the LTO cartridges into the storage system. The primary, “predigital” archive is the copy of the original magnetic tape on a new physical sup- port and magnetic tape. This archive is kept as such on its new support, duplicated
- 42. 24 Camus and Vinck and stored in a safe, waiting to migrate to the next generation of the support. The secondary (II) and tertiary (III) versions of the digital archive are uploaded into the storage system. The secondary archive will provide the basis for continuing the process due to its good value in relation to weight (about 50 GB per hour of re- cording) according to the researchers. On the basis of this version, they transform the files to prepare pieces on which they will run tests. They then undertake a series of tests to learn more about the tapes. The first test concerns the signal. To qualify the audio signal, they use spe- cialized software (Adobe Audition), which is their main tool for audio signal pro- cessing. For the video signal, they use other specialized software (Adobe Premiere) and tools present in the “reference monitors” with advanced signal processing functions. The tests and inspections of signals constitute an introduction. The signal is then taken as an intermediary through which researchers catch “what there is on the tape.” This contact is limited to the most experienced members of the lab. In concrete terms, the researcher opens the file corresponding to the digital copy of the tape in its secondary archive version with the specialized software. Her work- station is equipped with two screens. On the top of the right screen appears the moving image of the video recording, under which are displayed the different sig- nal channels: video is represented by a sequence of still frames, audio by the graph- ical representation of the waveform corresponding to each stereo channel. Audio can be listened to through headphones, but most of the time researchers only see it on the screen. The concert— both its sound and image— is thus visually deployed on multiple screens. Two screens are used for this operation described as quality assessment. A third screen, known as the “reference screen,” is put to use from time to time for some operations. On the right- hand screen, the video is displayed in play mode via the software interface; on the second, left- hand screen, the researcher varies visu- alizations of the video signal corresponding to different approaches of the signal (see figure 1). The lab has previously referred to local experts, who have long been related to the recording of the festival concerts, to help establish acceptance crite- ria, such as chrominance (part of the signal concerning the color) and luminance (level of light). They have agreed to set the luminance of the video between 0.3 and 0.9– 1.1. The researcher explores the digitized tapes to value indicators that allow her to estimate the quality of the digitization performed by the subcontractor. The researcher involved in this process of testing the signal is constantly navi- gating between the two main screens that combine different approaches of the re- cordings through specific visualizations, each corresponding to different types of tests. To chrominance and luminance is added the detection of errors and defects, such as dropouts (small losses of analog signal due to digitization or originating in the recording itself; see figure 2). During this first stage, browsing in the video is done randomly, through trial and error. The mouse cursor moves and clicks on the timeline, which is located on the right- hand screen, allowing circulation in the concert file. The representations of the signal coexist with the video. Moving forward on the timeline, the researcher goes ahead in the recording and in the discovery of the digitized tape, seeking to verify that there is still something that looks like a concert, assessing the state of the signal and detecting possible defects. If indicators of the video signal delivered on the screen do not show values outside the standards, the read- discovery- analysis continues linearly, moving
- 43. 25 Unfolding Digital Materiality FIGURE 1: Variation of the signal in the interface of Adobe Premiere. Credits: Metamedia Center, EPFL. FIGURE 2: Dropouts (see on the hear). Credits: Metamedia Center, EPFL.
- 44. 26 Camus and Vinck forward in the recording. However, when an anomaly is detected, scrolling is im- mediately stopped and the researcher goes back. Too high luminance or chromi- nance leads her to a more detailed examination: Is it certain? By how much? Under what conditions? Which color exactly? The dropouts also interrupt the reading be- cause their perception involves finding the incriminated frames. As a first step, she looks back on her perception and aligns it on a part of the video signal. She identifies the sequence (zone) where the dropout appeared. Then she zooms inside the frame sequence represented by a series of rods. Finally, she changes tools. Leaving the mouse, she moves to the keyboard and uses the arrows, scrolling through the frames one by one until she finds and notes the timecode (to the hun- dredth of a second) that matches the defect.8 This operation can be tricky because the matching of perception and the sequence that contains the defective images is not easy. Sometimes the perceived dropout is not found and the reading- analysis resumes. Giving Birth to Musical- Digital Intermediary Objects This first meeting between researchers and digitized tapes is an important step in understanding the recordings because holds are built in order to qualify them. Knowledge is channeled through the signal that translates the digital file into an object that can be handled with clues, indicators, and concepts that are known and tested by the specialists of signal processing. The signal appears on the screen, and it is “here” or “there,” on its graphical- digital representation, that the re- searchers identify relevant information, such as a remarkable value of the signal or images containing dropouts. The tapes are then recognized as containing con- tent that the researchers can qualify, at least the small portions that they can qual- ify and with which they build an object of knowledge. They thus begin to know “what the recordings are made of.” Approaching the tape through its audio or video signal also allows them to connect the contents of the tape with instruments mastered by the researchers. With their conceptual and instrumental equipment, they capture and translate a portion of what is on the tape and spread it over two or even three 22- inch screens. Even deployed in this way, the qualification of the signal remains difficult; the material is not fully captive. Some reactions to the signal testing are furtive and sometimes difficult to catch even with a trained eye. The result of this first encounter is materialized by a report (quality assessment report), another computer file that reports on the meeting with and the behavior of the tape grasped through its video signal. Researchers formalize the competence deduced from observed performances (Latour 2004). This process leads to descrip- tions that increase knowledge while multiplying the elements supposed to be constitutive of digitized records (signal, color, light, frame, timeline, timecode, etc.). These elements appear as intermediary objects (Vinck 2011) at the interface level (screens, headphones) and are sometimes inscriptions (Latour and Woolgar 1979), due to operations carried out by researchers, their computers, and algorithms. This set of successive operations of transforming the recording make it an object of knowledge and a component of the information infrastructure constituted by the digital archive.
- 45. 27 Unfolding Digital Materiality Preparing the Recorded Concert for New Encounters: Networking the Content with Other Files We have just seen a foundational stage of the process that helps dispel initial un- certainty about the state of digitized tapes and their capacity to be grabbed. The trial also involves many researchers, their techniques, and their skills. This first encounter verifies whether it is possible to go further in relation to the recording. The sociotechnical network constitutive of the material has significantly in- creased by connecting with instruments and scientific skills of the lab that multi- ply the material properties. However, we still have to consider many operations before the digitized tapes become equipped concerts that will drive musical play- lists. Now, we briefly account for the deployment of the material before stopping at an important moment of interaction between the operators and digital- musical material. The reconstitution of a concert involves a detailed examination of the record- ings on which their existence depends. During this review, the researchers seek to answer questions such as these: What happened that night on the stage? What was played? In doing so, they “reveal” the concert that is supposed to be “contained” in the tapes. By putting to work these recordings as well as inventories and other traces that have been kept since the days of video recording (labels on the case of the tape and ID), researchers link tapes to concerts and identify objects (such and such piece of music) that are supposed to exist in the file of the digitized concert. Up until this point, the researchers have revealed a signal proving the existence of a concert. The next part of the process is about bringing into existence its content and what this content is made of. To do so, they use archives from the legal files of the festival, which, in the negotiation of contracts with the artists, declare the song list supposed to have been played that night. So these songs have a legal existence. This setlist provided by the festival organizers (Festival-setlist) introduces in the lab a potential hold on the content of the concerts. Considering together the tape IDs attached to the corresponding digital files, the presence of a signal attested by first tests and the Festival-setlist leads to the idea that there indeed are pieces of music in the digital file corresponding to the concert, pieces whose list is given a priori. This new step then consists in testing this hypothesis, verifying whether what is described on the setlist is really to be found in the digital files and avatars of the tapes received from the subcontractor. The Festival-setlist looks like a relatively cursory Excel document; it is, for now, the most accurate description available to researchers and temporary employees (who generally are equally male and female engineering students) about the events that may have been preserved in the digi- tized tapes. This description of the concert does not necessarily correspond to a tape on which these pieces may be because in the world of copyright, the reference unit is not the tape but the concert. The next task is to establish a matching of con- certs setlists and tapes (often two tapes for a concert). The descriptive file of the concert is included in a file directory that gradually gathers a set of files to be investigated in order to determine what concerts are made of. The directory is named after a concert and collects lightened copies of audio files (WAV versions slightly compressed after extracting the audio stream of the archive II), video files (highly compressed MP4 versions of the archive II) of each tape related to the concert, the setlist provided by the legal service of the festival (Festival-setlist), and finally a list of songs to be completed (Indexing-setlist) as and when the Festival-setlist is validated by an exploration of audio and video files.
- 46. 28 Camus and Vinck In this exploration of the digitized concert, researchers and temporary employ- ees favor the audio file over the video file. The audio signal is said to be lighter; es- pecially the waveform visualization and the possibility to zoom into the signal make the audio signal an object considered to be manageable and easy to handle. Comparatively, the video signal representation is said to be hard to grasp. So it is on the audio file that temporary employees place markers that distinguish the events constituting the concert. The video file, considered to be peripheral, is there “just in case”; the user guide explains to temporary employees that in general it will not be used. However, this MP4 version of the archive is that which is included on the iPad and its Archive Discovery App. Changing the Properties of the Material: Obtaining a Reasonably “Clickable” Material The network of entities gathered around the tapes is already dense. New people and machines intervene in the handling of the files that researchers now call “con- cert files.” As the network grows, the archive corpus becomes a more and more tangible material. The deployment of the network gives thickness to the digitized records by associating inscriptions and accumulating clues used to qualify the material. At this stage, temporary employees have access to material that is just a click away. The sum of the files gathered in their working directory becomes the ground on which they prepare to take action and draw the outlines of what could be the concert they are in charge of. The recorded concert is from now on a set of concert files constituted of various computer files. The copresence of these files and clues reinforces the thickness of what is now the concert. By their participation in the evidential base (Ginzburg 1984) that makes the object, their role as evidence pro- vides them also with a role as mediator. These files are the mediators of an indexed concert in the making, with which temporary employees should be able to interact. This proliferation of mediators (Hennion 2003) ensures a possible and tangible interaction with the corpus of digitized recordings: the concert is distributed and expands into a series of new objects. Its matter (Latour 2013) extends and is popu- lated with elements that can be put to work in future interactions. The mediators built by engineers enable them to multiply holds for future interactions with the concert that can now be manipulated and modified. Part 3: The Struggle for Fluidity: Building Mobile Pieces Transforming Concerts into Collections of Small Pieces: Songs and Playlists The digitized recordings transformed into concert files pass through the hands of the temporary employees who ask, What happened that night onstage? What was actually played? The lab team thus progresses in its knowledge of digitized tapes and becomes prepared to index recording files by identification of events in order to be able to find them easily or even to extract and build them as songs that “may be played individually in a music software playlist” (as written into the In- dexing user guide). This indexing operation adds tags to digital files, allowing, for
- 47. 29 Unfolding Digital Materiality example, the Archive Discovery Application to explore videos of concerts in the media player playlist of an iPad, but also allowing Genezik to analyze musical sim- ilarity of pieces. On their arrival at the lab, the dozen new temporary employees are trained for a week and receive 13 pages of guidelines that remind them of the goals and steps to follow: • “Locate transitions between songs and events, placing markers in [the audio edition window] and naming them from the provided concert setlist; • Build the setlist associated to the .WAV file in progress, copying information from the concert setlist. If mismatch is observed, compared with the audio, apply the corrections; and, • Generally speaking, consider that each song will be isolated and played back alone, or as a part of a playlist, making use of fade out and fade in transitions.” (Indexing user guide, lab internal document, p. 9) They must scrutinize the whole tape in order to describe the content and mark events. To do this, they have a list of typical events: • Intro: the whole recorded area before the first song, including silence, applause, speeches • Song • Interlude: short piece of music, instrument tests • Applause: includes “thank you” and song introduction speeches by the artists • Speech: something more than just simple song introduction, including applause • Come back: long applause time before come back of an artist, may include speeches • Silence: rarely used • To check: in case something does not fit the previous types (Indexing user guide, lab internal document, p. 9) The guidelines for indexing, setlists, and the graphical representation of the waveform on the screen are used as support for the temporary employees to guide their work of qualifying file content but always need to be interpreted. This work leads to the emergence of quasi-objects, including songs that are not separate enti- ties and detached from the flow of the concert but that anticipate their potential extraction and their establishment as new objects. At this stage, they are tempo- rary objects made for the construction of new objects, which include songs and playlists. Feeling and Touching the Sound Material before Modifying It: The Songs as Quasi- Objects The first of these supports is the setlist, listing the songs as so many music- digital objects supposed to have been recorded and stored on tape. It orients the work of the temporary employees who, without this support, cannot a priori know what to
- 48. 30 Camus and Vinck look for in the recording and might put off their investigation by just leaving a note saying “no setlist.” Without the Festival-setlist, the investigation stops. If the Festival- setlist and the Indexing-setlist to be completed appear in the workspace, temporary employees open the file from the audio version (WAV) of the recording. It is with this file that they will interact. The markers they place on it will testify to the fact that an event is recorded at this precise location. At this point, the tape is no longer simply an audio signal; it begins to exist as a concert. With the setlist, it even starts to become a potential playlist. All the tempo- rary employees need, in principle, is to recognize the pieces assumed to be in the recording; then, with a click, they set new tags to delimit the songs. This is a first decisive but sometimes difficult step toward fluidization. Sometimes, they find the songs easily, especially when the song’s title words are regularly quoted in the lyrics; they may have more difficulty tracking and identifying others, including instrumentals, which jazz is particularly fond of. Having opened the audio file, mouse in hand, they move the cursor from a “mo- ment” of the concert to another on the graphical representation of the sound wave displayed on the screen. First, they scan visually the shape of the waveform re- cording to identify its structure. With their headphones on, they spot graphical wave packets mainly from visual cues on the screen, clicking the mouse for a brief stop at the beginning of each graphical wave packet to check whether it is music or not. With this visual scan of sound, in some way a warm- up for the real work of identification that will follow, they seek what they expect to find according to the setlist. They get an idea of what looks like the concert and the way in which the pieces are connected and the transitions done. They count as music tracks the graphical wave packets a priori identified, hoping that the setlist displays the same number. This identification of the relevant graphical wave packets does not happen by it- self; it takes the engineering students a while to learn how to determine the differ- ence, at a glance, between a graphical wave packet that shows a “song” and another packet that represents a “speech.” By doing this work for a few weeks, they become apprentices or even experts, able to distinguish a piece of music from a speech at a single glance. Interacting with digital recordings, armed with a mouse, a headset, and espe- cially a screen, with their eyes and fingertips, they explore the structure of the con- cert. Doing so, they are already transforming the continuous flow of the concert into a playlist whose labels are those of the Festival-setlist. The concert is seen on the screen, mainly on the audio file. The amount of clues and evidence gathered around it grants thickness to the audio file (Ginzburg 1984). Through the visualiza- tion of the audio file, the recorded concert becomes a space in which it is possible to move freely, in small steps or giant leaps, thus shaping quasi- objects (Lécaille 2003) preparing the installation of a markup. Once these (reversible) bollards are installed, the pieces take on more consistency. They are now defined by boundaries under construction. Sketching of the Piece Indexing consists of adding tags to digitized files in order to mark the beginning and the end of each identified event on the audio avatar of the tape recording (WAV file). The time code of these tags can then be used to guide the extraction
- 49. 31 Unfolding Digital Materiality of tracks and to facilitate searching in and playing concerts that have become playlists. To reach this goal, the engineering students have to build songs. They do this by starting from the Festival-setlist and a first visual exploration of the sound file. Then comes the moment to determine the physical limits of these songs. Having spotted on the audio file the first song corresponding to the setlist, they position the cursor and set a tag at the end of the graphical wave packet. This end point is the exact beginning of the next transition, that is, an “applause” sequence, whose end is at first fixed temporarily. It becomes final once the start of the second piece has been clearly identified; for the moment this is somewhere between the possible end of the “applause” and the following graphical wave packet (see figure 3). In this still unclear area, the temporary employee walks the cursor with small touches on the graphical representation of the audio signal; each stop generates the corresponding sound in the headphones. She thus tests some possible begin- nings until she marks one provisionally; automatically opening a new time range, she extends to the end of the graphical wave packet that is about to become the second piece. The end marker is positioned roughly toward the end of the graphi- cal wave packet. She then moves the cursor within the package that could be the second piece, with some hops in order to proceed through a quick listening. This ensures that the piece does not contain anything unexpected that she could not otherwise “see.” The wave packet is now becoming a song. The temporary employee then re- turns to its borders to define them more accurately. She retrieves the start marker and zooms in on this provisional start. The software then produces a detailed rep- resentation of the waves in order to sort out the sounds. She moves around and tests two or three plausible places, working on a different scale from the one used at the time of the provisional setting. She now targets a small portion, that is, a sample, defined at a 48,000th of a second (sampling rate of 48 kHz) on the audio file. Her eye guides the operation, as a slowed listening would distort the sound too FIGURE 3: The graphical wave packets in the interface of Adobe Audition. Credits: Metamedia Center, EPFL.
- 50. 32 Camus and Vinck much; the temporary employees act on the audio signal through its visualization and the mouse controlling the cursor position.9 Decisions on sound are thus taken visually. On the Way to the First Note: Boundary Work Struggle How do engineering students determine the most appropriate sample to material- ize the beginning of the song? The Indexing user guide, of which they always have a handy copy, insists on the fact that a good song beginning should be located in the first half second before the first note. This rule refers explicitly to the music indus- try and particularly to the edition of live CDs. In this interval, they must take the decision to define the small piece of waveform on which to fix the tag. At the scale of the sample 1/48,000th of a second, half a second is actually very large and con- tains a mixture of various noises: audience applause, whistles, shouts, and so on, with which the words of an artist can overlap (thanks or announcements of the next song). Cases of relative silence are rare; there is no tabula rasa on which they can fix the tag arbitrarily. This is nearly always applause that articulates two pieces. Zooming becomes strategic for indexers, in order to choose the sample that will host the tag of the beginning of the song; a second, stretched by the zoom, then spreads on a quarter of the 22- inch screen. Described as such because it hinders action, noise is also a resource for index- ers. They treat it as a buffer zone, a material martyr in which they can cut without mercy. This buffer zone forces them to zoom in and turn the time lapse of noise into a subsequence with many possibilities. They scrutinize it to know its composi- tion and detail one by one the sounds that could interfere with the beginning of the first note. For example, they wait for a cry or whistle to fade and place the marker then, to avoid giving the impression of starting on something that is ending. It is therefore not a straightforward task to get closer and closer to the first note. Index- ers use many tricks, knowledge of editing software, their sharpened ear, and body control that ensures fine coordination between hand, mouse, cursor, graphical- numerical representation, and sight. This work also puts to use their acoustic knowl- edge learned on the job about the behavior of the signal: the velocity of each sound, the need to wait for a sound to finish in order to be able to isolate it without disturb- ing listening. This indexing work, in fact, opens a new set of uncertainties. The divi- sion into distinct sequences does not impose by themselves as evident. The indexers must negotiate with the sound stream and dynamics of the concert. Nothing is obvious; the sound must be very finely qualified in order for the indexer to be able to decide where to put its click markup. Once the cursor has almost found its final place after a series of trials and hesita- tions, the indexer checks once again, listening to what happens by mimicking the start of the song as if it were in a playlist. She then repeats listening once or twice by pressing the buttons on the built- in player of the editing software. Sometimes dissat- isfied, she shifts again slightly the cursor to skip a tiny passage finally judged to be bad. She starts listening again in the manner of the player until she is satisfied with the result; the piece has therefore a beginning and an end, at least temporarily. This work will be taken up later in the file biography, during a step called “quality control,” consisting of verifying the quality of boundaries, particularly to ensure nobody has missed notes before the start of the song, that they have left enough, but not too much, applause at the end of the song, and have not forgotten real “silences” in the song.
- 51. 33 Unfolding Digital Materiality Shaping the Object, Equipping Its Boundaries Transforming heavy musical events like concerts into more fluid materials like songs goes through boundary work consisting of identifying what a song is and what its boundaries are. But it also goes through an equipping work (Vinck 2011) of these boundaries. In order to give more consistency to these boundaries, they are associated with new elements, which give them more weight and paradoxically contribute to the fluidization of the concerts. So, once the sequence has precise limits, indexers describe it in the Indexing-setlist. They assign a name using the generic formalism of Festival-setlist (when the song actually exists in the record- ing). They also include parentage with respect to the concert of songs that are on their way to become autonomous entities: E.g.: artist - x-title - x-album - x-year - x-track number - x-ID B.B. King - x-Strung Out - x-The Jazz Festival archive - x-2015 - x-1 - x-173 From the Indexing-setlist, which is destined to replace the Festival-setlist, the tempo- rary employees copy the corresponding line in the list of events that is built using the editing software (Audition); the “piece” that is shaped by the work of boundary markers has no name yet but only timecodes (the two samples hosting the start and end of a sequence). These timecodes are embedded in Audition and in the in- dexed audio file it produces. They are then extracted from the indexed audio file with another software, a freeware that structures a text file (.TXT), a description that reproduces the formalism of the example and adds timecodes. The sound file is not attached to this timecode.txt file, which is designed to serve as a basis for playing audio and video files and to provide time stamps that will be transformed into reading marks in the player of the Archive Discovery Application.10 The indexing operation ends with file saving. The Indexing-setlist is saved in two formats includ- ing XML, which “dialogues” more easily with the general database. This Indexing- setlist may now replace the list provided by the festival, which was the reference to this point. However, indexing does not end here. The songs now constituted as tagged entities are still embedded in the recording of the concert. The issue is then to extract them and add another set of equipment to them in order to ensure their new and autonomous life. With the indexed audio file still open, a new directory named SONGS is created and placed in the same directory as the other files being processed. The engineer- ing student selects musical events she has just indexed via the interface of editing software, more precisely in its descriptive list on the left of the waveform repre- sentation. With a right- click, she selects export, sets the format (WAV 24 bits 48 kHz, the same as the one with which she just tagged pieces of concert) and introduces the destination file: SONGS. She repeats the operation by changing the format for copying songs to MP3. She then reduces the editing software window and goes to the SONGS directory where she sorts out what she will keep. Audition automatically generates a third set of files in PKF format. This proprietary format saves an image of the graphical representation of the signal. It is an image of wave images that evolves according to signal processing; it is always up- to- date because it is pro- duced in the background; it thus avoids having to generate a graphical representa- tion each time the file is opened. These files, however, are the first to be deleted, indicating that the lab has no plans to reopen the tracks in the editing software. To
- 52. 34 Camus and Vinck do this, the “SONGS” files are sorted by “type”; all PKF files are selected and then deleted. Then, WAV and MP3 files are sorted by name. Events that are not songs, such as speech, applause, and others, are also deleted in order to leave only songs in the SONGS folder. Then the temporary employees structure song metadata using the Tag & Re- name program. In concrete terms, they take all the songs in MP3 version, drag and drop them into the program, click on “edit tag,” and the metadata that was in the name of the file itself is structured in columns. Continuing the example from BB KING: artist - x-title - x-Album - x-year - x-track number - x-ID B.B King - x-Strung Out - x-The Montreux Jazz Festival archive - x-2011 - x-1 - x-173 The term “- x- ” separates the variables. Artist, Title, Album, Year, Track- Number now constitute columns of metadata that media players are supposed to recognize and read. Engineering students then add to each piece the poster of the year of the concert. The pieces, whose parentage remains attached in the metadata, are now recognizable by any media player that will “play” them as any other MP3 song. In order to become autonomous, the song files are equipped with data that keep track of their parentage and refer to documents confirming their origin and copyrights associated with the concert. Discussion: Digitalization as Rematerialization A Produced Fluidity During digitization, the material of the recordings has been greatly deployed through multiple mediators and associations established by the lab team. In a first step, the digitized tapes are literally multiplied in different places: a safe for the two conservation cartridges with the uncompressed files, then a storage system containing the uncompressed files and the lower quality version that will be used for the rest of the process. Then their general condition is checked before they are engaged in a space of action in which they are grasped via the mediation of several objects, supposed to help unravel the mystery of their condition and their consti- tution. In fact, these mediators increase the number of elements on which the existence of the digitized concert rely. They became related as constitutive ele- ments of the matter- network. It is not a unique essence, which irrigates a network in construction, but rather a material, which is constantly transforming as its existence is deploying. Researchers and temporary employees interact with digital recordings, some- times very closely, for example in negotiating the marks these artifacts can ac- cept. These artifacts are worked on in a process through which researchers and temporary employees get to know their materiality and composition (including the sequences that make up the concerts). Conversely, progressively built objects lead researchers and temporary employees to act with caution, taking the materi- ality of these artifacts into account. While this digital- musical material has be- come tangible (reasonably clickable), this does not mean the material has become docile. Even the transitions that should help extract the “musical content” are ne-
- 53. 35 Unfolding Digital Materiality gotiated and inscribed with difficulty. Researchers and temporary employees go through a struggle that results in an acceptable compromise at some point on sam- ples of 1/48,000th of a second. They negotiate those object boundaries piece by piece. The result, written, described, and recopied in several places, unfolds into multiple traces, all of which are certificates and containers of what has just been built and is still attached to the digitized tapes. The indexing process we described is the most complete attempt to find and re- veal what there is “on the tapes.” Through indexing, knowledge of the concert is crystallized into a number of entities (inscriptions, equipment, intermediary ob- jects that become material mediators of a matter-network) that are associated with the object (i.e., part of the audio file) that has been built through these operations. This produced object becomes a known object (e.g., a song); the materiality of the produced object (e.g., the piece of file) is considerably extended with respect to that of the object to be built (i.e., songs and playlists). In this sense, our account for indexing process is an attempt to reveal the distribution of being digital. Think of what one should do to move a very small marker materializing the beginning of one song. The number of elements related to the markers— the matter of the marker— could itself be discouraging since it is very difficult to redo the indexing process. The whole chain of mediators must be activated once again and the inter- mediary objects (timecodes, up- to- date setlists, indexed audio files, independent songs, etc.) have to be rewritten and reproduced. While the process of digitization aims at producing and shaping digital facts, questioning them would require a new inquiry. Our original question on the destiny of the matter of recordings when it is confronted with a dynamic of digitization leads us to show that the deployment of matter and the dynamic of multiplication of mediators come with enhanced vitality of the musical fact. The new life of festival concerts materializes in two ways: on the one hand, concerts can be yet again read with contemporary devices. New means of navigation are made possible thanks to the reading tags on pieces. On the other hand, bits of concerts, the “songs,” are equipped in order to become au- tonomous and to circulate in a new sociotechnical network, that of media players. The fluidity that has been acquired through the digitization process is grounded in new associations on which, from now on, the recordings of the festival concerts depend. In this sense, this new potential for circulation depends on the capacity of the constitutive elements of the new matter- network to become active in order to allow interactions when necessary. This emphasizes the amount of work accom- plished to build a potential of fluidity that can rely on the media readers that are widely available around the world. The fluidity, or potential for circulation, results from the building of a material with which transformation and thus gain of fluidity is possible. The material that is at stake had to become tangible and modifiable in order to become fluid. This is a crucial point that our ethnography can shed light on. On the way to becoming a tangible material one can work with, these very hy- brid digital pieces (signal, music, bit, waveform, sample, timecodes, songs, etc.) modify their constitution. These transformations are particularly visible when op- erators are building for themselves a set of holds in order to stabilize a material with which they will be able to interact. These holds are forged in interaction with the material and modify its properties by becoming a constitutive part of it. These both practical and conceptual elements show with accuracy that reducing tangi- bility and contingence are at the heart of the process of becoming digital. In our understanding, this is also a key point for the conceptualization of digital materi- ality where equipping work (Vinck 2011) is playing a central role.
- 54. 36 Camus and Vinck Following on material properties, the example of copyrights is revealing. While becoming digital, concerts have become richer and have received constitutive ele- ments from the elements used to construct them. While concerts benefit from the emergence of pieces, their existence previous to songs is modified and enhanced by this new presence, which is tested and testified on the indexed recording. The copyright information that has been transformed as one of the prior holds in order to produce “surfable” concerts fosters the emergence of entities that have strong mobility potential. The “same” list of legal objects changes the status of the pieces once they have been created. There is no longer the possibility to pretend these objects don’t exist and are not the subject of a contract. Concerts are weighed down by the presence of new pieces and copyright turns back on an absolute and ubiqui- tous conception of digital fluidity. Law is used as a way to handle the tapes and is inscribed in the objects it refers to. It limits circulation when it has taken part in building the conditions for possible circulation. This composite matter contains elements that may tend to conflicting paths. The pieces that have been built in order to become autonomous may well not be able to exit the servers that host them because of copyright issues. This point encourages avoiding presuming mat- ter is univocal: the apparently “same” constitutive ingredient can shape and re- shape the destiny of the material. Rescuing Materiality: The STS Contribution Looking briefly at the history of the notion of materiality in the humanities and social sciences, we can trace back to the original temptation of reducing digital to a matter of pure semantics. For example, the fields of anthropology and archaeol- ogy, while traditionally sensitive to cultural artifacts and the materiality of the so- cial world, have long contributed to conceptualize a sort of materiality they think of as material culture or material traces of social activity in which, ultimately, the material dimension is secondary. If analyzing materiality means understanding what there is in artifacts, this equates to constructing them as social objects that lose their material properties to become objects of meaning and interpretation. Thus, the literature explicitly dealing with the materiality of things in the social world (Godelier 1986; Miller 1998; Toren 1999; Graves- Brown 2000) has given ma- terial objects the status of tabulae rasae, unimportant foundations on which the social world and culture are built. Material objects are thus understood to partici- pate passively in social life by providing their material form for the construction of a semantic layer, the higher activity specific to human societies (Godelier 1986). This conception of materiality is based on a generally obvious and implicit hierar- chy between humans (who are superior through their use of intentionality and meaning for example) and nonhumans (taken to be inert or transparent). This Great Divide (Latour 1993) supports the idea of materiality taken in an essentially semantic sense and leads to a conceptual impasse where materiality and materials are opposed (Ingold 2007). STS has played an important role in rescuing materiality from the dead end of the absolute exteriority of material things with regard to human beings and what they do. In this respect, we have made extensive use of foundational notions such as inscriptions, instruments, intermediary objects, and mediations in our analy- sis, which could also have been called an analysis of the construction of a digital fact, a distortion of the title of the famous 1979 book by Latour and Woolgar. STS
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- 60. This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: Darstellende Geometrie des Geländes Author: Rudolf Rothe Release date: October 21, 2018 [eBook #58148] Language: German Credits: Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DARSTELLENDE GEOMETRIE DES GELÄNDES ***
- 61. Anmerkungen zur Transkription Im Original gesperrter bzw. kursiver Text ist so ausgezeichnet. Der Text enthält mathematische Symbole, die nicht mit jedem Zeichensatz korrekt angezeigt werden können. Weitere Anmerkungen zur Transkription befinden sich am Ende des Buches.
- 62. Mathematisch-Physikalische Bibliothek Gemeinverständliche Darstellungen aus der Mathematik u. Physik. Unter Mitwirkung von Fachgenossen hrsg. von Dr. W. Lietzmann Direktor der Oberrealschule zu Göttingen und Dr. A. Witting Studienrat, Gymnasialprof. in Dresden Fast alle Bändchen enthalten zahlreiche Figuren. kl. 8. Kart. je M. 2.– Hierzu Teuerungszuschlag des Verlages 120% (Abänderung vorbeh.) u. d. Buchhandl. Die Sammlung, die in einzeln käuflichen Bändchen in zwangloser Folge herausgegeben wird, bezweckt, allen denen, die Interesse an den mathematisch-physikalischen Wissenschaften haben, es in angenehmer Form zu ermöglichen, sich über das gemeinhin in den Schulen Gebotene hinaus zu belehren. Die Bändchen geben also teils eine Vertiefung solcher elementarer Probleme, die allgemeinere kulturelle Bedeutung oder besonderes wissenschaftliches Gewicht haben, teils sollen sie Dinge behandeln, die den Leser, ohne zu große Anforderungen an seine Kenntnisse zu steilen, in neue Gebiete der Mathematik und Physik einführen. Bisher sind erschienen (1912/20): Der Begriff der Zahl in seiner logischen und historischen Entwicklung. Von H. Wieleitner. 2., durchgeseh. Aufl. (Bd. 2.) Ziffern und Ziffernsysteme. Von E. Löffler. 2., neubearb. Aufl. I: Die Zahlzeichen der alten Kulturvölker. (Bd. 1.) II: Die Z. im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit. (Bd. 34.) Die 7 Rechnungsarten mit allgemeinen Zahlen. Von H. Wieleitner. 2. Aufl. (Bd. 7.)
- 63. Einführung in die Infinitesimalrechnung. Von A. Witting. 2. Aufl. I: Die Differential-, II: Die Integralrechnung. (Bd. 9 u. 41.) Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung. V. O. Meißner. 2. Auflage. I: Grundlehren. (Bd. 4.) II: Anwendungen. (Bd. 33.) Vom periodischen Dezimalbruch zur Zahlentheorie. Von A. Leman. (Bd. 19.) Der pythagoreische Lehrsatz mit einem Ausblick auf das Fermatsche Problem. Von W. Lietzmann. 2. Aufl. (Bd. 3.) Darstellende Geometrie des Geländes und verw. Anwendungen der Methode der kotierten Projektionen. Von R. Rothe. 2., verb. Aufl. (Bd. 35/36.) Methoden zur Lösung geometrischer Aufgaben. Von B. Kerst. (Bd. 26.) Einführung in die projektive Geometrie. Von M. Zacharias. (Bd. 6.) Konstruktionen in begrenzter Ebene. Von P. Zühlke. (Bd. 11.) Nichteuklidische Geometrie in der Kugelebene. Von W. Dieck. (Bd. 31.) Einführung in die Nomographie. Von P. Luckey. I. Teil: Die Funktionsleiter. (Bd. 28.) II. Teil: Die Zeichnung als Rechenmaschine. (Bd. 37.) Theorie und Praxis des logarithm. Rechenschiebers. Von A. Rohrberg. 2. Aufl. (Bd. 23.) Die Anfertigung mathemat. Modelle. (Für Schüler mittl. Kl.) Von K. Giebel. (Bd. 16.) Karte und Kroki. Von H. Wolff. (Bd. 27.) Die Grundlagen unserer Zeitrechnung. Von A. Baruch. (Bd. 29.)
- 64. Die mathemat. Grundlagen d. Variations- u. Vererbungslehre. Von P. Riebesell. (24.) Mathematik und Malerei. 2 Teile in 1 Bande. Von G. Wolff. (Bd. 20/21.) Der Goldene Schnitt. Von H. E. Timerding. 2. Aufl. (Bd. 32.) Beispiele zur Geschichte der Mathematik. Von A. Witting und M. Gebhard. (Bd. 15.) Mathematiker-Anekdoten. Von W. Ahrens. 2. Aufl. (Bd. 18.) Die Quadratur d. Kreises. Von E. Beutel. 2. Aufl. (Bd. 12.) Wo steckt der Fehler? Von W. Lietzmann und V. Trier. 2. Aufl. (Bd. 10.) Geheimnisse der Rechenkünstler. Von Ph. Maennchen. 2. Aufl. (Bd. 13.) Riesen und Zwerge im Zahlenreiche. Von W. Lietzmann. 2. Aufl. (Bd. 25.) Was ist Geld? Von W. Lietzmann. (Bd. 30.) Die Fallgesetze. V. H. E. Timerding. (Bd. 5.) Ionentheorie. Von P. Bräuer. (Bd. 38.) Das Relativitätsprinzip. Leichtfaßlich entwickelt von A. Angersbach. (Bd. 39.) Dreht sich die Erde? Von W. Brunner. (17.) Theorie der Planetenbewegung. Von P. Meth. (Bd. 8.) Beobachtung d. Himmels mit einfach. Instrumenten. Von Fr. Rusch. 2. Aufl. (Bd. 14.) Mathem. Streifzüge durch die Geschichte der Astronomie. Von P. Kirchberger. (Bd. 40.) In Vorbereitung:
- 65. Doehlemann, Mathematik und Architektur. Schips, Mathematik und Biologie. Winkelmann, Der Kreisel. Wolff, Feldmessen und Höhenmessen. Verlag von B. G. Teubner in Leipzig und Berlin Preise freibleibend.
- 66. MATHEMATISCH-PHYSIKALISCHE BIBLIOTHEK HERAUSGEGEBEN VON W. LIETZMANN UND A. WITTING 35/36 DARSTELLENDE GEOMETRIE DES GELÄNDES UND VERWANDTE ANWENDUNGEN DER METHODE DER KOTIERTEN PROJEKTIONEN VON RUDOLF ROTHE DR. PHIL., O. PROFESSOR AN DER TECHN. HOCHSCHULE BERLIN ZWEITE, VERBESSERTE AUFLAGE MIT 107 FIGUREN IM TEXT 1919 LEIPZIG UND BERLIN VERLAG UND DRUCK VON B. G. TEUBNER
- 67. Schutzformel für die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika: Copyright 1919 by B. G. Teubner in Leipzig. ALLE RECHTE, EINSCHLIESSLICH DES ÜBERSETZUNGSRECHTS, VORBEHALTEN.
- 69. VORWORT ZUR ERSTEN UND ZWEITEN AUFLAGE In der vorliegenden kleinen Schrift habe ich versucht, den Leser in elementarer und leicht verständlicher Weise mit der zeichnerischen Behandlung der topographischen Flächen nach der Methode der »kotierten Projektionen« bekannt zu machen. Die glückliche Paarung zwischen Rechnung und Zeichnung, auf der diese Methode beruht, die darin begründete Freiheit, sich auch an kompliziertere Aufgaben mit Aussicht auf Erfolg zu wagen, und daher weiter das unbewußte Gefühl, hier wenigstens der »selbstgeschaffenen Schmerzen« der Mathematiker ledig zu sein, das alles gibt diesem Schwestergebiete der darstellenden Geometrie einen besonderen Reiz. Er wird noch erhöht durch die fast unmittelbare Anwendbarkeit auf praktische Fragen. Ich habe auf diese Anwendungen großes Gewicht gelegt; sie entstammen zum Teil dem geologisch-bergmännischen Gesichtskreis und rühren aus der Zeit, als ich an der Clausthaler Bergakademie einiges aus diesem Gebiete in elementaren Vorlesungen über darstellende Geometrie vortrug … In der zweiten Auflage, die dem Büchlein trotz der Ungunst der Zeiten beschieden ist, konnten mehrere sachliche und sprachliche Verbesserungen und Ergänzungen angebracht werden; so insbesondere in den §§ 63 und 64, wo, wie ich glaube, der Begriff des Talwegs jetzt einwandfrei erklärt worden ist. Auch wurde auf mehrfach geäußerten Wunsch ein kurzer Abschnitt über Anwendungen auf die zeichnerische Analysis und die Nomographie hinzugefügt. Bezüglich der Abbildungen, die schon wegen des Formates nicht mehr als einen bloßen Anhalt zum Anfertigen von Reinzeichnungen geben wollen, konnte ich mich auch aus äußeren Gründen nicht entschließen, größere Änderungen vorzunehmen. Wer aus dem Buche ernsthaft lernen will, wird gewiß nicht unterlassen, sich Reinzeichnungen im passenden Maßstabe selbst herzustellen.
- 70. Übrigens ist es ein Unterschied, ob es sich um eine Reinzeichnung handelt, wie sie in den Übungen zur darstellenden Geometrie gefordert wird, oder um eine Konstruktion an einer topographischen oder geologischen Geländekarte; hier wird manche Zeichnung doch nicht viel größer ausfallen als die Abbildungen dieses Bändchens. Am Schluß ist ein alphabetisches Sachverzeichnis angefügt worden. Der erweiterte Umfang hat es erfordert, das Buch als Doppelbändchen herauszugeben. Berlin, im April 1919. RUDOLF ROTHE
- 72. INHALT Seite Einleitung 1 I. Grundbegriffe und elementare Konstruktionen über kotierte Projektionen §§ 1–22 2–18 § 1. Kotierte Projektion. S. 2. § 2. Maßstab der Zeichnung. 3. § 3. Einschalten eines Punktes. 4. § 4. Stufung (Graduierung) einer Geraden. 4. § 5. Intervall. 5. § 6. Schnitt zweier Geraden. 5. § 7. Ebene. 6. § 8. Gefällemaßstab. 6. § 9. Aufgabe. 7. § 10. Böschung, Fallen und Streichen. 7. § 11. Aufgabe. 8. § 12 Schnittgerade zweier Ebenen. 8. § 13. Ebenen mit parallelen Gefällemaßstäben. 9. § 14. Ebenen gleicher Böschung. 10. § 15. Schnittpunkt einer Geraden mit einer Ebene. 10. § 16. Lot von einem Punkte auf eine Ebene. 11. § 17. Kürzester Abstand zweier windschiefer Geraden. 11. § 18. Drehen einer Ebene um eine Streichlinie in die wagerechte Lage. 12. § 19. Schnittwinkel zweier Ebenen. 13. § 20. Böschungskegel. 15. § 21. Kreiszylinder, schiefer Kreiskegel, Kugel. 16. § 22. Andere Oberflächen. 16. II. Elementare Anwendungen §§ 23–34 18– 25 § 23. Zweck der Anwendungen. 18. § 24. Aufführung eines Dammes. 18. § 25. Querprofil. 19. § 26. Anlage eines ebenen Platzes. 19. § 27. Weg gegebener Steigung. 20. § 28. Streichen und Fallen einer Ebene. 21. § 29. Dachausmittelung. 21. § 30. Aufgabe. 22. § 31. Fortsetzung. 22. § 32. Aufschüttung einer Halde. 22. § 33. Ausschachten einer Grube. 24. § 34. Tunnelmündung. 24. III. Darstellung der Geländeflächen §§ 35–73 26– 53
- 73. § 35. Hauptschichtlinien. 26. § 36. zeichnerische Bemerkungen. 26. § 37. Storchschnabel. 27. § 38. Glatte Kurve. 27. § 39. Spiegellineal. 28. § 40. Tangente. 28. § 41. Hüllkurve. 28. § 42. Evolute. 29. § 43. Parallelkurven. 29. § 44. Berührungen im Raume. 29. § 45. Relief eines Geländes. 30. § 46. Kurven auf einer Geländefläche. 30. § 47. Darstellung einer Raumkurve. 30. § 48. Einschalten von Punkten und Konstruktion von Schichtlinien. 31. § 49. Böschung einer Raumkurve. 32. § 50. Böschungslinie. 32. § 51. Normalebene, Planierungsfläche. 32. § 52. Schmiegungsebene. 33. § 53. Hauptnormale, Binormale. 34. § 54. Schnitt einer Fläche mit einer Ebene. 35. § 55. Anwendung. 36. § 56. Einschalten von Höhenlinien. 36. § 57. Berührungsebene und Normale einer Fläche. 37. § 58. Normalebene, Fallinien einer Fläche. 38. § 59. Schraffur einer Karte. 39. § 60. Krümmung einer Fläche. 39. § 61. Verlauf der Schicht- und Fallinien. 41. § 62. Gipfel-, Mulden- und Jochpunkt. 41. § 63. Wasserscheide und Talweg. 42. § 64. Fortsetzung. 44. § 65. Böschungsfläche. 47. § 66. Böschungsstreifen. 48. § 67. Gratlinie. 48. § 68. Ebene Raumkurven. 48. § 69. Böschungsflächen einer Raumkurve. 49. § 70. Böschungslinien auf einer Fläche. 50. § 71. Aufgabe. 51. § 72. Schnitt zweier Flächen. 51. § 73. Durchdringungspunkte einer Raumkurve mit einer Geländefläche. 52. IV. Aufgaben und Anwendungen §§ 74–88 53– 67 § 74. Zweck der Aufgaben. 53. § 75. Aufschüttung und Abtrag eines Eisenbahndammes. 53. § 76. Die Ausstrichlinie einer Mulde mit dem Gelände zu bestimmen. 54. § 77. Schnittkurve einer zylindrischen Fläche mit dem Gelände. 55. § 78. Um eine gegebene Geländefläche einen Zylinder mit wagerechten Mantelgeraden zu umschreiben. 56. § 79. Durch eine gegebene Gerade die Berührungsebenen an eine Geländefläche zu legen. 56. § 80. Umschriebener Zylinder
- 74. mit beliebig gegebener Richtung der Mantelgeraden. 57. § 81. Berührungsebene. 58. § 82. Andere Konstruktion des umschriebenen Zylinders und der Berührungsebene. 59. § 83. Gebrauch einer Hilfskurve. 61. § 84. Schattengrenze. 62. § 85. Von einem gegebenen Punkte an eine Geländefläche den Berührungskegel zu zeichnen. 62. § 86. Beispiel. 64. § 87. Ansicht des Geländes. a) Parallelprojektion. 65. § 88. b) Zentralprojektion. 66. V. Maßbestimmungen und Beziehungen zur zeichnerischen Analysis §§ 89–107 67– 89 § 89. Längenmessung. 67. § 90. Flächenmessung. a) Quadratteilung. 68. § 91. b) Einteilung in Streifen gleicher Breite. 69. § 92. c) Andere Streifeneinteilung. 69. § 93. d) Planimeter. 70. § 94. Geneigte Fläche. 71. § 95. Flächeninhalt einer Böschungsfläche. 71. § 96. Rauminhalt eines begrenzten Geländeteiles. 72. § 97. Aufgabe: Rauminhalt einer Lagerstätte. 73. § 98. Ausführung der Aufgabe. 74. § 99. Zeichnerische Analysis. 77. § 100. Funktionsskale. 78. § 101. Konstruktion besonderer Funktionsskalen. 79. § 102. Aufgabe. 81. § 103. Zusammengesetzte Funktionsskalen. 82. § 104. Netzteilung. 83. § 105. Logarithmenpapier. 85. § 106. Darstellung einer Funktion von zwei Veränderlichen durch ein Rechenblatt. 87. § 107. Rechenblatt mit ungleichmäßiger Teilung. 88. Alphabetisches Sachverzeichnis 90– 92
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