Paper short abstract:

For ethnographic research to capture translations of data, the disruptions and practices that surround data infrastructuring in biomedical research, this work argues that—just as data oscillates between states—ethnographers must oscillate between different perspectives and methods.

Paper long abstract:

In today’s biomedical laboratory, data infrastructures support the researchers’ work from data collection to data analysis thereby transforming data from brain tissue to cleaned and processed analyzable images and finally into research insights. For these transformations to work, such infrastructures need to be constantly maintained, updated, and improved. When not well integrated, the introduction of new steps and technological tools can disturb established practices in the laboratory. It can also shift attention away from generating new scientific results to working on infrastructures. In this process, what has been a means to do research becomes the end in itself.

This presentation is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a biomedical laboratory that invites the “crowd” to contribute to the analysis of research data by way of “virtual microscope” in an online citizen science project. Focusing on “infrastructuring as material-semiotic practice” (Niewöhner 2015), not only allows ethnographers to grasp biomedical research data in its various states, but also to attend particularly to the introduction of new data pipeline steps which compel scientists to temporarily move their research goals out of sight in order to build new infrastructures, investing in its potential future benefits when those infrastructures will have vanished into the background again. Here, infrastructuring goes hand in hand with practices of building trust and persuasion of scientists. For ethnographic research to capture these practices, the disruptions and oscillations in data states, this work argues that ethnographers must also oscillate between different perspectives and methods to follow the data and its surrounding practices.