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Based on three ethnographic vignettes describing the engagements of a small start-up company with prospective competitors, partners and customers, this paper shows how commercial considerations are folded into the ways visual images become ‘seeable’. When company members mount demonstrations of prototype mammography software, they seek to generate interest but also to protect their intellectual property. Pivotal to these efforts to manage revelation and concealment is the visual interface, which is variously performed as obstacle and ally in the development of a profitable product. Using the concept of ‘face value’, the paper seeks to develop further insight into contemporary dynamics of seeing and showing by tracing the way techno-visual presentations and commercial considerations become entangled in practice. It also draws attention to the salience and significance of enactments of surface and depth in image-based practices.

Imposters, as the contributions to this volume show, are promising?figures to think with. Such thinking can take multiple forms and deliver?various kinds of pay-offs for how we make sense of socio-material?relations, of society. This chapter is about non-human imposters.?The pay-off it aims to deliver comes from putting these ‘imitations?of something cared about’ at the centre of the analysis, as protagonists?rather than receptacles or intermediaries of the action. Doing this?allows us to let them teach us – chiefly about two things: (1) what, in a?given setting, is valued, and (2) how deception and its interception are?distributed across ever-changing socio-material alliances.

Although academic interest in the study of mobilities is on the increase, exactly what it takes and what it means for data to become mobile is seldom asked. This paper addresses that question for the case of digital medical images, more precisely mammograms (X-ray images of the breasts). It is argued that the kind of reasoning which treats mobility as a fixed asset of such images is problematic, because it obscures the particular perceptions, circumstances and practices that play a part in the accomplishment of medical images as mobile. The argument is based on ethnographic involvement with an e-Science/telemedicine research project aimed at demonstrating the benefits of a digital mammography database for breast cancer screening services, epidemiological research and radiology teaching in the UK. By focusing on the ways in which mammograms are re-presented as ‘mobile data’, and on how their movement is practically organized in the context of this project, the paper indicates a new direction for the sociological study of data mobility: one that understands the relationship between ‘data’ and ‘mobility’ as accomplished and emerging rather than fixed and inherent.

This paper explores an episode of numbers appearing on a screen and being read/spoken, looked at and received as numbers, by people who work together to achieve a particular goal. The events happened in Singapore, in 2012-2013, as part of periodic reporting on diabetic retinopathy screening in the context of efforts to innovate such screening. I tell of two parties at odds over how to engage numbers accountably. This question of ‘engagement’, of what can and should be done with numbers to secure their participation in organizational affairs, is worked out in how numerical forms are performed and sustained as working numbers. Using three STS analytics to analyse the episode – Helen Verran’s(2001) work on number as a relation of unity/plurality, John Law’s (1994) work on modes of ordering, and Steve Woolgar and Daniel Neyland’s (2013) work on mundaneity and accountability – I argue that numbers are brought to life in very different ways, each mobilizing a certain recognition of what numbers are and what it takes to respect this. In the conclusion, I comment on the article’s use and juxtaposition of these STS analytics, using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope.

This chapter explores how relations between seeing and knowing are articulated in efforts to promote “visual analytics”: the practice of extracting insights from large datasets with the help of on-screen, interactive displays of trends, outliers and other patterns. The focus is on online seminars organized by a software vendor, in which experienced business users demonstrate their practices to a less experienced audience. The chapter discusses how the idea that visual analytics can “reveal” insights is both manifested and qualified on these occasions. The user practices on display convey to audiences the impression that specific insights inhere in data and can be visually apprehended. Paradoxically, the demonstrations simultaneously render such insights conditional and elusive. The chapter characterizes this paradox as “artful revelation,” and proposes that it is rhetorically powerful in helping to foster imaginaries of, and investments in, data-driven discovery.

‘Tacit’ and ‘explicit’ knowledge, and their relation to expertise, have a long-standing importance within social studies of science and technology. At the centre of the development of thinking about these topics has been the work of Harry Collins and Robert Evans. In this article, we bring to bear observations of the work of people involved in grading eye disease, and their seeming display of expertise, tacit and explicit knowledge, on three thrusts identified in the work of Collins, and Collins and Evans. These thrusts are the following: (1) a concern with the appearance of tacit knowledge in the activities of experts, (2) a commitment to studying expertise as ‘real’ and substantive rather than attributed, and (3) a commitment to promoting the recognition and fostering the management of expertise by providing analytical distinctions regarding expertise and its reliance on tacit knowledge. By considering what is involved in the work of grading eyes, we relocate the interest in tacit and explicit knowledge, and their bearing on expertise, in how expert knowledge is displayed and made recognizable in and through courses of action and interaction.

Since the turn of the millennium, Singapore has made significant investments in its biomedical research sector, with in recent years an increasing emphasis on efforts to ‘translate’ the fruits of research into clinical applications. In this paper, we investigate how translational research trajectories are built in present-day Singapore, through a case study pertaining to the use of retinal photography for disease screening. The circulation of such images in the context of a tele-ophthalmology pilot service designed to support the early detection of eye disease related to diabetes, helps attune research to clinical practice and vice versa, in ways that open possibilities for future medical innovation. Our case study points to an inversion of the typical characterization of translational research as a process that begins at the ‘bench’ and then moves downstream (to the ‘bed’) in a linear fashion. It also illuminates certain distinctive features of the current biomedical innovation landscape in the city-state that may provide insights for other countries embarking on medical research.

This special issue aims to investigate the possibilities that spring from treating "care" as a practice and a moral-political orientation, through ethnographies and case studies related to medical settings across Asia. It pays attention to who and what is involved in care, and to historical and recent developments that feed into what forms of care are available and how they materialize and are negotiated on the ground. It is also concerned with who or what is produced from specific translations of care: what kind of patient, what kind of action, what sense of place and possibility. Finally, it treats the dilemmas and sense making of researchers regarding the question of how to care as parallel to those of informants or participants, be they patients, medical staff, family members, policy makers, scientists, engineers, activists, and/or others. This "view from Asia" contributes to recent work in STS, anthropology, and feminist studies that in various ways treats care as practice and orientation - namely, by adding a set of situated possibilities for understanding/doing care, place, and scholarly contribution.

The notion that Singapore’s multi-ethnic population provides a unique and quintessentially ‘Asian’ assetfor its biomedical sciences initiative has been part of the discourse in local and international mediacoverage of that sector. It has also been highlighted by scholars as a feature of Singapore’s politicaleconomy. This article discusses how ‘racial/ethnic difference’ was initially central but then becameperipheral to one high-profile research programme: the Singapore Epidemiology of Eye Disease (SEED)Study Programme. The case study is offered as an example of the flexible deployment and situationalenactment of racial/ethnic difference in biomedical science, by demonstrating how it gets entangledwith and disentangled from the creation of scientific capital and legitimacy, as well as complicates thenotion of ‘Asian’ science.

   A new series of essays that sets the bar for the study of representation in science in the twenty-first century. Chapters span a range of topics, including molecular modelling, nano-imaging, mathematical formalisms, and digital imagery in neuroscience, planetary science, and biology - as well as business data visualisation, economics diagrams and technology-mediated surgery.

A new series of essays that sets the bar for the study of representation in science in the twenty-first century. Chapters span a range of topics, including molecular modelling, nano-imaging, mathematical formalisms, and digital imagery in neuroscience, planetary science, and biology - as well as business data visualisation, economics diagrams and technology-mediated surgery.

In emerging theoretical models of innovation, digital simulation and prototyping tools are described as new means of production. However, relatively little is known about how such digital tools are used in construction and other industrial contexts, in particular how they are changing visual practices. In this paper, we present a study of the changes associated with interactive 3D technologies between 1990 and 2005 and we situate the findings in the context of innovation theory. With an empirical focus on the construction and film/television industries, our study is based both on the analysis of articles in trade publications and on interviews with key stakeholders. The dataset suggests that aspirations for these technologies are closely linked to their role as means of production; however, new practices also develop around the technologies as ends. We highlight preliminary implications of this study for industry, and give suggestions for further research in this area

The research project 'Playful Engineering' investigates how digital software tools, such as digital databases, enable innovation in an organization. the project is conducted in collaboration with a number of engineering and science-based companies and carried out within the Innovation Studies Center at Tanaka Business School, Imperial college, London. These digital tools can help engineers and scientists predict the real-world outcomes of a range of alternative solutions and compare them relatively. Digital tools can be used to optimize the processes. The project combines interviewing, observational fieldwork, and document analysis to develop. Visual scheduling packages that take into account multiple streams of information can test various execution strategies with many interdependencies, such as Heathrow Terminal 5, the intergravity quality of digital tools.

This paper presents findings from an investigation into requirements for collaboration in e-Science in the context of eDiaMoND, a Grid-enabled prototype system intended in part to support breast cancer screening. Detailed studies based on ethnographic fieldwork reveal the importance of accountability and visibility of work for trust and for the various forms of ‘practical ethical action’ in which clinicians are seen to routinely engage in this setting. We discuss the implications of our findings, specifically for the prospect of using distributed screening to make more effective use of scarce clinical skills and, more generally, for realising the Grid’s potential for sharing data within and across institutions. Understanding how to afford trust and to provide adequate support for ethical concerns relating to the handling of sensitive data is a particular challenge for e-Health systems and for e-Science in general. Future e-Health and e-Science systems will need to be compatible with the ways in which trust is achieved, and practical ethical actions are realised and embedded within work practices.

In this article, we draw attention to the way in which accountability relations are manifested in and through the use of visual evidence. Through their status as representations of what is the case, evidentiary visual images frequently provide a basis for giving accounts and for raising questions regarding distributions of accountability. At the same time, and in a similar manner to numbers (Munro, 2001), such images become part of organized relations of accountability that can be noted as having ‘hailing’ effects: they call for and prefigure a certain kind of response and dispersing of responsibility. Here we examine how the use of visual evidence is embedded in discursive and material practices that variously create or inhibit possibilities for questioning, or interrogating, this evidence. Drawing on elements of ethnomethodology and actor-network theory, we use ‘interrogation’ as the basis for depicting a three-part analytical schema focused on opening up, closing down and temporality to explore how visual accountability is worked out in surveillance, traffic management and breast screening images.

In conveying experiences of meditation, the question of what exceeds or should resist description has been a recurrent topic of commentary in a wide array of literature -- including religious doctrine, meditation guides (secular and religious), and contextual accounts written by historians and social scientists. Yet, to date, this question has not significantly informed neuroscientific studies on the effects of meditation on brain and behaviour, in large part -- but not wholly -- because of the disregard for first-person accounts of experience that still characterizes neuroscience in general. By juxtaposing perspectives from non-neuroscientific accounts on the tensions and questions raised by what is and is not expressed or expressible in words, this article paves the way for a new set of possibilities in experimental contemplative neuroscience.

This article attends to the movement between disclosing and non-disclosing in accounts of expertise. While referencing discussions about tacit knowledge (‘experts know more than they can say’) and the politics of non-disclosure (‘withholding can help as well as harm the credibility of experts’), in the main it considers how experts move between conveying and not conveying in order to make their proficiencies recognized and accessible to others. The article examines this movement through a form that partakes in it, thus drawing attention to conventions and tensions in how authors make themselves accountable, and their subject matter available, to audiences. It thereby proposes to explore the possibilities of careful, and generative, non-disclosure as part of expert writing practices.

This volume attends to an under-appreciated aspect of science communication: its silences.1 As discussed in the Introduction, one way of opening up silence as a phenomenon is to note that what counts as silence can vary across situations. Just when the absence of sound becomes treated as ‘silence’ varies depending on whether one is listening to the radio, working in an open plan office, at home enjoying a cup of tea before bed, or talking with a friend over the phone. Thus, the question ‘What is silence?’ needs to give way to questions like ‘Silent for whom?’ ‘When?’ and ‘In what manner?’ Silences are enacted in specific contexts and also help to define those contexts. Being produced through contingent and situated practices, silences come in many forms: what goes without saying, what is unspeakable, what has been censored, what is known but not sayable, and so on. Accordingly, to be silent can be recognized as a way of demonstrating deference or defiance, understanding or lack of understanding, giving or avoiding offence, as well as displaying or suppressing emotion. In this respect, silences are pregnant with possibilities. In this chapter we develop these points by exploring the struggle to render present what is considered silent in a specific context: the recent (renewed) attempts to scientifically demonstrate the effects of Buddhist meditation on the human brain and behaviour. Silence and meditation seem natural companions: through stilling the body and quieting the mind, people create the conditions for experiencing what is happening in the present moment. Yet silence, in various guises, also mediates accounts about meditation, which must grapple with how best to do it justice as a kind of practice. Efforts to convey what meditation ‘is’ face a number of tensions deriving from the idea that the best, and ultimately only, way of knowing it is through first-hand experience. By shifting the focus from ‘telling’ to ‘showing’, scientific approaches using brain imaging and other physiological methods have expanded the possibilities for conveying meditation experiences. In the process, these approaches invite, necessitate and shape particular forms of silence. Overall, we are interested in how silences work across and in the collaboration between the varied traditions that speak about meditation. Unlike mere gaps that hinder the development of knowledge, we argue that the interlacing of what is said and what is not said about the experiential helps cohere different traditions. In doing so, silences are consequential in helping define notions of expertise and producing forms of scientific accounting. The next section begins by introducing some of the general complications associated with describing lived experience. The third section considers how such complications play out within Buddhist contemplative traditions, indicating how and why accounting (in words) for experiences of meditation is seen as problematic. The fourth section examines scientific and popular-scientific accounts of neuroimaging and other experimental studies on the effects of meditation, in particular by attending to the case of a Tibetan Buddhist meditator who has assumed a high prominence. In this examination, we focus on what is not present in write-ups of experiments and on the manner in which the lived experience of meditators is rendered present and absent in such accounts. The final section surveys how accounts of lived experience of meditation have been positioned within the fields of neuroscience and so-called ‘neurophenomenology’ in the last few years and how this might develop in future.

Despite a substantial unfolding investment in Grid technologies (for the development of cyberinfrastructures or e-science), little is known about how, why and by whom these new technologies are being adopted or will be taken up. This chapter argues for the importance of addressing these questions from an STS (science and technology studies) perspective, which develops and maintains a working scepticism with respect to the claims and attributions of scientific and technical capacity. We identify three interconnected topics with particular salience for Grid technologies: data, networks, and accountability. The chapter provides an illustration of how these topics might be approached from an STS perspective, by revisiting the idea of “virtual witnessing”—a key idea in understanding the early emergence of criteria of adequacy in experiments and demonstrations at the birth of modern science—and by drawing upon preliminary interviews with prospective scientist users of Grid technologies. The chapter concludes that, against the temptation to represent the effects of new technologies on the growth of scientific knowledge as straightforward and determinate, escientists are immersed in structures of interlocking accountabilities which leave the effects uncertain.