Virtual Methods

184 • Anne Beaulieu
Ethnography of Knowledge Production
The methods discussed here were elaborated in the course of two projects using
virtual ethnography (Hine 2000). Both focused on new infrastructures for knowledge
production which had web interfaces, the first on a single large database, the
functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data Center (fMRIDC) and the second
on four public databases. 2 Common to both projects was the notion that these
knowledge infrastructures might be involved in shifts in the locus of knowledge
production. Studies of scientific fields like genetics and biodiversity have noted an
increasing reliance on databases and information technologies (Fujimura and
Fortun 1996; Lenoir 1999) and such databases tend to be especially large-scale and
interdisciplinary (Bowker 2000). These trends complicate the issue of how to think
about the location of scientific work.
‘Public databases’ were interesting to study because of their claimed potential
to be more open to lay experts than other kinds of databases of scientific information.
This could partly be witnessed in aspects of their design, for example, their
non-password-protected interface on the web. In the case of fMRIDC, the role of
the database was also to make data available in new ways to a wider audience, by
enabling data-sharing practices among scientists. In these cases, new actors, new
locations and new types of objects were meant to circulate, and to create new
meaningful practices.
In what follows, I refer mainly to the work on the fMRIDC, and draw complementary
examples from the other databases. The goals of the Center are to provide
‘a publicly accessible repository of peer-reviewed fMRI studies and their underlying
data’, although its launch as a centralized database did raise a heated controversy.
Currently, authors of articles published in the Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience are required to submit their data to the fMRIDC as a condition of
publication. The database has both online and offline elements, and its various contents
circulate in different ways (telephone, web interface, CD-Rom, email), with
the ideal of having all aspects networked, possibly on a ‘grid’ type of infrastructure.
This initiative was therefore a good case in which to study practices of datasharing,
in a network setting highly modulated by information and communication
technologies.
The usual field site for ethnographies of knowledge production is the space of
the laboratory. This had to be rethought to enable the study of data-sharing infrastructures
in relation to our research questions about the ‘novelty’ and ‘uptake’ of
these practices. The questions differed slightly in the two projects, but were deeply
rooted in the notion from the sociology of science that knowledge requires
sociality, via a community of ‘knowers’, in order to be validated, transmitted,
applied and understood (Barnes 1985; Shapin 1995; Barnes, Bloor and Henry
1996). That this sociality might be mediated, rather than face-to-face, was one of