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individual researchers each of them working on their own project and the other levelconsists of the whole laboratory usually managed by a single director. Knorr Cetina arguesthat the individual nature of the level has important theoretical implications.This is perhaps molecular biology’s first most important difference fromexperimental high energy physics: in the molecular biology laboratory, the personremains the epistemic subject. […]The laboratory, experimentation, procedures, andobjects obtain their identity through individuals. The individual scientist is theirintermediary—their organizing principle in the flesh, to whom all things revert. 73What about the research communities I want to study then? Firstly, bioinformatics isconcerned with the gathering, analysis, and exploitation of data and is one example of aresearch community at the interface of biology, medicine, mathematics, and computerscience. Biological data is not only generated in overwhelming amounts today, it is also ofa widely disparate nature. The development of methods to integrate and exploit the variousdata sources requires competence in computer and information science. The scientificknowledge, however, is biological in nature and a basic understanding and appreciation ofbiology and biomedicine is crucial for any integration methods to become successful. 74For much of the time since the inception of humanities computing in the 1940s 75 until thelate 1980s humanities computing was largely the province of individual scholars doing“things” on their own 76 for research but also for teaching. Scholars created electronictext(s) and then subjected those texts to different kinds of analyses, with a concordanceprogram or perhaps some other custom programs as well. The electronic texts, created asthe by-products of these individual research projects, usually reflected the theoreticalviewpoints of the scholars carrying out those projects. Some of these resources have foundtheir way into archives or digital libraries. Besides, the issue of reusability did not gain anysignificance until the late 1980s. It then became generally accepted among manyresearchers that a common encoding format would make it much easier for researchers toexchange and reuse the electronic texts they where producing. 77 After the proposal in 1987the methodological commons 78 is the centre of this multidisciplinary and heavily techniquedepending practice. The humanities computing community consists of members from all ofthe humanities but also to some extent from closely related social sciences. 79What then is a laboratory and how do they do experiments in the humanities computingand bioinformatics? I observe a striking, non-trivial resemblance between humanitiescomputing, bioinformatics with some of the salient features of HEP (see above) they are:data-centred, heavily equipment and machinery -orientated activities that centrally involvesome kind of modelling and they tend to be collaborative endeavours. Then, the lab mightbe the setting in which the researchers use this machinery, since the computers with theaccompanying applications, tools and methods are the environment in which theexperimenting take place. As Knorr Cetina points out “it [the computer] provides its own73 Knorr Cetina, 1999:217.74 Andersson, Langerth Zetterman & Strömdahl, 2001.75 Susan Hockey, Willard McCarty and other denotes the beginning of humanities computing to the 1940swhen a Jesuit scholar Italy, Father Roberto Busa, known as the founder of Literary and LinguisticComputing, created an exhaustive concordance of the writings of St Thomas Aquinas, the Index Thomisticus.The first volume of the Index appeared 1974 and was published on CD-ROM 1994.76 The notion of the “lone scholar” is currently discussed in the Humanist listserv.77 The TEI project was formed to create an encoding format, Hockey, 2000.78 See McCarty, 2002.79 A useful map picturing what kind of disciplines and activities involved in humanities computing, proposedby McCarty, can be found at: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/essays/encyc/figure1.htmlpm-030505.doc utkast avh.pm. Monica Langerth Zetterman 16(34)