Scientific Agency and Social Scaffolding in Contemporary Data-Intensive Biology

Abstract

It is widely recognised that social scaffolding is crucial to the entrenchment of new technologies and related standards and practices in scientific research, as well as to its manifestations and results. At the same time, there is little understanding of the circumstances under which, and the reasons why, some forms of sociality are effective in promoting particular types of scientific work. This chapter explores these questions by focusing on two forms of social scaffolding involved in the development of practices of data dissemination through digital means -and particularly infrastructures such as online databases -within the contemporary life sciences: (1) ontology consortia, which have recently emerged as de facto regulatory bodies for data curation in the US and Europe, and (2) steering committees for model organism communities, which play significant roles in the governance of biological research in the UK. I discuss the successful transformation of these initially ad hoc groups into scientific institutions with political and epistemic visibility and power. Drawing on political theory, I then argue that viewing these organisations as social movements is a fruitful strategy to understand their development from informal gatherings into wellrecognised regulatory bodies, and how this process of institutionalisation builds on highly entrenched forms of group socialisation. This in turn facilitates an analysis of the interrelation between institutional and infrastructural scaffolding involved in the evolution of scientific knowledge-making activities.

Investigating research practices: How qualitative methods enhance philosophical understandings of science.

“…These findings led her to modify her initial plan to focus solely on lab-based research and extend her fieldwork to include meetings organized by biologists and bioinformaticians to debate classification practices, which meant modifying study design to include a much wider and more diverse group of informants than originally envisaged, drawn from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including computer engineering and statistics. The need to understand the background and skills of these—to her—novel domains ended up shaping Leonelli’s subsequent research trajectory, resulting in projects fully devoted to the study of data science and related practices (e.g., Leonelli, 2016, 2019).…”

“…In more recent work on evidential practices in organismal biology, for instance, we focused on a variety of sites and media through which relevant research is performed, including virtual platforms and infrastructures (Leonelli, 2016; Leonelli & Ankeny, 2012); consortia and communities of practice including “lay” contributors (Leonelli, 2019); and science policy debates where scientists engaged in discussion with entrepreneurs, history, and philosophy of science and science and technology studies scholars, and/or policymakers around the significance, potential, and implications of their work (e.g., Australian Academy of Science, 2017; Reardon, Ankeny, et al, 2016). These inclusions had clear methodological implications.…”

Environing Innovation: Toward an Ecological Pragmatism of Scientific Practice

“…According to Wimsatt and Griesemer (2007), "scaffolding involves a mix of (relatively) static resources and constraints and dynamically interacting processes that together facilitate the acquisition of complex skills, knowledge, and behavioral routines when these interactions are appropriately organized," a "kind of interactive structure [that] is the key to new kinds of possibilities for innovation and change in culture" (p. 260). Scaffolding is a familiar concept in STS, commonly used to account for how technologies and infrastructures enable or constrain different social practices (Leonelli 2019;Orlikowski 2006). It draws particular attention to the participation of material resources in cultural reproduction as it occurs through collective processes of learning, enacting, disseminating, and altering knowledge systems, thus filling in some of the space left open by theories like Abbott's that focus primarily on systems of institutionalization and enculturation.…”