Janet Vertesi

Welcome! I am a sociologist of science and technology at Princeton University, where I am a Link-Cotsen Fellow at the Society of Fellows and a lecturer in the Sociology Department. I'm interested in the complex intersections between people, science, and technological systems: especially the role of digital images in science, the organization and coordination of distributed robotic spacecraft teams, transnational technologies, and the future of the digital humanities. My Ph.D. is from Cornell University in Science & Technology Studies, I have a Masters from Cambridge University in History and Philosophy of Science, and I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Irvine's Informatics Department. At Princeton, I teach classes on the Sociology of Technology, Sociology of Science, and Human-Computer Interaction.

My research focuses on the human-robot interactions that fuel planetary science research, and how the social organization of technical teams affects and reflects their robots' activities and scientific results. I also have a long-standing research interest in representation in scientific practice, and more broad interrelationships between art and science such as scientific illustrations, science fiction, music and science, art on scientific themes, and critical approaches to Human Computer Interaction. My work takes place at the interdisciplinary intersections of sociology, history, and philosophy of science, art history, and human-computer interaction. You can read more about my various projects on the Researchpage.

These days, you'll find me working on my first book manuscript, on my two-year ethnographic study of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, currently under consideration at Chicago University Press. As a followup to that study, I'm conducting a comparative ethnography with the Cassini Mission to Saturn, thanks to a National Science Foundation Grant in SocioComputational Systems, undertaken in collaboration with my Co-I's at University of California, Irvine. I'm running Princeton Tech/Soc, a group dedicated to understanding technology in society; and working with the nascent Digital Humanities Initiative on campus. And I'm also co-editing the forthcoming volume, The New Representation in Scientific Practice (MIT Press, est.2013), co-curating a special issue of Human Computer Interaction on Transnational HCI, and addressing the question of digital scholarshipin Science and Technology Studies.

Here, you'll find more information about my projects, my publications, and my other engagements. You're also welcome to follow me on Twitter, where I tweet as @cyberlyra.