OVERVIEW

I'm currently a Cotsen Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University, where I also hold a Lectureship in the Sociology Department.  My Ph.D. is from Cornell University in Science & Technology Studies with concentrations in Sociology of Technology, History of Science, and Information Science. Prior to coming to Princeton, I held a postdoctoral researcher position with Paul Dourish's group at the UCI Informatics school; I also have a background in history and philosophy of science, art histories, classics and religious studies, with degrees from Cambridge University and from UBC.

My current 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 practice in technological development. My work takes place at the intersections of history, philosophy, and sociology of science, art history, and human-computer interaction. You can read more about my interests below -- or check out the publications on the next page...

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND SPACECRAFT TEAMS

My current work compares the Mars Exploration Rover mission with the Cassini Mission to Saturn to examine how science is done with robotic spacecraft, and the relationship between the social organization of spacecraft teams and thework  that they accomplish. I call this theme "The Social Life of Spacecraft" and have been fortunate enough to explore it in primary research as a postdoctoral scholar funded by the National Science Foundation and the NASA History Office/History of Science Society Fellowship in the history of astronomy.  The majority of the work is sociological fieldwork, immersive ethnography within the two teams.  During my tenure at the second ethnographic site, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I was fortunate to work with Paul Dourish and the Informatics community at UC Irvine, whose expertise in cyberinfrastructure, distributed work and scientific collaboratories, and hybrid design practices and methodologies deeply informed the approach and analysis. As a follow up to this project, I am currently the PI on a collaborative grant between Princeton and UCI examining the Cassini mission in closer detail in the context of socio-computational approaches to sociotechnical systems. I am fortunate at Princeton also to benefit from excellent scholarly interactions at the Center for the Study of Social Organizations, and the Center for Ethnography.

HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION

Although I came to Cornell as a historian of science, as my interests shifted to the contemporary period I found myself increasingly engaged with twenty-first century configurations of people, machines and work. Thus my engagment with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): first with Cornell's CEmCom, the Culturally Embedded Computing Research Group, next at the University of California, Irvine's Informatics department, and currently at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.

What I love about my work in HCI is the opportunity to put Science & Technology Studies into practice: to use analytical techniques from my field to produce new ways of understanding, guiding and designing for emerging technologies. Thus my published work in HCI ranges across broad topics such as human-robot interaction, computer-supported co-operative work, and design for international contexts, but always providing a methodological or critically-informed stance on technological design and integration. For example, with my colleague Jofish Kaye I have presented qualitative work at CHI on personal archiving practices. I worked as an intern for a summer at the User-Centered Design lab at Intel Corporation on international approaches to health and aging for application to technology developments, where I introduced the idea of an 'intercultural probe'. This has prompted a best paper nominee paper on the topic of cultural probes and methodological disjunctures in HCI in general, which I co-authoed with Phoebe Sengers, Kirsten Boehner, and Paul Dourish. At Irvine, I became a co-author on work on GPS tracking of sex offenders with Irina Shklovski and Emily Troshinksi; and on "postcolonial computing", an analytical lens on computing in "developing" nations, with Lilly Irani, Beki Grinter, and Kavita Phillip. I was also an associated member of Gary and Judy Olson's HANA Lab, where I was involved in conversations about collaboration and technologically-distributed work practices. All of my CHI, Ubicomp, and CSCW-related work is available for download on this website, or through a search of the ACM Portal.

VISUAL CULTURES OF SCIENCE

If you see an image on the cover of a magazine and someone tells you, "That has been photoshopped!", has its credibility been diminished, or augmented? If it was a celebrity on the cover of a glossy magazine, it's likely the former -- but what if it's a picture of a crater on Mars on the cover of Nature? My original interest in the Mars Rovers was fuelled by an interest in digital images in science: how they are worked with, how they come to be seen as credible, and how they structure and inform interactions between team members and their robots. This formed the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation, which you can download and read online here.

This project followed up on several years' worth of projects on the sociology of scientific observation, philosophies of instrumentation and representation, and history of astronomy. For example, my Master's level work at Cornell explored the question, "how do images inform interactions with objects?" with a study of the London Underground Map. The question was how an iconic image such as the Tube Map affected users' representations, stories, and interactions with the City of London. While also a foray into urban studies and urban informatics, with a version of the findings written up for CHI 2005, the paper published in 4S concludes that iconic images provide structural clues and points of interaction for otherwise complex and inaccessible objects, such as London, atoms or DNA. "Mind The Gap" received the Hacker-Mullins Prize for best student paper from the American Sociological Association's Science, Knowlege and Technology section in 2006.

And in addition to contemporary ethnographic projects, I have worked extensively on the history and philosophy of representation in science. I have published two projects in Early Modern Astronomy, focusing on various aspects of the production o  the 17th century visual astronomer Johannes Hevelius: his 'visual debate' with Jesuit Riccioli about how to name the moon ("Sicily, or Sea of Tranquility?"), and his argument with Robert Hooke over telescopic sights in positional astronomy (which, like most debates in history of astronomy, it comes down to, is it how big your telescope is, or how you use it?). I have also worked on issues of representation in Eighteenth Century Chemistry, specifically on archival materials related to Madame Lavoisier's chemical illustrations for her husband's Traite Elementaire de Chimie (1789), and on the artist Joseph Wright of Derby and his 'scientific scenes', especially The Alchymist.  On the philosophy of science stide, the dissertation develops a concept of theory-laden representation in science based on Wittgenstein's and Hanson's ideas of theory-laden observation, and during my MPhil at Cambridge I also developed a project on the use of testimony as a philosophical framework for understanding the constrution of scientific images.

OTHER FUN STUFF ...

Like most geeks and geekologists, I have an interest in Science Fiction in the cultural imaginary about science and technology. My article on cyborg women in science fiction was published in the anthology Sci Fi in the Mind's Eye (Open Court, 2007), and although my high school thesis on Star Wars as a twentieth century fairy tale didn't survive the closure of Geocities I will try to get it back up online soon enough... :)