Janet Vertesi

Thanks to the Fellowship in the History of Space Sciences, jointly awarded by the NASA History Office and History of Science Society, I am in residence this fall as a researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, joining my friends and colleagues in the Intelligent Systems Division. I also have a concurrent appointment as a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Science, Technology and Society program. Here, I am embarking on a project extended from my dissertation research: what is the relationship between the social organization of spacecraft teams and the operation and management of spacecraft resources?

This question arises from my dissertation work on the visual technologies on the Mars Rover Mission, which operates by consensus using a very flat hierarchy. But apparently this wasn't always the case, so I am digging into the rich history of NASA's unmanned space exploration program, including such missions as the Vikings, Mariner, Voyager and Galileo, to get a better sense of the historical context of the Mars Rover mission as I've observed it for the last three years. As Ames was also involved in an ethnography of the Rover mission in the early phases of its development and operation, I am also using the opportunity to learn all I can about how this well-honed structure of operations came about. Digging through the boxes of archival paperwork on Viking or leafing through 1960's NASA managerial and HCI handbooks, the historian of science in me is excited to be back in the archives again!

I am also delighted to announce that my NSF grant under the Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems program has been approved; so early next year I will start working as a postdoctoral scholar under Paul Dourish at the University of California, Irvine. Here I will continue the same research trajectory into the relationship between the social and technical organization of spacecraft systems and robotic space science -- what Charlotte Lee et al. have called "the human infrastructure of cyberinfrastructure" -- but with increasing focus on contemporary or developing missions.

As I am also currently finishing up my dissertation in addition to getting knee deep in a new research project, I am keeping travel this semester to an all-time low. Following field work with the next generation Rovers, the Mars Science Laboratory, at the team's landing site meetings in September, I am also participating at workshop on Designing Cyberinfrastructure to Support Science at the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, in San Diego this November. And then of course, it's back to Ithaca this winter to defend the dissertation ...

At Cornell snow is in the air, the Society for the Humanities is back into full swing -- and speaking of swing, in addition to my usual jazz combo I will be playing with the CU Jazz Ensemble I in a (re)production of Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain in April! More details as they come...

Speaking engagements this semester include a visit to MIT's Space Science Policy group and STS program; I will be presenting some of my work on the Mars Exploration Rover mission, with an emphasis on the visualizations and embodied interactions that team members use to depict Martian terrain "like a Rover". Following that talk, I have also been invited to speak at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science at the workshop, The Educated Eye. Here I will present the scientists' side of working with Rover images, focusing on how details are teased out of the Martian landscape with digital editing software.

Also, my paper on the effects of the iconic tube map on navigating and representing the city of London is now published as "Mind the Gap: The London Underground Map and Users' Representations of Urban Space" in the journal, Social Studies of Science, 38.1: 7-33. Check it out!

Thanks to a Doctoral Dissertation Grant from the National Science Foundation, this summer's research travel took me across the United States, from California to DC with stops in Arizona, Missouri and Ohio, to visit Rover scientists in their workplaces and watch them work with digital images from Mars to do their science. A thousand digital photos, hundreds of recorded interviews and ten full research notebooks later, I am fortunate to have the intellectual and physical space at the Society for the Humanities to turn this great material into a dissertation over the course of this academic year.
Although writing is my focus this fall, I will be speaking on my dissertation work periodically: first at the Society for the Social Studies of Science conference in Montreal in October, then at the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts conference in Portland, Maine in November, and finally at my department's Science Studies Research Group series. I am also an invited speaker at the upcoming "Educated Eye" workshop at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin in February. To achieve some kind of balance, I continue to play with the Cornell Jazz Ensembles with a wonderfully talented group of students -- catch our upcoming performance on November 17 at the Carriage House Cafe! -- and serve on the Graduate Community Initiative working group based on the report authored last spring.

An update on some recent awards and honours... Our paper, "How HCI Interprets the Probes" was Best Paper Nominee at CHI 2007! :) Phoebe Sengers, Kirsten Boehner and I delivered the paper today in San Jose and it inspired some great comments and discussion -- including a question from one of our co-authors! Also, last week I received the Cornell Student Activities Office's Distinguished Student Leadership Award for my work with the GPSA and on the Graduate Community Initiative in particular. I'm happy to report that the Initiative is already in effect, and a working group is already underway. In addition, the GPSA Grad Ball that I founded three years ago was also honoured with an Organization Showcase Award! Did I mention that the Ball this year sold out with 500 tickets in advance? Something to celebrate indeed! :)

It's finally here: the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly has released its Graduate Community Initiative! The Initiative is a co-authored document produced by our Assembly requesting a focused and integrated approach to graduate and professional student issues at Cornell, including: an expanded student center, improved career resources for students and their spouses, and sustained attention to graduate and professional student housing. As President of the GPSA, I presented the Initiative to the Cornell Board of Trustees on Friday the 9th of March (see coverage in the Cornell Chronicle and the Daily Sun, and on Monday we hosted President Skorton at our Council of Representatives Meeting to officially present the document and discuss next steps. Based on the positive feedback we've received from University leaders -- from the Provost to the Dean of Graduate Studies -- it sounds like the document will be influential in directing university-wide policy. Go team! :)

I will be attending a conference on ethnographies of scientific practice in Fribourg, Switzerland in late March, to speak about my work on the Rover mission. This conference brings together ethnographers and ethnomethodologists from around the world to discuss the current state of laboratory studies, with an eventual publication of collected papers.
I have also been invited to speak at the University of Toronto's Jackman Program for the Arts conference on Visualization in Scientific Practice at the end of April. The conference is chaired by philosopher of science Brian Baigrie and features such prestigious scholars as David Gooding, Lisa Cartwright and Alex Pang.

Qualified for university-level instruction and advising on the following topics:

• Sociology and Philosophy of Visual Cultures of Science
• Sociology of Science and Technology
• History of Visual Cultures of Science 1600-1800

Additional broad research experience in the sociology of scientific knowledge, the history and philosophy of science, the history of scientific instruments (especially cameras, microscopes, and telescopes), science fiction, science and art, and human-computer interaction.

Teaching experience at Cornell:

• S&TS 126.1 The Art of Science, the Science of Art (primary instructor in a writing seminar course)
• S&TS 201 What is Science? (TA)
• S&TS 355 Computers: From the 17th Century to the Dot Com Boom (TA)
• S&TS 101 Science in the Public Arena (TA)

Other teaching experience:

• A (Very) Brief History of Art (Vancouver School Board 2001, for students going to Europe on Study Abroad trip)
• Internet Safety workshops (BC and Nova Scotia, 2000-2003)
• 'Science and Society' and 'Science and Art' (UBC Connect 2001)

This January I'll join a group of scholars from across the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, NV, to engage in an exciting new research program, sponsored by the Center for History and New Media. CES is the biggest technology fair in the world, featuring the release of new products from an international array of companies -- and is too big for any one social scientist. But with twenty of us working together in a 'swarm', it will present an exciting opportunity to engage in collaborative qualitative scholarship on topics of interest across the site.

Science & Technology Studies Dept