Book Review of Casper Bruun Jensen's Ontologies for Developing Things
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Casper Bruun Jensen’s book is centered upon Science and Technology Studies (STS), more specifically in the area of healthcare technologies studies. One of the central interests of the book is to offer an openended invitation to break the traditional compartmentalization that exists between the theory-oriented humanities and the empiricaloriented social sciences. It does so by focusing on the conceptual and empirical components of what Jensen refers to as ‘practical ontologies,’ which emerge as health care technologies are envisioned, developed, and deployed in diverse settings of Danish and Canadian health care. Through a series of analyses centered on different empirical and analytical themes, including the making of health care futures, analysis of technology and power, and questions of STS and ‘intervention,’ the author presents convincing examples of how scholars working in STS and adjacent fields might embrace new spaces of methodological and theoretical experimentation. The process of adopting such forms of experimentation is not limited to technological objects like the electronic patient record (EPR). Such studies might be expanded, for example, to deal with information and communication technologies more broadly, or, as the author suggests, any setting where new ontologies emerge through (and to an extent as) the development of things. Jensen’s book deals primarily with the case of the EPR development in Denmark, but also discusses technology development issues within the Canadian healthcare context. These studies are used simultaneously as empirical characterizations and as springboards for engaging with a series of interrelated topics at the intersection of STS and various other fields such as feminist studies or the philosophy of technology's differences and history. He draws on a range of theoretical resources, including pragmatism and poststructuralist approaches, which allow him to engage in an innovative analysis of the ontological reconfigurations to which the making of the EPR gives rise. Additionally, this approach allows him to specify various organizational and political consequences of these practical ontologies, including the consequences for the social analyst engaged in their study. Doing so, Jensen embraces what might be called a multidisciplinary approach to the study of technology. Through this approach, Jensen engages in a sustained and critical discussion with various well-known positions in STS, not the least being social
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".