Medium, calculation, play: On digital images in scientific practice
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Latour’s notion of immutable mobiles relates the circulability of certain objects to, among other features, their immutability, readability and combinability. As such it does not distinguish between, say, hand-drawn maps and machine-generated graphs. How, though, does the medial ‘microstructure’ of immutable mobiles matter to socially shared uses? Would, for example, digital images as bounded grids of nonoverlapping square pixels, each representing a numerical value, shape how distributed scientific work unfolds? In this article, I begin with reviewing attempts to link the microstructure of media to their communicative uses, focusing on Luhmann’s relational account of media as loosely coupled substrates in which more rigid forms can become manifest. Drawing on an ethnography of astronomical research, I then inquire into how the scientists involved reasoned about their uses of media from within their practices. They used digital photographic exposures as ‘workable objects’ whose usefulness was not guaranteed initially. Local work was oriented to potential reuses of images (as processed exposures) by researchers elsewhere, as demonstrated by concerns over the integrity of images, the possibility of describing their work with reasonable efforts, as well as by negotiating acceptable elements in calculations so as to reveal stabilized phenomena. In doing so, scientists insisted on the need to play or experiment, suspending sequential work for explorations oriented toward deciding which action among alternatives to make consequential. This was part of a more extended ‘calculative game’ that points, through its orientation to reasonable agreement and delimitations of legitimate efforts, to the social order of this work. The medium, here conceived as images deemed accountable to reuses elsewhere, is a social achievement. Recognizing this may help to better understand the reusability of scientific data and its challenges.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Science and technology studies Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | high |
| gpt | Science and technology studiesScholarly communication Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | high |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it