Social Studies of Science最新文献

Platforms as laboratories of the social: How digital capitalism matters for computational social research in North America. 作为社会实验室的平台：数字资本主义如何影响北美的计算社会研究。

IF 2.7 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-10-01 Epub Date: 2025-02-25 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251321826

Onurhan Ak

{"title":"Platforms as laboratories of the social: How digital capitalism matters for computational social research in North America.","authors":"Onurhan Ak","doi":"10.1177/03063127251321826","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127251321826","url":null,"abstract":"The contemporary prevalence of artificial intelligence and machine learning methods has resulted in a rich literature on the factors that shape computational research. This article draws on the laboratory studies literature to examine how platforms' socio-technical infrastructures shape contemporary computational social science research. Based on 18 months of online ethnography of a university laboratory and 15 in-depth interviews with its researchers, the article makes two main arguments. First, for computational social sciences, platforms function as laboratories where the social is selectively carved and transformed, to make it knowable with computational methods. Thus, it makes the case that platforms manufacture the objects of analysis in computational social research and provide the social as a domain. Second, because of the significance of social media platforms as data laboratories for computational research, in contrast to the claims of data sciences to be domainless, these sciences may derive some of their epistemological and occupational power, as well as their cultural authority, from digital capitalism.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"711-731"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12460916/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143493753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Who knows what a mask is … and what it does? A bibliometric and textometric study of more than a century of scientific publications on sanitary masks (1892-2023). 谁知道面具是什么，它能做什么？对一个多世纪以来有关卫生口罩的科学出版物（1892-2023）的文献计量学和质地计量学研究。

IF 2.7 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-10-01 Epub Date: 2025-03-19 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251322880

Franck Cochoy, Guillaume Cabanac, Wendeline Swart

{"title":"Who knows what a mask is … and what it does? A bibliometric and textometric study of more than a century of scientific publications on sanitary masks (1892-2023).","authors":"Franck Cochoy, Guillaume Cabanac, Wendeline Swart","doi":"10.1177/03063127251322880","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127251322880","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, the authors identify the disciplines that have taken an interest in masks over time, as well as how, in what proportions, according to what concerns, with what developments, and possibly with what effects. They ask whether the multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives is likely to lead to the emergence and sharing of new concerns, especially environmental ones, or whether the balkanization and juxtaposition of disciplines may leave certain aspects in the dark and thus contribute to the persistent production of a certain kind of ignorance. Based on a bibliometric and textometric study of more than 6000 scientific articles (1892-2023), they show the extent to which the Covid-19 pandemic has turned the study of masks upside down. It has encouraged the development of multidisciplinary and even interdisciplinary approaches, even if the legacy of almost exclusively medical sciences and engineering tends to severely limit hybridizations. The study highlights the possible emergence of a new movement of 'scientization of the popular', which leads scientists to incorporate the everyday concerns of ordinary citizens into the conduct of their research, thus challenging and reversing the well-known process of popularizing science.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"756-790"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143659397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Reconsidering the 'post-truth critique': Scientific controversies and pandemic responses in Brazil. 重新考虑“后真相批判”：巴西的科学争议和流行病应对。

IF 2.7 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-10-01 Epub Date: 2025-02-19 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251317718

Daniel Edler Duarte, Pedro Rolo Benetti, Marcos Cesar Alvarez

{"title":"Reconsidering the 'post-truth critique': Scientific controversies and pandemic responses in Brazil.","authors":"Daniel Edler Duarte, Pedro Rolo Benetti, Marcos Cesar Alvarez","doi":"10.1177/03063127251317718","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127251317718","url":null,"abstract":"Science and Technology Studies (STS) has long been criticized for eroding science's authority and blurring the line between opinions and facts, and more recently for contributing to the emergence of 'far-right populists' and 'anti-science movements'. This article argues that 'post-truth politics' does not necessarily entail epistemic democratization. This claim is based on an investigation of the controversies surrounding public health policies during the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. In 2021, the Brazilian parliament established an inquiry into allegations that President Jair Bolsonaro neglected expert advice and actively promoted contagion, causing a surge in hospitalizations and deaths. The analysis of testimonies and ensuing debates suggests that so-called 'science deniers' did not contest scientific authority but instead positioned themselves as critical thinkers who sought to expose political interests masquerading as facts. Bolsonaro's allies claimed to be supported by unbiased experts who had more prestige and credibility than those cited by the opposition. In short, they were not against modern scientific knowledge and methods but claimed to speak in the name of the best available scientific evidence. Thus, instead of blaming STS for the 'post-truth era', we should further engage with its conceptual tools to understand the complex relations of 'far-right politics' and scientific institutions. More specifically, we need to investigate how expertise gets distributed, how different statements accumulate authority, and how scientific knowledge is enacted across multiple fields of practice.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"791-813"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143450910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

It's not a bug, it's a feature: How AI experts and data scientists account for the opacity of algorithms. 这不是一个漏洞，而是一个特征：人工智能专家和数据科学家如何解释算法的不透明性。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-09-14 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251364509

Netta Avnoon,Gil Eyal

{"title":"It's not a bug, it's a feature: How AI experts and data scientists account for the opacity of algorithms.","authors":"Netta Avnoon,Gil Eyal","doi":"10.1177/03063127251364509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251364509","url":null,"abstract":"The opacity of machine learning (ML) algorithms is a significant concern in academic and regulatory circles. An emergent sociology of algorithms, however, argues that far from opacity being an inherent quality of algorithms, it is socially constructed and contingent upon certain choices and decisions. In this article, we show that a valorization of opacity is a key component of the epistemic culture of ML experts. While earlier campaigns for mechanical objectivity contrasted the inconsistency of human experts with the reliability of procedures and machines, we found that ML experts valorize precisely those moments when complex algorithms 'surprised' them with unexpected outcomes. They thereby endowed machines with a mysterious capacity to make predictions based on calculations and factors that humans cannot grasp. In this way, they turned opacity from a problem into an epistemic virtue. We trace this valorization of opacity to the jurisdictional struggles through which ML expertise emerged and differentiated itself from its two competitors: the 'expert systems' type of the 'artificial intelligence' sub-field of computer science on the one hand and inferential statistics on the other. In the course of these struggles, ML experts absorbed a theory of human expertise as tacit and inarticulable, extended it to include algorithms, and then leveraged this newly acquired version of opacity to dramatize the differences that separated them from statisticians. The analysis is based on sixty in-depth, semi-structured, and open-ended interviews with ML experts and data scientists working today, as well as historical research on the origins of data science.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"75 1","pages":"3063127251364509"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145059003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Cleaning a dark matter detector: A case of ontological and normative elusiveness 清洁暗物质探测器：一个本体论和规范难以捉摸的案例

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-08-30 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251361158

Jaco de Swart, Annemarie Mol

{"title":"Cleaning a dark matter detector: A case of ontological and normative elusiveness","authors":"Jaco de Swart, Annemarie Mol","doi":"10.1177/03063127251361158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251361158","url":null,"abstract":"Laboratory sciences crucially depend on the cleanliness of experiments. But what is clean? In this article, we show that the salience of the valuation clean emerges through its relation to a particular ontological repertoire. Our case is the XENONnT experiment in the Gran Sasso Mountains of Italy, designed to detect dark matter in the form of hypothetical WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). In this experiment, dirt presents a significant disruption, as contaminations can mimic the signals of WIMPs, and electronegative molecules risk erasing such signals. The ideosyncratic cleanliness required makes the practice of cleaning the XENONnT detector exceedingly difficult. So far, the ontological question ‘do WIMPs exist?’ remains open, which means that the normative question ‘is the detector clean enough?’ cannot be answered either. In addition, more cleaning will make the detector sensitive to a background of unremovable neutrinos—hence irredeemably dirty. With the normative goal of a ‘clean detector’ out of reach, the ontological question ‘do WIMPs exist?’ is bound to remain open as well. Alternative experiments therefore hunt for different hypothetical dark matter candidates, with different equipment, requiring different kinds of cleanliness. At the same time, the XENONnT experiment must navigate tensions between its own cleanliness goals and rules meant to ensure the environmental cleanliness of the Gran Sasso National Park. Cleaning turns out to be dirty. This leads us to ask: Which goods deserve to be cherished, and, intertwined with that, which realities deserve to be cared for?","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144919276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Cartographic infrastructures: Geographical pathology, tumour safaris, and colonial networks in British East Africa 地图基础设施：地理病理学，肿瘤之旅和英属东非的殖民网络

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-08-25 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251364513

David Reubi, Thandeka Cochrane

{"title":"Cartographic infrastructures: Geographical pathology, tumour safaris, and colonial networks in British East Africa","authors":"David Reubi, Thandeka Cochrane","doi":"10.1177/03063127251364513","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251364513","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we explore infrastructures—human, epistemic, and material—that enable the creation of maps and the stories they tell about the world. We develop the concept of ‘cartographic infrastructures’ to reveal the hidden and fragile political, scientific, and social worlds that undergird the production of maps and the truths they bring into being. To illustrate this, we examine a series of highly influential maps published in the early 1960s by Denis Burkitt—a colonial doctor working in British East Africa—showing the geographical distribution of a pediatric tumour in Africa. By correlating the tumour with altitude and rainfall, the maps suggested it had a viral origin, a finding that profoundly affected cancer research and helped accelerate the development of viral oncology. Using reports, diaries, and photos left behind by Burkitt and others, we excavate the cartographic infrastructures that underpinned his maps and viral hypothesis. First, we examine how the research tradition of geographical pathology—with its focus on environmental factors in carcinogenesis and its interest in Africa as a laboratory for cancer research—provided Burkitt with the theories, networks, and funding necessary to conduct his work. Second, we examine the surveillance practices, ranging from tumour safaris to geographical plotting, that enabled Burkitt to generate and interpret the data underlying his maps. Third, we analyze the communities of white colonial medical officers and missionary doctors spread across Africa with their shared imaginaries of race, empire, and adventure on which Burkitt relied to conduct his surveys.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144898837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The fall and rise of Iruda: Reassembling AI through ethics-in-action. 伊鲁达的兴衰：通过行动中的伦理重组人工智能。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-08-03 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251360397

Yubeen Kwon,Sungook Hong

{"title":"The fall and rise of Iruda: Reassembling AI through ethics-in-action.","authors":"Yubeen Kwon,Sungook Hong","doi":"10.1177/03063127251360397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251360397","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the case of Iruda, an AI chatbot launched in December 2020 by the South Korean startup Scatter Lab. Iruda quickly became the center of a controversy, because of inappropriate remarks and sexual exchanges. As conversations between Iruda and users spread through online communities, the controversy expanded to other issues, including hate speech against minorities and privacy violations. Under public pressure, Scatter Lab quickly suspended Iruda on 12 January 2021. After implementing extensive changes, the company relaunched the chatbot as Iruda 2.0 in October 2022. Notably, this revised version has operated without any major incidents as of mid-2025. This study offers a symmetrical analysis of Iruda's initial failure and subsequent success in terms of 'folds' connecting users, machines, algorithms, and other key elements. We introduce 'configuration' as a mode of folding and show how socio-material assemblages-whether harmful or safe-emerge as a result of different configurations. The success of Iruda 2.0 highlights the importance of placing ethics at the core of AI development and implementation strategies. In addition, we introduce the concept of 'ethics-in-action' to highlight the critical role of practical interventions and user engagement. By tracing Iruda's evolution in detail, this study provides practical guidelines for the successful integration of AI systems into society.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"724 1","pages":"3063127251360397"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144769538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Coordinating uncertainty in the political economy of cyber threat intelligence. 协调网络威胁情报政治经济中的不确定性。

IF 2.7 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-08-01 Epub Date: 2025-01-10 DOI: 10.1177/03063127241299132

Rebecca Slayton, Lilly Muller

{"title":"Coordinating uncertainty in the political economy of cyber threat intelligence.","authors":"Rebecca Slayton, Lilly Muller","doi":"10.1177/03063127241299132","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127241299132","url":null,"abstract":"Cyber threat intelligence firms play a powerful role in producing knowledge, uncertainty, and ignorance about threats to organizations and governments globally. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods, we show how cyber threat intelligence analysts navigate distinctive types of uncertainty as they transform digital traces into marketable products and services. We make two related contributions and arguments. First, building on STS research on uncertainty and ignorance, we articulate two kinds of uncertainty and their potential to interact. Coordinative uncertainty emerges from socially and technologically distributed processes of producing, interpreting, and reporting data that emerges when analysts create standards to make data travel. However, standards can be exploited by intelligent adversaries behaving in deliberately unpredictable ways. We argue that efforts to reduce coordinative uncertainty through standardization can thus ironically increase opportunities for adversarial uncertainty, creating a potential tradeoff. Second, we aim to show how STS can deepen and integrate studies of international security and political economy, by providing an example of how the geopolitical structuring of private industry shapes the science and technology that industry produces. In particular, we argue that the political economy of the cyber threat intelligence industry tends to produce relatively little knowledge about cyber operations that are conducted by governments in the U.S. and its allies, and more about cyber operations conducted by adversaries of U.S. and allied governments. We conclude with a reflection on the broader significance of these findings for the ways that coordinative and adversarial uncertainties refract through the political economies of technoscience.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"481-511"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142958157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Postcolonial technoscience revisited. 重新审视后殖民技术科学。

IF 2.7 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-08-01 Epub Date: 2024-12-16 DOI: 10.1177/03063127241303778

Cameron Hu

引用次数: 0

Unboxing the imaginary: Typology of future imagination techniques in high-tech development. 打开想象的盒子：高科技发展中未来想象技术的类型学。

IF 2.7 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-08-01 Epub Date: 2024-12-11 DOI: 10.1177/03063127241300625

Limor Samimian-Darash, Amit Sheniak, Nir Rotem

{"title":"Unboxing the imaginary: Typology of future imagination techniques in high-tech development.","authors":"Limor Samimian-Darash, Amit Sheniak, Nir Rotem","doi":"10.1177/03063127241300625","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127241300625","url":null,"abstract":"When the future is connected to the term 'imagination', it is generally presented through the concept of the 'imaginary'-that is, an image of the future that is related to a grand social image. In this article, we discuss the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries and argue that although this concept provides a needed perspective that allows scholars to unpack imaginaries associated with technological futures, it often features very broad concepts, hindering investigation of the ongoing dynamics of the actual acts of imagining and imagination. In contrast, we are interested in examining the processes and practices of imagination of socio-technical futures. Attempting to extend and deepen the development of this prevalent approach in STS, we make three incremental claims. First, future imaginaries should be addressed as a product of a process of imagination, not just in their final stable states. Second, exploring the process of future imagination reveals the effect of different temporalities-patterns of future imagination that expand the common singular far-future imaginary. Third, using a temporality-based analysis, we can identify different future planning techniques and practices in terms of their levels of formality and institutionalization.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"542-564"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142808426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0