Varieties of STS: Luminosities, Creative Commons, and Open Curation

Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) presented their archives and accounts of their collective work at two meetings of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S) in Sydney 2018, and New Orleans 2019. These presentations are not only very interesting in themselves, but are housed on a digital platform (Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography or PECE) that poses the question—and attempts to build a solution—of how ethnographic materials can be digitalized and made available for productive further activity. This text is a guiding summary for a set of further engagements published on PECE entitled: “Kenya: Techpreneur, Transnational Node, Kibera” (2023a), “Turkey. Inside and Outside the University” (2023b), “‘Japan’/Japan On Line: NatureCulture” (2023c), and “Ecuador: Thirdspaces amidst Social Conflict” (2023d), and “Bibliography for Varieties of STS” (2023e). These engagements help to ask: do long texts such as these four parts create need to be fragmented, tagged, and curated, into perhaps GPT-4 chunks, to be useful on new digital platforms such as PECE? Will this be required for next generation literacy of humans and machines alike, or more-than-human readers, analysts, and synthesizers?