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A Cognitive Ethnography of Knowledge and Material CultureAn Anatomy of a Microanatomy

A Cognitive Ethnography of Knowledge and Material Culture: An Anatomy of a Microanatomy [As icons of science, microscopes occupy a place of prominence in debates about scientific realism and the reality of things invisible for the naked eye. Tapping into these, Chapter 7 examines how scientists perform explorative microanatomy of salmon lice exocrine glands. Through interactional analyses of scientists at work, it shows how mundane artifacts and sophisticated imaging techniques help practitioners create spatial reference and biological meaning from microscopic phenomena through a culturally shaped perceptual process. Spatial language, and a suite of semiotic resources, is deployed in intricate ways to reason and achieve consensus about such biological entities. The ethnography describes these cognitive practices. It looks at how representational states propagate through multimodal embodied interactions in front of the microscope, via transformations to scribbled paper notes, and get systematized and disseminated in scientific publications. From these analyses, low-level cognition like visual perception emerges as active processes enabled by a range of semiotic resources. But these only become noticeable when attending to what François Jacob once dubbed “night science”: the generative and inevitable mucking around that goes on backstage in the laboratory.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A Cognitive Ethnography of Knowledge and Material CultureAn Anatomy of a Microanatomy

Part of the Culture, Mind, and Society Book Series
Solberg, Mads
Springer Journals — Jun 16, 2021
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73 pages

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Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
ISBN
978-3-030-72510-5
Pages
339 –412
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-72511-2_7
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[As icons of science, microscopes occupy a place of prominence in debates about scientific realism and the reality of things invisible for the naked eye. Tapping into these, Chapter 7 examines how scientists perform explorative microanatomy of salmon lice exocrine glands. Through interactional analyses of scientists at work, it shows how mundane artifacts and sophisticated imaging techniques help practitioners create spatial reference and biological meaning from microscopic phenomena through a culturally shaped perceptual process. Spatial language, and a suite of semiotic resources, is deployed in intricate ways to reason and achieve consensus about such biological entities. The ethnography describes these cognitive practices. It looks at how representational states propagate through multimodal embodied interactions in front of the microscope, via transformations to scribbled paper notes, and get systematized and disseminated in scientific publications. From these analyses, low-level cognition like visual perception emerges as active processes enabled by a range of semiotic resources. But these only become noticeable when attending to what François Jacob once dubbed “night science”: the generative and inevitable mucking around that goes on backstage in the laboratory.]

Published: Jun 16, 2021

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