Systematics As Cyberscience Computers Change And Continuity In Science Christine Hine by Christine Hine 9780262083713, 026208371X instant download after payment.

The use of information and communication technology in scientific research has beenhailed as the means to a new larger-scale, more efficient, and cost-effective science. But althoughscientists increasingly use computers in their work and institutions have made massive investmentsin technology, we still have little idea how computing affects the way scientists work and the kindof knowledge they produce. In Systematics as Cyberscience, Christine Hine explores these questionsby examining the developing use of information and communication technology in one discipline,systematics (which focuses on the classification and naming of organisms and exploration ofevolutionary relationships). Her sociological study of the ways that biologists working in thisfield have engaged with new technology is an account of how one of the oldest branches of sciencetransformed itself into one of the newest and became a cyberscience. Combining an ethnographicapproach with historical review and textual analysis, Hine investigates the emergence of a virtualculture in systematics and how that new culture is entwined with the field's existing practices andpriorities. Hine examines the policy perspective on technological change, the material culture ofsystematics (and how the virtual culture aligns with it), communication practices with newtechnology, and the complex dynamics of change and continuity on the institutional level. Newtechnologies have stimulated reflection on the future of systematics and prompted calls for radicaltransformation, but the outcomes are thoroughly rooted in the heritage of the discipline. Hineargues that to understand the impact of information and communication technology in science we needto take account of the many complex and conflicting pressures that contemporary scientists navigate.The results of technological developments are rarely unambiguous efficiency gains, and are highlydiscipline-specific.Christine Hine is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey. Sheis the author of Virtual Ethnography. "I came away from this book with new insights about thesciences of systematics and with a sense that I had been given a rich panorama of an emergingcyberfield."--Geoffrey C. Bowker, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa ClaraUniversity"Christine Hine moves with analytic mobility, sidestepping the buzz in cybersciencebuzzwords to reveal with respect and wonder the heart of a discipline."--Karen S. Baker,Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego
ISBN : 9780262083713