Janet Vertesi

Dr. Janet Vertesi
Born
🏫 Education	Master's degree from Cambridge, PhD from Cornell
💼 Occupation	Associative Professor of Sociology
👔 Employer	Princeton University
Known for	Research in sociological connections between science, knowledge, and technology
🏅 Awards	Several grants from the National Science Foundation, top prizes for work from the ASA and the Society for Social Studies of Science

Janet Vertesi is an American Associate Professor of Sociology at the Princeton University, specializing in research regarding the sociological aspects of science, knowledge, and technology. Some of her works include Seeing Like a Rover: Images and Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission and Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA's Teams. Through analyses of the ethnographic landscapes of these missions, Vertesi has done significant research on the importance of organizations in fueling scientific discovery. In addition to her contributions to scientific ethnology, Vertesi has done research on digital sociology, studying subjects ranging from societal computational systems to the role of sociology in technological development. Her educational experience includes a Master's degree from Cambridge University and a PhD from Cornell University, and Vertesi has won many major awards for her work in sociology, including prizes from the National Science Foundation as well as the ASA.

Career and work in academia

Particularly, much of Vertesi's work focuses on "how and why do we know what we know?" Her projects have attempted to find answers to this and similar questions; thus, since her PhD dissertation on Mars exploration, she has completed numerous studies on the social and spatial organizations of scientific teams. Following that, she has transitioned to a diverse array of topics including analyses of urban spaces such as her work studying the spatial representation of the London Underground, technology in postcolonial contexts, GPS tracking of sex offenders, and the history of early modern astronomy. As of March 2021, the rate at which human technology has developed has prompted Vertesi to continue her commitment to better comprehend its connection to human social constructs and how these tools and processes will continue to shape global societies.

Conference Studies

Much of Vertesi's work has been shared within scientific conferences, and Vertesi is an active participant within scientific discourse and discussion as well, such as the ACM Conferences on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Algorithms, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Ubiquitous Computing Systems.

Work and publications

Vertesi has significant experience in a wide array of fields relating to sociology. Many of her publications are centered around connections between science and social constructs, but her work is hardly limited to these subjects. Vertesi has written a diverse array of research papers and various other works pertaining to a vast variety of different fields, all rooted in her sociological background.

Peer-Reviewed and Academic Research

Seeing Like a Rover: Images and Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission

One of Vertesi's most renowned works, "Seeing Like a Rover" written in 2015 delves into the Mars Exploration Mission, analyzing the choices the engineers made regarding where and how to move their robots. Given the enormity of the project, Vertesi argues that the practices that allowed the scientists to make determinations as to where to put the robots was a direct result of the production and maintenance of the social order of the laboratory. Vertesi wrote this to educate the reader on this topic, and it covers a wide range of ideas - sections varying from rover physics to scientist mentality and efficiency.

Mind the Gap: The London Underground Map and Users’ Representations of Urban Space

Vertesi analyzes the connections between objects and spaces through the interesting case of the London Underground Subway. Specifically, the Tube Map’s purported exemplary design has made it somewhat of an icon in terms of civil engineering and structure. However, Vertesi claims that the visual technology that the map establishes it as an interface between the city and its occupants, an essential connection between the person and the urban space itself. Her analysis creates crossovers between science, urban studies, as well as the previously mentioned concept human-computer interaction, taking a more holistic approach to the role that the seemingly simple Tube Map has in London urban society. In a greater scope, Vertesi explores the social and practical implications of powerful visuals such as the Tube Map in objects in everyday life. The power of visual representation is also explored by researchers such as Daniel Silver, specifically in the field of sociological theorizing.

“All these worlds are yours except …”: Science Fiction and Folk Fictions at NASA

Vertesi takes a look at NASA employee knowledge of science fiction and how it discreetly allows these workers to connect with one another through their understanding of these local folk fictions. These shared stories allow for commentary on the circumstances of technoscientific work that these people do and act as a form of lay social theorizing. These allusions to these cultural references allow these people to discuss their social, political, and interactional contexts while maintaining a form of expertise and credibility. It’s organized in a way that talks about all the different roles folk fiction plays in these workplace environments - first, talking about folk fiction’s connection to group membership, then socio-political commentary, then interactional roadmaps and social problems. It's a similar argument she makes to her other work, "Seamful Spaces", where she discusses social niches in scientific laboratories.

Working Apart, Together: The Challenges of Co-Work

In this article, Vertesi dives into computer-supported cooperative work, and how it is being used as a way to work together while apart at the same time. However, specifically, she examines the challenges of this method of working by studying three companies in New York City. By taking a sociomaterial approach, Vertesi identifies that tensions that a system of computer-supported collaboration can create, an idea she labels the “co-working paradox”. She mentions this in order to call for a return to certain core concepts in distributed systems - common ground, workspaces, and placefulness.

The Greatest Missions Never Flown: Anticipatory Discourse and the “Projectory” in Technological Communities

Vertesi’s work in “The Greatest Missions Never Flown” introduces the idea of sociotechnical projectory, analyzing the importance of looking into the future when it comes to scientific discourse. Specifically, she takes two deferred NASA projects to elucidate the need to keep track of past interpretations of the future. Despite the fact that these two projects were never actually completed, Vertesi argues that even the conceptual development of these missions were able to alter the landscape of scientific direction.

From Affordances to Accomplishments: PowerPoint and Excel at NASA

Vertesi’s work in From Affordances to Accomplishments: PowerPoint and Excel at NASA gives insight into the seemingly basic technologies that even prestigious agencies such as NASA use on a daily basis in their work. Despite their prevalence in the lives of “normal” people, Vertesi emphasizes the importance of these tools even in fields as advanced as space travel and greater scientific research. Mass commercial software such as Excel is quickly becoming so powerful that the lines between specialization and versatility are blurring. Thus, Vertesi’s “affordance theory” claims that the material aspects of software such as Excel aim to bridge the gap between social and technical determinisms.

Introduction to This Special Issue on Transnational HCI

Vertesi talks about the interactions between humans and computational devices. Particularly, the role of technology in modern global processes has allowed humanity to live transnational lives, where people are no longer confined to the spaces they occupy. Specifically, she explores how and why this idea of transnationalism is a critical component of computational systems. According to Vertesi, present technologies should focus more on this idea as it will open up new possibilities for future research as well as design for these systems. By taking a sociological and anthropological stance, Vertesi is able to set up an argument advocating for the use of transnational HCI systems. Other researchers have similarly discussed the potential of HCI, noting potential use in social areas such as women's health and wellbeing. However, others are careful hesitant to adopt the technology because of its potential to push certain social, cultural, and political agendas.

Instrumental images: the visual rhetoric of self-presentation in Hevelius’s Machina Coelestis

Vertesi talks about an astronomer named Johannes Hevelius, specifically his perspective on comets and his fierce debates with fellow scientist Hooke about telescopic sights of planetary entities. In particular, however, she hones in on his work Machina Coelestis, and carefully dissects the reasoning behind Hevelius’ inclusions of images in the book. She ultimately argues that because of the poor reception Hevelius received from his work stemming from his imagery’s rhetoric, one should pay attention to the role of laboratory imagery more closely in scientific history. It essentially explains the conditions it takes it gain acceptance in the scientific community, a topic discussed by other researchers in the field such as Michael Gordin.

Pre-Automation: Insourcing and Automating the Gig Economy

Vertesi examines the phenomenon of “pre-automation”, in which companies take advantage of outsourced labor to funnel funding into machines that will eventually replace these human workers. First, Vertesi more closely explains her concept of “pre-automation” and internal automotive development as well as patterns of insourcing and outsourcing that companies take. In her next section, in parallel with accepted socioeconomic predictions of the future, Vertesi emphasizes the weight companies such as Uber and Amazon are placing on this concept, and specifically takes these firms as case studies to prove her point. She applies the foundational knowledge she explained in her first section to draw comparisons to Amazon and Uber. Finally, in her last section, she illustrates the functions that pre-automated workforces perform and the role they play in upscaling these companies.

Magazine Publications

Vertesi has similarly written op-eds for magazines such as TIME. Her article "Stop Counting on Individuals To Solve California's Water Crisis" written in April 2015 argued that the California water crisis has revealed significant weaknesses in Californian environmental policies and technologies. Rather than putting the blame on general citizens, Vertesi emphasizes that large agricultural industries were the main culprits in California's water shortages. A year prior, in May 2014, Vertesi wrote an article for TIME titled "My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal," where she speaks about the pervasive nature of data detectors (bots, trackers, and cookies) in modern society and how avoidance of these measures are not as easy as opting out. Other researchers have made similar observations on the ethics of technology. In fact, Vertesi claims avoidance of data collection in modern society is almost considered criminal behavior - explaining a firsthand account of someone trying to use illicit software in order to avoid data collection, but having their behavior flagged as suspicious as a result. Similarly, author John Cheney-Lippold discusses the fatal occurrences of Tesla autopilot software in his work "Accidents Happen", claiming that human reliance on software is not necessarily strictly positive. Overall, much like her published, peer-reviewed work, Vertesi deals with a plethora of ideas regarding sociology and technology.

Research perspectives

Making Sense of Enterprise Apps in Everyday Work Practices

There is much debate surrounding many of the topics Vertesi has researched in the scientific community. For instance, some researchers in the field such as CT Wolf and JL Blomberg in their work Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing have also discussed the connections between technology and workplace dynamics. In it, they specifically examine the brief histories of innovative technologies in the workplace, ranging from laptops to pagers to cloud computing and explain the impact such technologies have had. While Blomberg and Wolf's article focus on workplace efficiency and output, Vertesi's work has shown that she takes a different direction, arguing that technologies such as Excel have had profound social effects in addition to the practical advantages they generate. Thus, Vertesi provides a unique perspective on the role of technology in modern society, recognizing that the technology has changed the way people communicate and interact. This focus on the sociological aspects provides a different point of view when it comes to enterprise applications and systems.

Representing Computer-Aided Design: Screenshots and the Interactive Computer circa 1960

Researcher Matthew Allen's work regarding MIT computer development in the 1960s falls more in line with Vertesi's own views. Rather than seeing computational devices as "mere tools", Allen emphasizes that the power of computers, especially when it comes to image processing, has had profound cultural and social impacts. Computers, according to Allen, were considered to be "active partners" when it came to day-to-day work, whose powers could be felt through their ability to efficiency complete tasks. These breakthroughs were said to have changed workplace dynamics among individuals, thus having a deep sociological impact on the environments in which people worked. Vertesi's adherence to the sociological aspects of technologies such as imaging fall in line with perspectives of individuals such as Matthew Allen.

References

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