Medium, calculation, play: On digital images in scientific practice

Latour’s notion of immutable mobiles relates the circulability of certain objects to, among other features, their immutability, readability and combinability. As such it does not distinguish between, say, hand-drawn maps and machine-generated graphs. How, though, does the medial ‘microstructure’ of immutable mobiles matter to socially shared uses? Would, for example, digital images as bounded grids of nonoverlapping square pixels, each representing a numerical value, shape how distributed scientific work unfolds? In this article, I begin with reviewing attempts to link the microstructure of media to their communicative uses, focusing on Luhmann’s relational account of media as loosely coupled substrates in which more rigid forms can become manifest. Drawing on an ethnography of astronomical research, I then inquire into how the scientists involved reasoned about their uses of media from within their practices. They used digital photographic exposures as ‘workable objects’ whose usefulness was not guaranteed initially. Local work was oriented to potential reuses of images (as processed exposures) by researchers elsewhere, as demonstrated by concerns over the integrity of images, the possibility of describing their work with reasonable efforts, as well as by negotiating acceptable elements in calculations so as to reveal stabilized phenomena. In doing so, scientists insisted on the need to play or experiment, suspending sequential work for explorations oriented toward deciding which action among alternatives to make consequential. This was part of a more extended ‘calculative game’ that points, through its orientation to reasonable agreement and delimitations of legitimate efforts, to the social order of this work. The medium, here conceived as images deemed accountable to reuses elsewhere, is a social achievement. Recognizing this may help to better understand the reusability of scientific data and its challenges.