Handling Digital Brains: A Laboratory Study of Multimodal Semiotic Interaction in the Age of Computers

7. Publishing fMRI Visuals

7 Publishing fMRI Visuals Throughout this book I have been suggesting that fMRI visuals are fields scientists actively engage with, rather than pictures and images they simply look at. By foregrounding the human hands as essential elements of scienti fic visuals, I have described how, during data analysis sessions, fMRI visuals do not stand for or indicate something but participate in enacting hybrid forms that practitioners experience as objects of their practice. This, however, does not mean that the visual character and the cultural shaping of fMRI evidence are of lesser relevance. In fact, the multimodal approach needs its visual component to be complete, and the visual, despite its embodied and situated character, is undeniably cultural. To highlight the visual and cultural character of fMRI evidence, in this chapter I turn to the process of publishing an fMRI research article. An experimental research article is the end product of laboratory work; it distills the laboratory effort while silently inscribing practices of negotiation with the larger scientific community. These negotiations are clearly manifested in the publishing process. Because the peer review of a scientific article indicates the interface between laboratory work and the community of experts, the process is critical to a comprehensive understanding of scientific practice. Despite the important work that has been done on this aspect of science,1 publishing has still received less attention than it deserves, mainly due to its impenetrability. As discussed in chapter 2, Anne Beaulieu (2002) has shown that brain imaging practitioners undermine the visual character of their evidence. My descriptions of how work is accomplished in the laboratory suggest that fMRI practitioners take advantage of the visual character of their experimental data.2 In this chapter, I show how this visual element permeates the encounter with the community of experts and shapes the 148 Chapter 7 culturally inflected peer-review process. By describing the creative effort of the practitioners, I indicate how reading about fMRI research results regards our senses and how fMRI visuals, at the same time, contain the collectivity. The Visual Character of fMRI Results While conducting my ethnographic research, I was given access to documentation that testifies to production of scientific writing. The writing in question is an experimental research article that was published in Science (Sereno et al., 2001). As I look at its process of submission, revision, and publishing, focusing on the status of brain visuals and their function in the article, I point out the importance of the multimodal character of the experimental data for the scientists, and describe how knowledge, relative to the visuals, is culturally negotiated. The research article under examination was already partially discussed in chapter 2 where the second figure from the article was analyzed (see figure 2.1). The article (Sereno et al., 2001) suggests that, in addition to the well-known retinotopic areas in the early human visual cortex, there are retinotopic maps in the higher-order visual areas as well. The article reports findings of a map, located at the border between the visual and somatosensory cortices, that represents the angle of a remembered target.3 The meaning of the text, and especially the results of the study, are in a significant manner generated through the visuals that feature in the article. The introductory part of the article lays out the historical background, giving the overview of other studies and describing methods that had the goal of defining maps on the cortical surface.4 The text also points out a lack of prior evidence about the specific topic of the article. Next, the focus shifts to a description of the participants and the task of the study (illustrated in figure 2.1). The role of this part of the text is to portray the precisely ordered steps of procedure and the technical equipment used.5 Similar to the introduction, the final section of the article is mainly text-oriented; it is dedicated to placing results in the broader picture, connecting it with larger scientific knowledge, predicting future research, and attempting to suggest links between this study and other domains of cognitive neuroscience (i.e., vision and language). Publishing fMRI Visuals 149 Yet, importantly, the main part of the text, where the results of the study are presented, is heavily based on the visual material.6 The central section of the article opens by directly indicating figure 2.1...