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

8. Conclusion

8 Conclusion This book has showed how, by turning attention to the skillful (but habitually overlooked) orchestration of working hands, multimodal semiotic acts, and digital technology, we can get a deeper sense for how science is actually done. Digital video records, augmented with extensive fieldwork, despite its limitations, have provided a way to describe how practical thinking is accomplished, how professional skills are acquired, and how objects of enquiry are experientially understood. The intricacies that constitute such events remain invisible when practice is narrated to interviewers or when scientists report their results to larger audiences. By attending to how fMRI practitioners modify digital displays, how they place their hands onto computer screens, and how they expressively feel what they claim to see on the screen, I have shown how digital scientific visuals gradually become visible to practitioners. As I zoomed in on apprenticeship practices, I saw how newcomers, in front of computers and in coordination with their colleagues, engage their bodies to make sense of experimental data. This approach was also a way to discuss how scientists experientially understand objects of their inquiry. By coordinating multiple semiotic spaces, scientists enact composite and dynamic entities. Rather than simply dealing with what the visuals stand for (somehow untouched by those visuals and the acts of dealing with them) or by exclusively working with what is present on the computer screen, practitioners understand their objects of practice as hybrids that dynamically coordinate those spaces in new, emergent formats. In this sense, though my approach has tended toward the reduction to the essential (the everyday details of science), the inclination was toward complexity. By unpacking aspects of action and interaction in the laboratory, I have observed how practitioners study the 160 Chapter 8 digital brain and the human bodies by semiotically enacting phenomena that blend the computer displays, the practitioners’ own bodies, the mathematical processes executed by the machine, and the physical manipulation of 3D objects. The story that the book has told about fMRI practice, however, is not a comprehensive one. Even though I have carefully grounded my claims in the larger ethnography of the field site, I have worked with only fragments of video-recorded elements of practice. I chose these fragments—as part of the very ordinary events that habitually occur in the laboratory—to explore how brain visuals are dealt with in laboratory work and interaction. In other words, in my use of video, the goal was not to document and represent. I do not even claim that I have wholly described what takes place at any single site where I conducted my ethnographic work. For instance, there are processes in the brain that are definitely central for practical thinking, but I do not analyze those processes in this book. Even though I did discuss how brain processes are studied, I did not provide access to those processes. Instead, I have used videotaped moments of practice as resources for examining engagement with technology, social action, and interaction in the laboratory. My aim was to show how scientists work with digital screens and to suggest how such acts can be studied. In fact, this book has positioned itself in parallel to what it describes. I have shown that fMRI practitioners treat brain visuals as fields for interaction (rather than representations). Just like them, my aim was to propose a study as a field for interaction (rather than generate a representation). Similar to practitioners who engage with the visual to understand how we think, I have been interested in the visual (as well as the audible and tactile) aspects of scientists’ conduct. By scrutinizing how fMRI practitioners go about everyday problems in the laboratory, I have pointed out how they engage with the visually presented data in a multimodal manner. Thanks to the affordance of digital technology, I have repeatedly inspected my records, transcribed the chosen moments, and worked with the stills to delineate the contours of the bodies to make them visible. The approach has left open a possibility for dialogue with the field of study. In this regard, the focus on how the body and digital technology feature in scientific practice not only enhances our understanding of how the body is understood in science but is also a way to engage in a conversation with the field of study. Conclusion 161 Talking with fMRI Practitioners The attention to multimodal interaction in the real-time description...