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Notes Chapter 1 1. For a discussion of a somewhat different idea of cyborg visuality in MRI, see Prasad (2005b). 2. President George H. W. Bush, as part of a larger effort involving the Library of Congress and the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health, proclaimed the 1990s to be the “decade of the brain.” 3. One of the main proponents of this research trend, interested in the involvement of gesture in practical activities and thus attentive to the context in which gestures are deployed, is Charles Goodwin. Goodwin has studied the involvement of gestural action in situations as diverse as courtroom procedures (e.g., 1994), playground activities (e.g., Goodwin, Harness Goodwin, & Yaeger-Dror, 2002), interaction with an aphasic man (e.g., 2000b, 2003a, 2003b), and in scientific activities: archeological excavations (e.g., 2003a, an oceanographic research vessel (1995), and a team of geochemists (1997). 4. This approach is different from the studies of gesture that apply methods akin to the experimental approaches in linguistics and psychology (McNeill, 1995, 2000). 5. See Lynch’s (1991) argument drawing upon the phenomenology of Aaron Gurwitch and Maurice Merlealu-Ponty. 6. UCSD News, October 30, 2000. 7. My doctoral advisor was Ed Hutchins, and my thinking was influenced by his work on distributed systems (Hutchins, 1995). 8. “[A] stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not (not even the zero-form twitches, which, as a cultural category, are as much nonwinks as winks are nontwitches) in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn’t do with his eyelids” (Geertz, 1973: 5–6). 170 Notes 9. In Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action (Lynch, 1993) (following his original laboratory study Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science; Lynch, 1985a), Michael Lynch, reflecting on the current situation, observes: Rather than undertake the difficult, time-consuming, and epistemologically suspect tasks of ethnography, many sociologists of science have preferred to take refuge in offices and libraries. There they can act as if they are observing “science in action” while engaging in more respectable academic pursuits: sifting through historical archives and secondary sources, composing scholarly syntheses of the diverse literatures in the sociology of science and related areas, and performing close textual analyses. (Lynch, 1993: 105) 10. For example, in his book on positron emission tomography (PET), Joseph Dumit (2004) has used cultural studies and historical and ethnographic methods to study how visual brain representations are generated by scientists, how they are presented in the media, perceived as facts by the general audience, and put to persuasive use in courtrooms, doctors’ offices, and before Congress. In doing so, Dumit points out how “PET brain images of mind and personhood . . . make claims on us because they portray kinds of brains” (Dumit, 2004: 4, 5). Similarly, Kelly Joyce, in her book on MRI in clinical medicine, examines “the cultural, political, and economic factors that contribute to the making of MRI anatomical images as a cultural icon” (Joyce, 2008: 2). Particularly prominent is Joyce’s analysis of how narratives from popular culture and media accounts obscure the decisions, values, human relations, institutional context, and economic structure that stand behind the transparency inscribed into MRI representations. 11. Kelly Joyce (2008) and Joseph Dumit (2004), for example, provide the reader with a sense of how activities around scans are organized, describing general procedures and stages in data acquisition, analysis, and publication, while interweaving such accounts with excerpts of discourse taken from their interviews with scientists, physicians, and technologists. Though successfully generating overviews of MRI and positron emission tomography (PET) and engaging with questions about objectivity, standardization, and generalization, these accounts, however, do not provide moment-by-moment descriptions of the activities through which scientists engage scanning technologies, digital computers, and each other to accomplish their everyday activities. 12. My interest in Peirce’s semiotics was acquired through my undergraduate and doctoral adviser, Umberto Eco. Chapter 2 1. For Peirce, signs are relations composed of other relations and linked in series. In this sense, Peirce spoke of the sign as being triadic while calling the process of continuous development of signs in other signs “semiosis.” The triadic sign in Peirce’s semiotics is composed of a representamen, interpretant, and an object. A representamen , or sign vehicle, broadly corresponds with the better known Saussurian [18.223.171.12] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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