Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence / Edition 1

by Diana E. Forsythe, David J. Hess

Overview

Diana E. Forsythe was a leading anthropologist of science, technology, and work, and especially of the field of artificial intelligence. This volume collects her best-known essays, along with other major works that remained unpublished upon her death in 1997.

The essays proceed as a series of developing variations on the key questions that still confront science and technology studies today. What assumptions do expert systems designers make about users, and about knowledge more broadly, when they build software? How should humans interact with computers, and how do they, really? Why do computing firms hire anthropologists to study human-computer interaction, and what do anthropologists find once they are hired? And how and why are traditional power asymmetries between men and women produced and maintained in engineering firms and laboratories?

The book is not only a significant anthropological study of artificial intelligence and informatics, but is also an exemplar of how reflexive ethnography should be done. Among several pioneering strands of thought, it investigates the roles of gender and power in computer engineering, looking at the cultural mechanisms that support the persistent male domination of engineering, and analyzing the laboratory as a fictive kin group that reproduces gender asymmetries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804742030
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2002
Series:	Writing Science
Edition description:	1
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

The late Diana E. Forsythe was Associate Professor in the Medical Anthropology Program at the University of California, San Francisco, and a visiting scholar in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

	Editor's Introduction	xi
	Editor's Note	xxvii
1.	Blaming the User in Medical Informatics: The Cultural Nature of Scientific Practice	1
2.	The Construction of Work in Artificial Intelligence	16
3.	Engineering Knowledge: The Construction of Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence	35
4.	Knowing Engineers? A Response to Forsythe	59
5.	STS (Re)constructs Anthropology: Reply to Fleck	66
6.	Artificial Intelligence Invents Itself: Collective Identity and Boundary Maintenance in an Emergent Scientific Discipline	75
7.	New Bottles, Old Wine: Hidden Cultural Assumptions in a Computerized Explanation System for Migraine Sufferers	93
8.	Ethics and Politics of Studying Up in Technoscience	119
9.	Studying Those Who Study Us: Medical Informatics Appropriates Ethnography	132
10.	"It's Just a Matter of Common Sense": Ethnography as Invisible Work	146
11.	Disappearing Women in the Social World of Computing	163
12.	George and Sandra's Daughter, Robert's Girl: Doing Ethnographic Research in My Parents' Field	183
Appendix	Additional Publications	197
	Notes	201
	Bibliography	213
	Index	229

Editorial Reviews

"Diane Forsythe pioneered the field of the anthropology of artificial intelligence, and the essays in this collection are crucially important for three reasons. First, they have historical value as groundbreaking work in a new field. Second, they have enduring value for other scholars, notably the burgeoning number of social scientists studying computer cultures. And Forsythe's careful discussions of her methods, and the interesting reflexivity she worked out, will serve as important models for future anthropologists and others. The editor has done an outstanding job of selecting, ordering, and introducing the essays." - Paul N. Edwards, University of Michigan

"The essays posthumously collected here are the fruits of the later career of a fine anthropologist and a sensitive, skilled ethnographer. . . . Forsythe's collection will interest a broad audience concerned with the production of software and the behavior of teams. Highly and unreservedly recommended for all collections."—Choice

"[A] thought-provoking book . . . .[It] reveals an intriguing insight into the tacit assumptions made in the fields of artificial intelligence and current anthropology."—Science Books and Film

From the Publisher

"[A] thought-provoking book . . . .[It] reveals an intriguing insight into the tacit assumptions made in the fields of artificial intelligence and current anthropology."

Science Books and Film

"The essays posthumously collected here are the fruits of the later career of a fine anthropologist and a sensitive, skilled ethnographer. . . . Forsythe's collection will interest a broad audience concerned with the production of software and the behavior of teams. Highly and unreservedly recommended for all collections."

Choice