I just got back from attending the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The conference is a fun venue and most of the Science and Technology Studies world was there. There is a significant overlap with ACM conferences like CHI and CSCW, but the approach at 4S tends to be more theoretical.

I presented a talk about “Cyberinfrastructure and Scientific Validity in Metagenomics Research,” in which I looked at how large DNA sequence databases are involved in creating “matters of fact.” The paper was part of a really interesting session on Genomics: Life as an Information Technology. I attended a lot of other great sessions, too. A few of the many highlights:

• Stuart Geiger’s work on Wikipedia bots, in the session, What is Code? What is Coding? Emerging STS Approaches in Studying Computer Code
• Sonja Palfner’s presentation in the session on Monitoring, Modeling, and Memory: New Scientific Infrastructures, where she argues (as we do in our “Leveraging Development Expertise Across Cyberinfrastructures” grant) that we should look at supercomputing centers to understand the relationships among cyberinfrastructure projects.
• Michael Barany’s presentation on “Examples, Models, Witnessing, and the Mathematical Imagination,” in which he proposes the idea of “slightly scalene” examples in mathematics (from the session Making Things: Artisanship, Representation, and Formalisms at the Convergence of Science and Craft).
• Katrina Boulding’s work uncovering the actor-network that was required to create the 2007 San Diego Wildfires Google Map, in the session Visualization: Maps and Images.

The conference makes an excellent counterpoint to the more design-oriented conferences like CHI and CSCW, and opens up a space for deeper theorizing about the interactions of science and technology. 4S 2010 will be in Tokyo!