4 Redistributing Representational Work

Traditionally, we understand multidisciplinary links to be the work of human relationships across domains of heterogeneous expertise—for example, bringing together biologists and physicists in order to understand genetics (Kay 2000), or a collaboration between computer scientists and geologists as a means of framing a new understanding of geoinformatics (Ribes and Bowker 2009). This human focus directs our attention to questions of communication, shared language or diverging understandings (Galison 1999; Jeffrey 2003). From this perspective, technology plays a supportive role in human collaborations—facilitating communication across domains, time and/or space (Olson, Zimmerman et al. 2008). Yet multidisciplinarity does not rely solely on a human-to-human links: Frequently, technology plays a leading role in collaboration across disciplines. In this chapter, I focus on how technology becomes the multidisciplinary link, sustaining relations across domains of scientific expertise that are not centered on human-to-human ties (Ribes, Jackson et al. 2012). While produced through multidisciplinary collaboration, certain representational technologies can become relatively autonomous of the initial human-to-human relationships responsible for their creation. Through visual output, multidisciplinarity can also be structured through representation tools—technologies that continue to carry a history of their development over time. By tracing the production of visualization systems, such as those used in the sciences and medicine, we as analysts must also travel across multiple disciplinary boundaries. This chapter is one such journey: the …