Between People and Paper: Inhabiting Experiment in a Journal Club

ABSTRACT

In 2015, the Open Science Collaboration reported in the journal Science that a disturbingly large proportion of psychological studies cannot be replicated (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). The ensuing ‘reproducibility crisis’ became a lightning rod for contesting what counts as legitimate research, and for negotiating the relationship between communication infrastructures and research practice. In the psychological and cognitive sciences, the Open Science community has advocated widespread reforms to incentivize transparency, encourage replication, and detect and discourage questionable research practices. The model of ‘openness’ underlying mainstream Open Science centers on sharing information to increase science’s self-correcting capacity. Against the backdrop of broad-scale transformations in Open Science, this case study depicts how scientists read. By examining the activity of a group of researchers ‘virtually witnessing’ an experiment together, this study reveals reading as a non-trivial process that matters for how research is apprehended and for how science is moved through time and space. The case complicates a disembodied, information-centric ‘openness’ pursued by mainstream Open Science reforms and advocates integrating situated and embodied resources into methods reforms, beginning with practices of reading.

KEYWORDS:

• Open science
• experiment
• reading
• cognitive neuroscience
• ethnomethodology
• architecture

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There are criticisms of OS which target the one-size fits all and top-down implementation of many of these reforms. Some critique these reforms on the grounds that scientific inference cannot be proceduralized (Rich et al., 2021), that top-down reforms harm epistemic diversity both within these fields (Devezer et al., 2019) and outside of them (Penders et al., 2019), that these reform movements are exclusionary (Whitaker and Guest, 2020). These debates are beyond the scope of this paper, but I note that the attention I pay to context-embedded practices of reading resonates with pushback against moves to proceduralization and my account of how attending to social reading practices can reveal implicit theoretical tensions resonates with calls for formal modelling to make hidden assumptions explicit (Guest and Martin, 2021).

2 Latour and Woolgar (1979) develop a capacious theory of inscription and inscription devices that includes any and all kinds of technological trace-making, charts, maps, visualizations, as well as the production and circulation of texts (articles, reports) which may assemble some of these inscribed traces with written descriptions of methods. Because the scale of inscription and what is inscribed varies, it is worth clarifying that in this article, the type of inscription that I center on is the research article itself, and the ways in which experimental designs are moved between inscribed and enacted states.

3 Exceptions outside the mainstream include anthropological work on individual practices of reading (Livingston, 1995; Roth, 2010). A small body of work on historical replication are among the closest to a situated examination of reading practices because they highlight the embodied work of reader/replicators filling in gaps in methods descriptions (Heering, 2008, 2010).

4 I asked if I could attend these meetings as part of my ethnographic observation and was granted permission; at the first few meetings of the school year I introduced myself to the group (a few knew me already) as an ethnographer studying cognitive scientific practice. After a few meetings, I asked whether I could videotape. From then on, when I was able to attend, I would set up a tripod and camera to record the meeting. I participated in discussion, even though my background did not match those of the other students.

5 All names are pseudonyms, with the exception of my own.

6 In the exchange that happened between the transcribed excerpts, Mary asked Cameron to clarify his line 27 utterance, asking ‘what’s more difficult?’ (line 32) and (lines 28–33 occur between excerpt 2.1 and 2.2)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number SSHRC Doctoral Award # 752-2011-0551].

Notes on contributors

Sarah Klein

Sarah Klein is an assistant professor in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her research on experimental practice in cognitive science has been published in Performance Research and Performance Matters. Her work centers on how methods move, treating experiments as performances with material, embodied, situated, and esthetic features indivisible from their empirical structure. Bringing together approaches from Communication Studies, Science Studies, and Performance studies, Sarah’s collaborative work involves opening up research to performative intervention by documenting art-science collaborations and by designing experiments/performances with scientists.