New Fellow Cohort for the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re)
The Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re) welcomes twelve new international fellows for the academic year 2024/25, this year mainly from the humanities and social sciences.
Between July and October, Dr Denisa Butnaru (Sociology), Dr Sam Ducourant (History of Science), Dr Grit Laudel (Sociology), Dr Nathalia Lavigne (Artistic Research and Urbanism), Professor Carsten Reinhardt (History of Science), Professor Elisabeth Röhrlich (History), and Professor Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer (Science and Technology Studies) began their fellowship.
They will be joined by Dr Daniela Wentz (Media Studies), Dr Ehsan Nabavi (Science and Technology Studies) and Professor Harro van Lente (Science and Technology Studies) at the end of the year, and in January 2025 by Dr Matthew Eisler (Science and Technology Studies) and Dr Hannah Star Rogers (Science and Technology Studies).
RWTH-sponsored short-term fellows this year will be Dr Ricky Wichum (Sociology) from October to December, Professor Jack Copeland (Philosophy) from October to November, Professor Carl Mitcham (Philosophy) in October, and Professor Gabriel Sandu (Philosophy) in November.
The Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re) is the first International Center for Advanced Studies at RWTH Aachen University and is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research for a period up to twelve years. The fellowships, which cover a research stay of six to twelve months, offer scholars the opportunity to immerse themselves deeply in a research project of their own choice while also being able to discuss core issues of the Center (e.g. digitalization of science and global varieties of scientific cultures) in an interdisciplinary environment.
The substantive focus of the Center’s work for the 2024/25 academic year is on the topic of “Expanded Science and Technology Studies (STS)”. In various event formats, such as a lecture series in the winter semester, the fellows and invited guests will shed light on the current challenges for Science Studies and discuss future developments from different disciplinary perspectives.
Event Announcement: Freedom of Research – A European Summit: Science in Times of Uncertainty
Together with the Charlemagne Prize Foundation and RWTH Aachen University’s Knowledge Hub, the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (co/re) organizes an international symposium entitled “Freedom of Research: A European Summit – Science in Times of Uncertainty”, which will take place on November 4 and 5, 2024 in Aachen.
Freedom in all its dimensions is a core European value and right. Freedom of research is vital for fostering innovation, expanding knowledge, and ensuring Europe’s global competitiveness. Today, this freedom is increasingly under pressure from political tensions and shifting uncertainties. How can we navigate these challenges? How do we create a resilient framework for future developments to come?
We invite you to Aachen for a summit focused on the crucial role of freedom in scientific, cultural, social, and political contexts. With a program that includes a late-night event, an all-day symposium, an art exhibition, and a festive evening, the summit will bring together researchers, policymakers, representatives of business, media, culture and the public to exchange ideas and develop strategies for strengthening academic freedom, fostering a resilient European community that champions democratic governance and societal benefit, and connect fresh perspectives and innovative solutions for the challenges of tomorrow.
All information about the program, the speakers and the registration form can be found on the event website: www.for-summit.eu.
Get to know our Fellows: Denisa Butnaru
Get to know our current fellows and gain an impression of their research. In a new season of short videos, we asked them to introduce themselves, talk about their work at the KHK c:o/re and the research questions that fascinate them.
In this video, Denisa Butnaru, lecturer in sociology at the University of Konstanz, introduces her research on bio-objects, how human bodies transform following the development of current technologies and how the production of bio-objects is linked to developments in healthcare and the armed forces.
Check out our media section or our YouTube channel to have a look at the other videos.
From bio-ontologies to academic lives: What studying biocuration can tell us about the conditions of academic work
SARAH R. DAVIES
When I arrived at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg in February 2024, my plan was to study bio-ontologies: the systems that are used to categorise and organise biological data. As a Science and Technology Studies (STS) researcher, I had been interested in biocuration for a while, and one key aspect of biocuration work is developing and applying ontologies. Exploring bio-ontologies would, I thought, give me important insights into the practice of biocuration and what it is doing to our understandings of biology, the organisms, and entities that are studied, and ideas about ‘life’ itself.
Sarah R. Davies
Sarah R. Davies is Professor of Technosciences, Materiality, and Digital Cultures at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna, Austria.
Her work explores the intersections between science, technology, and society, with a particular focus on digital tools and spaces.
I am a social scientist, so delving into the nature of bio-ontologies by looking at natural science and philosophy literature about them was something of a departure for me. What I hadn’t necessarily expected was that doing so would bring me back to more sociological questions, in particular regarding the conditions of academic work. In other words, studying bio-ontologies led me to argue that these systems, which are “axioms that form a model of a portion of (a conceptualization) of reality”[1]Bodenreider, Olivier, and Robert Stevens. 2006. “Bio-ontologies: current trends and future directions.” Briefings in Bioinformatics 7 (3): 256–74. https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbl027., are connected not just to forms of life in the context of biological entities, but with regard to the researchers who create and use them.
Let me rewind a bit. What is biocuration, and what exactly are bio-ontologies? Biocuration is “the process of identifying, organising, correcting, annotating, standardising, and enriching biological data”. [2]Tang, Y. Amy, Klemens Pichler, Anja Füllgrabe, Jane Lomax, James Malone, Monica C. Munoz-Torres, Drashtti V. Vasant, Eleanor Williams, and Melissa Haendel. 2019. “Ten quick tips for … Continue reading Its “primary role … is to extract knowledge from biological data and convert it into a structured, computable form via manual, semi-automated and automated methods.”[3]Quaglia, Federica, Rama Balakrishnan, Susan M Bello, and Nicole Vasilevsky. 2022. “Conference report: Biocuration 2021 Virtual Conference.” Database 2022 (Januar): baac027. … Continue reading This is largely done in the context of large data- and knowledgebases (such as FlyBase or UniProt), which are now central to the biosciences. Biocurators work to develop and maintain such databases, for example by reading scientific articles and extracting useful information from them, inputting data into databases, adding metadata and annotating information, and – importantly – creating and using the bio-ontologies I have already mentioned.
Bio-ontologies, then, are a means of classifying and organising biological data. They offer a ‘controlled vocabulary’ (meaning a standardised terminology), but also represent current knowledge about biological entities in that they consist of “a network of related terms, where each term denotes a specific biological phenomenon and is used as a category to classify data relevant to the study of that phenomenon.”[4]Leonelli, Sabina. 2012. “Classificatory Theory in Data-intensive Science: The Case of Open Biomedical Ontologies.” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 26 (1): 47–65. … Continue reading Bio-ontologies such as the Gene Ontology therefore offer not only a means of accessing knowledge and data, but investigating biological phenomena by creating, as noted on the Gene Ontology’s website, “a foundation for computational analysis of large-scale molecular biology and genetics experiments in biomedical research”.
As I looked into the nature of bio-ontologies, it became clear to me that these organisational systems for biodata are hugely important. They allow researchers in the biosciences to access current knowledge and relevant data (not always easy in the midst of a ‘data deluge’), but they also have epistemic significance. As Sabina Leonelli writes, bio-ontologies “constitute a form of scientific theorizing that has the potential to affect the direction and practice of experimental biology.”[5]Ibid. The development and application of ontologies to biological data thus renders the contemporary biosciences thinkable, capturing the current state of the art and allowing researchers to extrapolate from that.
Given this significance, it is perhaps somewhat surprising that biocuration, as an area of science, often goes unnoticed by its users and by research funders. As one biocurator told me:
…we are in the background. Even researchers who heavily use these resources [databases], don’t usually know our names and don’t think about us existing. But they love the resource. And that’s actually something we’ve gotten with the booth when we were at conferences. People will come up and be like, oh you are the [resource]! Wow, you are good, awesome. They are kind of shocked that there’s humans there.[6]Davies, Sarah R., and Constantin Holmer. 2024. “Care, collaboration, and service in academic data work: biocuration as ‘academia otherwise.'” Information, Communication & … Continue reading
Biocurators are not only ‘in the background’, they frequently struggle to get sustained funding for their work, and generally need to build careers through a series of temporary contracts. Perhaps because databases are machine-readable and can be queried automatically, both funders and the researchers who use curated resources often seem to imagine that the work of biocuration can be readily carried out through automated means; in practice, while biocurators make use of automated tools such as text-mining, interpreting scientific literature and annotating data is a highly skilled activity that cannot be easily replicated by AI or other technologies.
Why is biocuration so under-valued despite its epistemic importance? One answer is that biocuration does not fit well with current systems of reward and evaluation within academia. Researchers are, for instance, rewarded for publishing frequently and in high-profile journals, but biocurators produce other kinds of outputs to journal articles – the data – and knowledgebases that they work on. Similarly, gaining research funding is typically seen as a sign of a successful academic, but biocurators’ work does not fit well into the categories that funders use to assess research quality (such as novelty). As Ankeny and Leonelli explain:
Value in science (be it of individual researchers or particular research projects) is largely calculated on the basis of the number of publications produced, the quality of the journals in which those publications appeared, and the impact of the publications as measured by citation indices and other measures: given that [data] donation and curation are still largely unrecognized, the value of these activities correspondingly is limited in part because it cannot be measured using traditional metrics.[7]Ankeny, Rachel A., and Sabina Leonelli. 2015. “Valuing Data in Postgenomic Biology:: How Data Donation and Curation Practices Challenge the Scientific Publication System.” In … Continue reading
Studying bio-ontologies thus led me to consider the lives of their creators, and the conditions under which they work. Despite the epistemic significance of biocuration, it escapes recognition under contemporary ways of crediting and rewarding academic work – something which seems to me to be deeply unfair. Perhaps, then, we need to find new ways of valuing, funding, and rewarding the wide variety of epistemic contributions made within research, rather than relying on metrics such as number of publications and citations as the key means of assessing research?
References
| ↑1 | Bodenreider, Olivier, and Robert Stevens. 2006. “Bio-ontologies: current trends and future directions.” Briefings in Bioinformatics 7 (3): 256–74. https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbl027. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Tang, Y. Amy, Klemens Pichler, Anja Füllgrabe, Jane Lomax, James Malone, Monica C. Munoz-Torres, Drashtti V. Vasant, Eleanor Williams, and Melissa Haendel. 2019. “Ten quick tips for biocuration.” PLoS Computational Biology 15 (5): e1006906. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006906  . |
| ↑3 | Quaglia, Federica, Rama Balakrishnan, Susan M Bello, and Nicole Vasilevsky. 2022. “Conference report: Biocuration 2021 Virtual Conference.” Database 2022 (Januar): baac027. https://doi.org/10.1093/database/baac027 . |
| ↑4 | Leonelli, Sabina. 2012. “Classificatory Theory in Data-intensive Science: The Case of Open Biomedical Ontologies.” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 26 (1): 47–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/02698595.2012.653119. |
| ↑5 | Ibid. |
| ↑6 | Davies, Sarah R., and Constantin Holmer. 2024. “Care, collaboration, and service in academic data work: biocuration as ‘academia otherwise.'” Information, Communication & Society 27 (4): 683–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2315285. |
| ↑7 | Ankeny, Rachel A., and Sabina Leonelli. 2015. “Valuing Data in Postgenomic Biology:: How Data Donation and Curation Practices Challenge the Scientific Publication System.” In Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology after the Genome, edited by Sarah S. Richardson and Hallam Stevens, 126–49. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822375449-008. |
Net Zero Precinct Futures: place-based experimentation for sustainability transitions
On September 11, 2024, Kármán Fellow Dr Darren Sharp gave an overview of Net Zero Precincts, a four-year ARC Linkage project to develop and test a new interdisciplinary approach to help cities achieve net-zero emissions. In this interdisciplinary project, Dr Sharp aims to bring together transition management and design anthropology with the goal of transitioning to net-zero carbon emissions in an urban environment.
The starting point of the project is the Net Zero Initiative of Dr Sharp’s home institution (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia), where Monash University, as the first university in Australia, has pledged to become carbon-neutral by 2030. Net Zero Precincts is researching this transition on campus to both facilitate its success and learn lessons for scaling up such initiatives at the precinct level.
Dr Sharps started by giving overviews of the two stages of the project that are already finished. In the orienting stage, Dr Sharp and his team made use of interviews with, among others, staff, students, representatives of local and state government, and people from NGOs. The goal was to identify the main sustainability challenges, drivers, and uncertainties along the way as they were understood by the interviewees.
In the second stage, which focused on agenda-setting, workshops were used to go from abstract visions of a net-zero future by participants to concrete ideas of actionable steps and transition pathways. It was especially important at this stage to take local perspectives, the local landscape, and nature into account.
Finally, Dr Sharp briefly discussed the ongoing stage 3 of the project, which started in April 2024. Here, the pathways and visions found in stage 2 of the project were used to develop experiments for the Monash campus living lab. Different projects to overcome the identified challenges or reach the set goals are tried out.
Overall, Dr Sharp argues that the process of scaling up a net-zero project to the precinct level requires a broad perspective. It is not enough to focus on technical innovations to reduce carbon emissions alone. Instead, it is also essential to rediscover First Nations’ knowledge systems, to think about small everyday innovations, and to mobilize the community. Challenges to achieving a net-zero future are local and community-specific and must also be considered.
The Net Zero Precinct project raises fundamental questions that are also of great importance for technical universities. The self-design of universities as living labs is becoming increasingly important under the current transformative conditions of research and innovation. This is because knowledge contexts and the orientation towards socially desirable results must be intertwined with the forms of academic knowledge production. In addition, in cooperation with the Living Labs Incubator at the Human Technology Center, we were able to not only work on specific research issues in living labs in a workshop, but also discuss the first steps towards developing a global network for living lab research at universities.
Links
Net Zero Precincts: Stage 1 Report (PDF)
Net Zero Precincts: Stage 2 Report (PDF)
Photos by Jana Hambitzer
Lecture Series Winter 2024/25: Expanding Science and Technology Studies
We are happy to announce that the lecture series of the winter term 2024/25 will revolve around the topic of Expanding Science and Technology Studies.
Over the decades, Science and Technology Studies (STS) have developed many different approaches for investigating the relationship between science and society and to dig deep into the cultures of research, the ways science is conducted. E.g., scholars have investigated the local cultures and politics underlying processes of knowledge production, the biases and gender divisions informing the organization of academic institutions, or the reception of future technological visions in different publics. There is a rich knowledge. However, it seems that science studies are not well prepared for the transformation challenge. Against this background, the purpose of this lecture series is to understand first the transformation challenge and its consequences for science studies and second to explore different pathways of future science studies.
Various speakers, including the sociologist David Kaldewey (University of Bonn) and the philosopher Sabina Leonelli (Technical University of Munich), will be guests at the KHK c:o/re and shed light on “Expanding Science and Technology Studies” from different disciplinary perspectives.
Please find an overview of the dates and speakers in the program.
The lectures will take place from October 9, 2024 to January 22, 2025 every second Wednesday from 5 to 6.30 pm in presence and online.
If you would like to attend, please write a short email to events@test.khk.rwth-aachen.de.
Theodore von Kármán Fellowship to Darren Sharp
In September, we will welcome Darren Sharp from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, as RWTH Theodore von Kármán Fellow at the KHK c:o/re.
The application for the fellowship was jointly supported by Professor Christine Reicher (Chair of Urban Design and Institute for Urban Design and European Urbanism), Professor Reinhard Madlener (Institute of Future Energy Consumer Needs and Behavior) and KHK c:o/re Director Professor Stefan Böschen. The fellowship contributes to the international profiling and interdisciplinary exchange in the field of sustainability transitions research.
During his stay, Darren Sharp will work on his project “Net Zero Precincts: an interdisciplinary approach to decarbonising cities”, a four-year ARC Linkage project to develop and test a new interdisciplinary approach to help cities reach net zero. The research takes inspiration from the Net Zero Initiative through which Monash University has committed to achieving net zero emissions across its four Australian campuses by 2030. Net Zero Precincts brings together transition management with design anthropology to support the transition to net zero cities in a way that is responsive to the needs of people, politics and place.
In a public university lecture at the KHK c:o/re on September 11, 2024, from 5 to 6.30 pm, Darren Sharp will discuss the interdisciplinary approach being developed through an overview of the envisioning process that took place via a workshop series with participants from the Monash Precinct community. You are cordially invited to come along.
RWTH Kármán-Fellowships are funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine Westphalia (MKW) under the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder.
Reports from the field: a very partial view of EASST4S2024 Amsterdam
BART PENDERS
Social studies of science, or science and technology by any other name, may sometimes feel like a small field in which one knows, or knows of, the relevant players on a global level. Attending the combined conference of both the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) then becomes a humbling experience. With over 4100 attendees over the course of the conference, this year’s edition in Amsterdam may have been the biggest ever. The scale of these events is always impressive and without exception displays the holes in one’s overview of the community.
Bart Penders
Bart Penders investigates moral, social and technical plurality in research integrity, scientific reform and forms of collaboration across a variety of scientific specializations. He currently holds a position as Associate Professor in ‘Biomedicine and Society’ at Maastricht University.
On the upside, that means that there are new worlds in STS to uncover and engage with, without a real upper limit. The absence of these upper limits is overwhelming and daunting though. Consider, for instance, that EASST4S2024 had 10 timeslots for parallel sessions in which each timeslot offers a choice between 50 and 60 parallel sessions. That gives every attendee over 97 quadrillion potential sets of panels to go to and has given rise to the custom of not asking fellow attendees How is the conference so far? but instead How is your conference so far?
Thematically and conceptually, STS is difficult to pin down. EASST4S2024 saw whole collections of sessions on AI and society, participatory approaches to science policy and practice, critical engagement with open science and various panels on psychedelics, music and sound, and so much more. But it never is just talk – experiments with different forms of conferencing have, over the years, created alternative panel forms that included this year, ranging from cooking workshops, to a whole selection of movies.
The diversity of a conference this scale cannot be summarized. Every attempt is destined to fail. However, there are elements that are worth mentioning to me – as the core of my route through the conference and a few that are more plenary, more shared, more collective – snippets of a joint experience.
Let’s start with the shared experience – that of judicious connections between scholars with shared interests; the joy of meeting people you haven’t met in a while but with whom you share academic pasts and those whom you never met but with whom you may share academic futures. Next to the many plural elements of the conference, there is a number of plenary events for all to share. The scale of the conference did make some of that sharing materially difficult: the largest room at the Free University Amsterdam, which hosted the conference, could only seat roughly a quarter of all attendees. Plenaries were streamed to a number of the conference rooms, where plenary sessions became large-screen televised events.
One of the key questions of the first plenary was How does STS translate into policy? One of the speakers was Dr. Alondra Nelson who had served as scientific advisor in the Biden administration and conveyed a twofold message: first, there is a lot STS has to offer policy. The contested themes of our day are where STS excels and we need not be overly afraid of some instrumentalization of science in policy. Second, in contrast though – policy advice does not always leave time for empirical or conceptual labor to underpin it. What we need, Nelson argued, was a certain Science and Technology Intuition, a reservoir of generic tacit skill and knowledge we can tap from. Uncomfortable, imprecise, but powerful. Brice Laurent expanded on this argument by highlighting that we need to transcend a dualist frame in which science is separate from (the issues of) daily life. Our daily lives are penetrated by science to such an extent that we cannot, and should not separate them and any culture war that seeks to achieve this inevitably will come undone.
Massive conferences also come with honors: people who are remembered for their achievements (a plenary dedicated to the work of Adele Clarke) and those who are awarded for their achievements. The list of prizes both societies grant together is very long, but one worth point out in the duo that received the 2024 Bernal Prize: Dutch anthropologist Annemarie Mol and US critical informatics scholar Geoffrey Bowker.
The infrastructure of conferences this scale turns it, in many ways, into an academic festival with the ability to taste and enjoy the various fruits the community has on offer. This analogy was not lost on the conference organizers, who chose to not host a traditional conference dinner but rather organize a genuine “Forest Festival” in the Amsterdamse Bos. Next to the various flavors a global academic community has on offer, we were treated to quite literal global flavors under a pleasant sun.
On a more individual note, I managed to attend a plethora of sessions diving into the credibility of scientific collaboration, the role of replication in science and what perspectives STS has to offer, how reforms in science happen under conditions of uncertainty and how science corrects itself – or not. I organized some of them, spoke in some of them, and engaged with speakers in others. I asked and was asked regularly Have you written about that? and more often than not, the answer was no. In isolation, that no may be disappointing, but on a more structural level it displays the many unexplored and underexplored paths and potential futures STS conferences offer. As every STS mega-conference does, it has left me exhausted but intellectually revigorated. To be overwhelmed is not always a bad thing, but it sure is impressive every time.
Photos by Ana María Guzmán Olmos
Get to know our Fellows: Federica Russo
Get to know our current fellows and gain an impression of their research.
In a new series of short videos, we asked them to introduce themselves, talk about their work at c:o/re, the impact of their research on society and give book recommendations.
In the latest edition of our video series, Federica Russo, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Technosciences, talks about her research on the key questions of evidence and how the humanities and philosophy can affect socio-political questions and policy making, even if they seem abstract and theoretical:
Check out our media section or our YouTube channel to have a look at the other videos.
New Publication in Nature Computational Science: “Software is Ubiquitous Yet Overlooked”
A group of fourteen scientists, most of whom work or have worked at the KHK c:o/re, have published an article entitled “Software is ubiquitous yet overlooked” in Nature Computational Science about the lack of attention paid to software.
Software is ubiquitous in science, and yet it is overlooked everywhere. At a time when the scientific world (and beyond) is talking about code, algorithms or artificial intelligence, software appears in the discourse as just another semantic quibble. But many facets of software, such as questions about user licenses or file formats, are not part of the definition of code or algorithm.
Interdisciplinarity as the key to understanding
In their paper, the authors argue for bringing together perspectives on software from different academic (e.g. computational sciences, humanities and social sciences) and professional (e.g. development, use, maintenance, etc.) fields to uncover the tensions between the different meanings of software. Case studies in different scientific fields, including older software developments, will help to improve the understanding of software.
A simple example: Excel autocorrection
An example from bioinformatics: In the supplementary materials of bioinformatics publications, the preferred format for long gene lists surprisingly is the Microsoft .xls format. However, Excel automatically converts the designation MARCH1 for the gene “Membrane Associated Ring-CH-type finger 1” into a date. This distorts the listed data. A publication from 2021 reminds us that the problem was recognized (and published) as early as 2004, but never disappeared. A fifth of publications dealing with gene lists contain these errors.
Researchers could use tabulated plain text (.csv files), but they don’t because they are used to spreadsheets. However, these are not designed for this type of processing of large amounts of data. Another reason is that many scientific practices employ the widespread use of the Microsoft software suite. It took twenty years for the researchers to finally rename the genes in question. Only recently has Microsoft Excel, a thirty-year-old software package, been able to de-automate the conversion of a character string into a date.
Research on practices and transformations in science and technology
The authors of the article look at the topic of software in scientific research from the perspectives of computational science, history, philosophy of science, semiotics, science and technology studies (STS) and media studies. They work at various universities around the world. Most of them were fellows at the KHK c:o/re, where the idea for the joint publication was born during the workshop “Engineering Practices Workshop: New Horizons in the Social Study of Science and Software“.
