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

Citation: Forsythe, Diana E., Hess, David J. (2002/07) Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence.
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence
Tagged: Anthropology (RSS) Anthropology (RSS), Computer Science (RSS), Medical Informatics (RSS), artificial intelligence (RSS)

Summary

Diana Forsythe drowned while crossing a river on a hiking vacation in 1997. She was quite young, and a pioneer in the anthropology of science and technology. Her colleagues, led by David Hess, collected and edited her published and unpublished works into this volume.

Given the straightforward nature of the book's chapter titles, it seemed valuable to list them here:

1. Blaming the User in Medical Informatics: The Cultural Nature of Scientific Practice 2. The Construction of Work in Artificial Intelligence 3. Engineering Knowledge: The Construction of Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence 4. Knowing Engineers? A Response to Forsythe (by James Fleck) 5. STS (Re)constructs Anthropology: Reply to Fleck 6. Artificial Intelligence Invents Itself: Collective Identity and boundary Maintenance in an Emergent Scientific Discipline 7. New Bottles, Old Wine: hidden Cultural Assumptions in a Computerized Explanation System for Migraine Sufferers 8. Ethics and Politics of Studying Up in Technoscience 9. Studying Those Who Study Us: Medical Informatics Appropriates Ethnography 10. "It's Just a Matter of Common Sense": Ethnography as Invisible Work 11. Disappearing Women in the Social World of Computing 12. George and Sandra's Daughter, Robert's Girl: Doing Ethnographic Research in My Parents' Field

As Hess provides a cogent and brief summary of the book in its first few pages, I will not attempt to do so here.

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

Forsythe wrote most of the material in this volume in a time of great change in the anthropological study of technoscience. It was both novel for anthropologists to study technoscience, and doing so presented unique opportunities and challenges. Some of these had (and still have) to do with the differences between the beliefs and values of AI researchers and AI anthropologists (e.g. Chs 1-5), some of them arose because anthropologists had moved from a traditionally powerful, isolated position relative to their informants to a lower-power, socially interdependent one (Ch 8).

Additionally, Forsythe problematizes the appropriation of ethnography by computer scientists and physicians in medical informatics (Ch 9, 10) and raises gender-driven/focused critiques of medical informatics as a discipline.

Her exchange with Fleck is particularly illuminating; she reveals herself as an unabashedly critical scholar, and one could be forgiven for assuming that Fleck's claims about her writing drove her to the work represented by the subsequent chapters of the book.

Those with a more sociological bent would likely find her "New Bottles" chapter most intriguing. It poses traditional research questions (e.g. "How do values and expectations come to be embedded in technology"), addresses them empirically and with theoretical models, and only then explores the implications of its findings for the practice of medical informatics.