 Introduction
Welcome to the website for The
Significance of Noise, the Spring 2000 workshop of the Science and Technology Studies Department
at Cornell University. This year’s
workshop was the second in what will hopefully become an annual series of
conferences organized by the graduate students of
Cornell S&TS.
The
Significance of Noise took its inspiration primarily from two sources. Organizationally, we modeled the format on
that of the Summer and Winter Schools held in Dutch Science Dynamics
departments. That is, we wanted a
forum, like the Summer and Winter Schools, in which the entire department
works closely and intensively with a very limited number of well-known
invited lecturers. In particular, we
wanted a format where several of our graduate students could present material
based on their research (grouped around a common theme), complemented by the
presentations and comments of two distinguished speakers, for discussion by
their peers and professors.
Thematically,
the common topic for our papers was meant to be part of ongoing discussions
in STS around issues of data and meaning, sense and nonsense, and the diverse
uses of signal and noise. The most
recent contribution in this area, and the most important kernel of our
workshop, was the N01SE
series of exhibitions at museums in London and Cambridge, UK, curated by Adam
Lowe and Simon Schaffer. A number of
STS scholars, including Peter Galison, Adrian Cussins, Bruno Latour, Roy
Porter, and Cornell’s own Michael Lynch contributed to this exhibition,
alongside a number of artists and art critics. Many of these contributions point to the ambiguities of signal
and noise, the aesthetics of creating meaningful forms, the occasional
usefulness of “messy” data, the embodied, practical character of sifting out
signal, the role of the senses in perceiving what is “significant,” the
construction of an often-unseen but ever-present “background,” and the
historical contingency of ideas about meaning, communication, and
transparency. All of these themes, as
you will see, continued to run through The Significance of Noise.
One of
the scholars involved in N01SE, Brian Rotman of
The Ohio State University, was invited to speak at The Significance of Noise
on digitization, visualization, embodied counting, and the metaphysics of
math – “the god/man number nexus.” We teamed his talk with those of two
Cornell S&TS graduate students whose work also concerns the embodied
practices of science: Heidi Voskuhl,
speaking on “Locating
Noise: Automatic Speech Recognition and the Human/Machine Dichotomy,” an
analysis based on her ethnographic work with a German group trying to perfect
computerized systems for automatic speech recognition; and Cyrus Mody, whose talk on “Tending and Attending:
Using, Reading, and Listening to Laboratory Artifacts,” stems from his
ethnographic work with a group of Cornell materials scientists. This panel was to focus on the ways in
which the materiality of being human is constitutive of scientific facts and
enables/shapes the sorting of signal and noise. In particular, each paper examines how the noisiness of humans
and their environments is negotiated to produce knowledge that is often
claimed to be purified of both “noise” and human presence.
The
invited speaker for the second panel, Prof. H. M. Collins of the Center for Knowledge,
Expertise, and Science at Cardiff University, was one of the first to point
to the social negotiations surrounding the separation of signal and noise, in
books such as Changing Order and articles such as “The Seven
Sexes.” In his current work he is
returning to the site of one of his most important studies, gravity wave physics, with an ongoing
investigation of international cooperation and competition to build ever more
sensitive gravity wave detectors and interpret the data they produce. The fruits of Prof. Collins’ project
formed the kernel of his presentation at The Significance of Noise,
entitled “The
Meaning of Data: Open and Closed Evidential Cultures in the Search for
Gravitational Waves.” Teamed with
Prof. Collins were, again, two Cornell S&TS graduate students: Josh Greenberg spoke on “The Creation of
the ‘Pillars’: Multiple Readings of a Hubble Image,” the story of how
different communities of scientists and non-scientists variously interpreted
and used a single image from the Hubble Space
Telescope; and Park Doing spoke on
“Noisy Signals,
Clean Identities: Engineering in the Real World,” a study of a momentary
controversy between disciplines involved in the workplace world of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source. The organizing theme of this panel was the
role of various kinds of noise in the struggles of communities to come to
agreement on matters of scientific interest.
Each of these three papers is concerned with how forms of noise differ
between communities, and how rhetorics of noise present themselves when
communities intersect.
Also
taking part in the workshop, as commentators and presenters for the final roundtable
discussion were three Cornell S&TS professors, Trevor Pinch, Ron
Kline, and Michael Lynch. Prof.
Pinch’s early work on solar neutrino detection and the controversy
surrounding low levels of detected neutrinos was an important contribution to
science studies perspectives on signal and noise. More recently, he has turned his attention to technological
aspects of noise, with an ongoing study of the Moog synthesizer and uses of
“noise” in music. Prof. Kline has,
for the past year, been working on the early history of what would become
information science (associated with Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver), the
conduit for much talk about “noise” and “signal” in both scientific and
science studies disciplines. Prof.
Lynch has had a continuing interest in the “epistopic” of signal and noise,
whether in the aesthetics or representation in biology and astronomy or, more
recently, in his studies of the fussiness of plasmid preps and the messiness
of DNA fingerprinting.
We wish
to thank all of the members of the Cornell S&TS department for their hard
work and participation in what proved to be an excellent workshop. We also thank the organizations that
funded the workshop, the National Science
Foundation and Cornell’s Graduate and
Professional Students Advisory Finance Commission.
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