writing and laboratories

Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s (1986) in-depth study of a scientific laboratory during the 1970s offers insight into writing’s role in current day laboratories. Latour and Woolgar observed that at every bench sits a large notebook in which participants painstakingly record their work. Technicians, if not actually handling scientific instruments, fastidiously record lists of figures on blank sheets. When not writing on paper, technicians label test tubes, mark beakers, or pencil identifying numbers on the fur of rats. The result of “this strange mania for inscription” is a preponderance of documents (p. 48). Workspace texts are compounded with even more documents found in the laboratory’s office space: annotated published scholarly articles, drafts of articles in progress, scrap papers, letters, printouts, markings on the blackboard slides, and so on. Participants’ telephone conversations are dominated by discussions of potential documents, documents in progress, and published documents. Latour and Woolgar posited that the proliferation of texts transforms the laboratory into a system of literary inscription. The laboratory’s chief occupants, however, chafed at this characterization because it is at variance with their own vision of their work.