Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 260-266). / Evidence from history, archaeology, and the social sciences suggests that making models of the world has anchored our understanding of it since the earliest days. From models of deities, dwellings and weapons to molecules and planetary systems, models have been tools for thinking and imagining, as well as planning and building. Though there are many possible definitions, a digital model is understood here essentially as a miniature virtual world-a distillation that captures the essence of some aspect of the larger physical or imagined world-which provides a vehicle for virtual exploration or manipulation of that world, and a focal point for debates about its nature. This dissertation explores the communities engaged in making 3D digital models used in computer animation-globally dispersed communities linked by their professional tools and practices and their shared use of algorithms to sculpt geometry in the spaces of the machine. My research builds on the work of historians of computing and computer-aided design as well as insights on objects and their meanings by scholars such as Sherry Turkle, Peter Galison and Loraine Daston. To this conversation I contribute a view of digital models as meaningful objects, both tactile and evocative, around which conversations on expertise, craft, nature and representation coalesce. I draw on the work of Merritt Roe Smith on the contributions of government funding to innovation, and David Kaiser's work on the role of representations in circulating professional identities and shaping professional communities. Finally I draw on the work of those who have thought deeply about creativity and digital design tools and practices, including Rudolph Arnheim and Malcolm McCullough. I have also benefitted from Lev Manovich's work on software in the evolving field of digital humanities and software studies. I base my understanding of 3D modeling practices on a series of interviews conducted with a widely-dispersed community of artists, programmers and technical specialists who collaborate, sometimes over great distances, in creating 3D models for the entertainment industry. I argue that the idea of 3D modeling was shaped by the intersections of contrasting styles of abstraction practiced by artists and engineers. The interactions of present-day modelers with their models are part of an emerging discourse with the world, opening new possibilities for human interaction with the world's objects. As an example of the complex, global flow of people, objects and ideas I contrast two animation studios on opposite sides of the world, located in Connecticut and New Zealand. Though each of these is far from Hollywood-traditionally regarded as the heart of the film and animation industries-3D modeling practices, shared software and migrating workers link them to each other and to a global community of 3D thinkers and makers. Digital 3D modeling-sculpting characters, objects and environments, and even 3D printing the objects-emerges as a powerful way of connecting the self to the world. Finally, I examine the use of models as archives of real world objects and their attributes, with a case study a natural history museum's 3D modeling of a dinosaur. / by Rebecca Ann Perry. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, February 2003. / "December 2002." / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves [263]-272). / In this thesis, I examine the current reorganization of office or information work in its technological, spatial, social and cultural aspects. Based on ethnographic and historical methods, I explore how information and communication technologies, and spatial designs combined with specific organizational visions shape the social organization and culture of work. Analyzing ideas as well as material configurations, design as well as use, and developments in offices as well as those beyond the office, I am particularly concerned with the new forms of life and cultural formations these developments produce. The 1990s saw a development towards more flexible, mobile and virtual ways of officing, such as non-territorial offices and remote work. Analyzing the alternative officing movement in the context of wider economic and cultural changes, I demonstrate the strategic role technology plays for the movement's vision of a less place-based definition of work. Suggesting an alternative intellectual origin for today's office concepts different from Taylorism, I opt for the concept of office landscaping, an influential German office concept developed after WW2 and inspired by cybernetics. Fieldwork in a present day innovative office design firm reveals a deep tension in its office designs between a more flexible and mobile organizational goal, and a more communicative and collaborative one - a tension that is exacerbated by technology. Further exploring the designers' own mobile and non-territorial office, I introduce the notion of placemaking to explain the observed friction in the mobile ways of the office. I also find a reconfigured power dynamic that is no longer based on space ownership, but rather on mobility and ownership of technology, or "techno-territory." / (cont.) Not only do I examine alternative office designs, I also investigate remote and technologically mediated work beyond the office among high-tech workers in the Silicon Valley region. My analysis suggests not only novel network-like social and professional structures but also hidden costs for individuals associated with these new formations. / Heinrich Joachim Schwarz. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 456-493). / This dissertation traces a transformation in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's governance of food markets during the second half of the 20th century. In response to new correlations between diet and risk of disease, anxieties about (over)abundant food supplies, and changing notions of personal versus collective responsibility in an affluent society, the FDA changed how it regulated food labeling. Following WWII, the agency developed a set of standard recipes with fixed common name labels (such as "peanut butter" or "tomato soup"), or "standards of identity," for all mass-produced foods. However, the appearance of new diet foods and public health concerns undermined this system. Beginning in the 1970s, the FDA shifted its policies. Rather than rely on standardized identities, the agency required companies to provide informative labels such as the ingredients panel, nutrition labels, and various science-based health claims. Agency officials believed that such information would enable consumers to make responsible health decisions through market purchases. Food labeling is explored as a regulatory assemblage that draws together a variety of political, legal, corporate, and technoscientific interests and practices. The five chapters are organized chronologically. The first two describe how a shift in focus among nutrition scientists from concern for the undernourished to a concern with overeating led to the introduction onto the market of engineered foods capitalizing off popular interest in diet and health. A middle chapter describes a series of institutional scandals that generated the political animus to change the FDA's system, and registered a broader "shock of recognition" that Americans' views about food and food politics had changed. The final two chapters describe the introduction of "Nutrition Information" labeling in the 1970s and the mandatory "Nutrition Facts" panel in the 1990s. By looking at the regulation of labels as a kind of public-private infrastructure for information, the turn to compositional labeling can be understood not merely as a shift in representation-from whole foods to foods as nutrients-but more broadly as a retooling of food markets to embed notions about personal responsibility for health into the ways that food was designed, marketed, and consumed. / by Xaq Zachary Frohlich. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis (Ph. D. in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 409-429). / Guglielmo Marconi's trans-Atlantic wireless experiment in 1900 marked the beginning of a communication revolution that transformed the open space above the earth into channels of information flow. This dissertation grapples with the historical conditions that gave rise to such a transformation: the studies of radio-wave propagation and the treatments of radio interferences in early twentieth-century America and Western Europe. The part on propagation examines the debate between the surface diffraction theory and the atmospheric reflection theory for long waves, the development of the ionic refraction theory for short waves, the evidential quests for the existence of the ionosphere, and the studies of the geomagnetic effects on propagation. The part on interferences focuses on the engineering efforts toward the characterization of atmospheric noise and signal-intensity fluctuations, the policies of radio-channel allocation for fighting man-made interference, and the scientific research into electronic tube noise. By the mid-30s, the results from these endeavors had considerably improved the quality of radio communication. Characterizing Radio Channels builds a bridge between the history of science and the history of technology by inspecting an immaterial engineering entity--radio channels--whose control required significant scientific research. In the history of science, it contributes to an integrated study of electrical physics and geophysics. In the history of technology, it enriches radio history, epistemology of engineering knowledge, consumer studies, and the studies of technological policies. Combining both fields with the concept of radio channels enables a new understanding of the historical conditions that made the information society / (cont.) social factors that facilitated the modern research organizations in academia, industry, governments and the military. / by Chen-Pang Yeang. / Ph.D.in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, June 2007. / "May 2007." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 284-308). / My research is about the particular effects of Vietnam's economic liberalization program (known as "doi moi") on the local food and market system in Hanoi. Doi moi policies, which began in the late 1980s, have instituted major changes in both the national system of agricultural production and in Hanoi's local system of marketplaces. The doi moi reforms have created many new opportunities in Hanoi, but they have also re-configured social relationships and market spaces along the food chain to present new kinds of risk for consumers. These include harmful chemicals, goods of uncertain quality, and sellers who operate outside of the moral obligations of the dominant system of personal relationships. These things have not yet been resolved through regulation and have therefore been left to consumers and sellers to work out among themselves. The competition between various actors to manage foodborne risk in the absence of state regulation has taken place amidst the state's campaign to re-order Hanoi's market system according to neoiberal ideals. / (cont.) This has made the local market system a site for the enactment of a symbolic politics of modernity in which discourses that are really about risk and political economy have been obscured by their expression as a debate about "tradition" and modernity." Beneath the discourse of modernization lies a range of hybrid market worlds as well as systemic issues related to the transition from a centrally planned economy to a free market system. / by Margaret A. Hiesinger / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages [255]-265). / This dissertation examines the distinctive and critical role that space exploration played in American foreign relations and national image making in the 1960s. Proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, Project Apollo was established, in large part, as a means of demonstrating American power and promoting technocratic values in an international landscape defined by the Cold War, the collapse of colonialism, and the emergence of newly independent nations. While existing scholarship has gestured to this geopolitical context, it has tended to examine activity that takes place on American or lunar soil. This dissertation argues that the geopolitical context was not simply a backdrop but instead the main theater of Project Apollo. By embedding this familiar story back in its global context, this dissertation reinterprets the established narrative of Project Apollo in three significant ways. First, it places greater emphasis on the international stage and the relationship between the US and the world. Second, while the role of the Executive Branch remains essential to this story, this dissertation shifts the focus from engineers and managers, to key actors within the State Department and United States Information Agency, as well as foreign leaders and the world public. Finally, the role of Project Apollo in foreign relations, and public diplomacy in particular, becomes the defining feature of this investigation. By examining how US government elites promoted and disseminated information about space exploration to support American foreign relations interests, this dissertation offers a lens onto attempts to establish national power by fusing perceived values and strengths of science and technology- like rationality and progress- with the image of the nation's political system. These efforts, this dissertation demonstrates, were not only aimed at boosting American prestige, but were also strategic attempts to promote an idea of global unity and progress ushered in by American scientific and technological leadership. / by Teasel Muir-Harmony. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 297-326). / This ethnography tracks a diverse set of practices I term "constructive biologies," by which I mean efforts in the post-genomic life sciences to understand how biology works by making new biological things. I examine five fields of constructive biology - synthetic biology, DIY (do-it-yourself) biology, hyperbolic crochet, sonocytology, and molecular gastronomy - investigating how they are enmeshed in sensory engagements that employ craftwork as a means of grasping biology. Synthetic biology is a community of bioengineers who aim to fabricate standardized biological systems using genetic components and manufacturing principles borrowed from engineering. DIY biology is a community of "biohackers" who appropriate synthetic biologists' terminologies, standards, and commitment to freely exchanging biomaterials in order to do hobbyist biological engineering in their homes. The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is a distributed venture of thousands of women who are cooperatively fabricating a series of yarn and plastic coral reefs in order to build a material simulation of oceanic morphologies and evolutionary theories. Sonocytology, a technique in nanotechnology research, uses scanning probe microscopes to "listen to" cellular vibrations and "feel" the topologies of cells and cellular components. Molecular gastronomy is a movement in which practitioners - physical chemists and biochemists who study food, and chefs who apply their results - use biochemical principles and laboratory apparatuses to further cooking and the culinary arts. In analyzing these fields, I draw on histories of experimental biology, anthropological accounts of artisanship, science studies work on embodiment and tacit knowledge in scientific practice, and sensory ethnography. Based on data gathered from participant-observation and interviewing, I argue for thinking about making new biological things as a form of "crafting," an analytic that illuminates five aspects of contemporary biological manufacture: 1) sensory cultivation, 2) ongoing participation with biological media and forms, 3) the integration of making biological things and practitioners' selfmaking, 4) the embedding of social relations, interests, norms, and modes of exchange in built artifacts, and 5) the combination of making and knowing. In this study, I argue that both biology the substance and biology the discipline are currently being remade, and that increasingly, life scientists apprehend "life" through its manufacture. / by Hannah Sophia Roosth. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 306-317). / This dissertation investigates Twitter parody accounts as a form of social critique and linguistic play across English, Japanese, and Arabic-one that is collaboratively created by the users, policymakers, and architects of Twitter. Together, apart, and in different constellations with governments and news media, these actors use parody accounts to recreate and experiment with everything from law to what constitutes a person. I argue that the Twitter parody account, both as negative critique and ambiguous personification play, is an off-platform use-an unintended use of platform, site, or app that is allowed to endure, with varying degrees of official encouragement, silence, and ignorance. Drawing on ethnographic, linguistic, and legal analysis, the dissertation details the contours of this use, its adversaries and proponents among traditional structures of authority, and how the platform has ratified and deployed it globally. Chapter 1, Aspect Shift, examines how a parody account works at a linguistic level through the name and profile photo play of a classic political parody account. Chapter 2, The Account-Person, proposes that personhood on Twitter is a cyborg entity and investigates five elements the shape this account-person: number, body, position, world, and time. Turning to parody accounts' relationship with authority, chapter 3, Warranting Parody, investigates why some in positions of authority mobilize apparatuses of power against parody accounts. Not all governmental employees, however, see parody accounts as threats. Chapter 4, Tweeting Like a State, explores the development of norms around parody among a key, but often overlooked group of contemporary interpreters of representative government: governmental social media managers. Chapter 5, The Social Media Contract, argues that the history of Twitter's parody policy is the history of its still-emerging social contract, a contract shaped by user demands, the abdication of traditional authorities, and Twitter's own interests. This social contract has uneven globality-as chapter 6, Of Policyness and Global Polysemy, shows through examining Twitter's parody policy across languages. Finally, in the conclusion I bring these various strands together through the concept of usership, a member relationship entangled with citizenship yet largely asserted and negotiated with corporations rather than governments. / by Amanda Johnson. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / The thesis utilises newly available legal and municipal archives to study the historical geography of colonial Bombay through five interlocking themes and periods from 1870-1930. This spans the period between the boom and bust in the cotton trade during and after the American Civil War - when Bombay was a colonial mercantile port - to its emergence as of one of India and Asia's largest industrial cities after the First World War. Separate chapters explore the history of railway and telegraph networks, standardisation and time-keeping, land acquisition and valuation, cadastral surveying and property registration, and the urban built environment. From the perspective of the colonial city, the history of these formations looks less like the smooth unfolding of singular standards of money, time or space, than a protracted war of position fought out across a century by experts, elites and the masses. This thesis seeks to deepen the social and political history of urbanization in South Asia beyond concepts of colonial technology transfer or nationalist resistance by examining the everyday politics of stock and real estate speculation, public clocks, land and private property, maps and topographical surveys, and buildings and streets in colonial Bombay. These "modern" technologies of calculation, coordination and control in the urban environment both created and depended on new scales of power and capital accumulation, or particular configurations of industrial technologies, civic institutions and urban space. / by Shekhar Krishnan. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2001. / "February 2001." / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, p. 631-784). / This thesis traces the development of American bacteriology during the first quarter of the twentieth century. While bacteriology experienced a period of rapid growth, an enduring disciplinary anxiety equally characterized the field. In particular, bacteriologists feared increasing specialization and conceptual fragmentation. Leading practitioners repeatedly worried that their science constituted a collection of unrelated techniques, carried out in the service to other practical endeavors without the benefit of an underlying theory or unifying language. I suggest that the sources of bacteriology's rapid professional growth equally accounted for this sense of conceptual impoverishment and disciplinary privation. Typically, bacteriologists focused on what bacteria did rather than what they were in any biological sense. The first three chapters provide a comprehensive survey of the institutional contexts bacteriology (e.g., medical schools, public health laboratories, water sanitation works, dairies, land-grant colleges, and agricultural experiment stations). For the most part, bacteriologists studied bacteria only so far as to isolate, identify and eliminate pathogens. Dairy and soil bacteriologists, however, sought to distinguish productive types of bacteria, and render those forms more active, a direction that led them to consider a range of phenomena and organisms normally occluded by the practices of medical, public health, and sanitary bacteriology. / (cont.) The final three chapters of the dissertation trace the attempts of American bacteriologists to render their science less fragmented and more biological, focusing in particular on the actions of the Society of American Bacteriologists (SAB). Established in 1899, the SAB endeavored to bridge the divergent interests and practices of American bacteriologists. Through its inclusive membership, ecumenical leadership, diverse meeting programs, and society journal, the SAB served as an organizational exploration of those shared aspects of the discipline. Furthermore, the SAB issued a comprehensive chart for the identification of unknown cultures. While never endorsed as its official methods, the chart soon formed the basis of undergraduate and graduate training, while it guided research programs and published papers. In addition, the serial revisions of the chart led bacteriologists to consider many fundamental aspects of bacteria. Lastly, the SAB struggled to reform bacterial systematics. At the time of the SAB's founding, bacteriology languished under a state of taxonomic chaos, with each specialty offering its own system of naming and grouping bacteria. Believing that this linguistic fragmentation precluded the emergence of a unified discipline, the SAB overhauled bacterial systematics, arranging bacteria according to their detailed morphology, physiology, and likely evolutionary histories. / (cont.) While the SAB's taxonomy did not find immediate adherents, it did become authoritative by way of the classroom and laboratory. The SAB issued a new comprehensive determinative guide, the Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology, which incorporated the SAB's scheme. As the Bergey's Manual became ubiquitous to laboratory practice and course instruction, American bacteriologists unwittingly adopted a broader range of considerations ... / by Eric D. Kupferberg. / Ph.D.