Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
4
Following Data
Telling stories about how people move around inside the
physical spaces of laboratories and sequencing centers re-
veals only some of the topology of bioinformatics. Twenty-
fi rst-century science involves a further set of spaces. In
bioinformatics, the relationships between spaces are not
only physical, but are also infl uenced by other kinds of
proximities: Ethernet cables, microwave links, and shared
computer networks form a second kind of “space” that
must be mapped and taken into account. This chapter
will pay close attention to these virtual spaces—how they
are arranged, who can access them, and how people inter-
act within them.
1
The landscape of scientifi c communica-
tion and the possibilities for collaboration, interaction,
and exchange are fundamentally reworked by electronic
networks; these spaces must be considered autonomous
means through which scientifi c actors and objects can be
ordered, distributed, and brought into proximity with
one another. In other words, they present new modes
through which scientifi c knowledge can be produced and
certifi ed.
As one might expect of a digital discipline, much of the
important space and motion in bioinformatics is virtual:
shared disk drives, local networks, server farms, compute
farms, and the World Wide Web constitute another, less
immediately apparent, landscape in which bioinformatics
