This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in the journal Artifact ©2006 Taylor & Francis; Artifact is available online at:

Do socio-technical systems cognise?

The analysis of the cognitive role played by external representations – particularly within the distributed cognition (DC) framework – has focused on the use of such representations in cognitive tasks. In this paper, we argue that the processes of building such representations require close attention as well, especially when extending the DC framework to ill-structured domains such as scientific laboratories, where building novel representations is crucial for making discoveries. Based on an ethnographic study of the building of computational models in a systems biology laboratory, we examine the complex cognitive roles played by the external representations built by the lab (pathway diagrams and models), and the building process itself.

Abstract. This paper examines reading as done by programmers engaged in software development. Reading is an activity we feel should be of fundamental interest to studies of programming, but the practical achievement of which has not been closely examined. We give examples of programmers reading in pairs, and reading alone, and show reading in both cases to be explainable in terms of shared social practices. These practices are not determined by the code but nor are they purely socially constructed; rather they lie in the linkage between the code and programmers ’ ways of reading the code. We discuss (1) how features of day-to-day coding work create pertinent occasions for reading a certain piece of code, (2) how programmers order and expect there to be an order to code, and (3) how programmers have ways of analysing code in order to make sense of it. This is an ethnomethodological study that draws from ethnographic fieldwork at a professional software development company.