Toward an Anthropology of Graphing: Semiotic and Activity-Theoretic Perspectives

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This work presents the results of several studies involving scientists and technicians. In Part One of the book, Graphing in Captivity , the author describes and analyses the interpretation scientists volunteered given graphs that had been culled from an introductory course and textbook in ecology. Surprisingly, the scientists were not the experts that the author expected them to be on the basis of the existing expert-novice literature. The section ends with the analysis of graphs that the scientists had culled from their own work. Here, they articulated a tremendous amount of background understanding before talking about the content of their graphs. In Part Two, Graphing in the Wild , the author reports on graph usage in three different workplaces based on his ethnographic research among scientists and technicians. Based on these data, the author concludes that graphs and graphing are meaningful to the extent that they are deeply embedded in and connected to the familiarity with the workplace.