Janet Vertesi

At Cornell snow is in the air, the Society for the Humanities is back into full swing -- and speaking of swing, in addition to my usual jazz combo I will be playing with the CU Jazz Ensemble I in a (re)production of Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain in April! More details as they come...

Speaking engagements this semester include a visit to MIT's Space Science Policy group and STS program; I will be presenting some of my work on the Mars Exploration Rover mission, with an emphasis on the visualizations and embodied interactions that team members use to depict Martian terrain "like a Rover". Following that talk, I have also been invited to speak at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science at the workshop, The Educated Eye. Here I will present the scientists' side of working with Rover images, focusing on how details are teased out of the Martian landscape with digital editing software.

Also, my paper on the effects of the iconic tube map on navigating and representing the city of London is now published as "Mind the Gap: The London Underground Map and Users' Representations of Urban Space" in the journal, Social Studies of Science, 38.1: 7-33. Check it out!

Thanks to a Doctoral Dissertation Grant from the National Science Foundation, this summer's research travel took me across the United States, from California to DC with stops in Arizona, Missouri and Ohio, to visit Rover scientists in their workplaces and watch them work with digital images from Mars to do their science. A thousand digital photos, hundreds of recorded interviews and ten full research notebooks later, I am fortunate to have the intellectual and physical space at the Society for the Humanities to turn this great material into a dissertation over the course of this academic year.
Although writing is my focus this fall, I will be speaking on my dissertation work periodically: first at the Society for the Social Studies of Science conference in Montreal in October, then at the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts conference in Portland, Maine in November, and finally at my department's Science Studies Research Group series. I am also an invited speaker at the upcoming "Educated Eye" workshop at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin in February. To achieve some kind of balance, I continue to play with the Cornell Jazz Ensembles with a wonderfully talented group of students -- catch our upcoming performance on November 17 at the Carriage House Cafe! -- and serve on the Graduate Community Initiative working group based on the report authored last spring.

An update on some recent awards and honours... Our paper, "How HCI Interprets the Probes" was Best Paper Nominee at CHI 2007! :) Phoebe Sengers, Kirsten Boehner and I delivered the paper today in San Jose and it inspired some great comments and discussion -- including a question from one of our co-authors! Also, last week I received the Cornell Student Activities Office's Distinguished Student Leadership Award for my work with the GPSA and on the Graduate Community Initiative in particular. I'm happy to report that the Initiative is already in effect, and a working group is already underway. In addition, the GPSA Grad Ball that I founded three years ago was also honoured with an Organization Showcase Award! Did I mention that the Ball this year sold out with 500 tickets in advance? Something to celebrate indeed! :)

It's finally here: the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly has released its Graduate Community Initiative! The Initiative is a co-authored document produced by our Assembly requesting a focused and integrated approach to graduate and professional student issues at Cornell, including: an expanded student center, improved career resources for students and their spouses, and sustained attention to graduate and professional student housing. As President of the GPSA, I presented the Initiative to the Cornell Board of Trustees on Friday the 9th of March (see coverage in the Cornell Chronicle and the Daily Sun, and on Monday we hosted President Skorton at our Council of Representatives Meeting to officially present the document and discuss next steps. Based on the positive feedback we've received from University leaders -- from the Provost to the Dean of Graduate Studies -- it sounds like the document will be influential in directing university-wide policy. Go team! :)

I will be attending a conference on ethnographies of scientific practice in Fribourg, Switzerland in late March, to speak about my work on the Rover mission. This conference brings together ethnographers and ethnomethodologists from around the world to discuss the current state of laboratory studies, with an eventual publication of collected papers.
I have also been invited to speak at the University of Toronto's Jackman Program for the Arts conference on Visualization in Scientific Practice at the end of April. The conference is chaired by philosopher of science Brian Baigrie and features such prestigious scholars as David Gooding, Lisa Cartwright and Alex Pang.

This January I'll join a group of scholars from across the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, NV, to engage in an exciting new research program, sponsored by the Center for History and New Media. CES is the biggest technology fair in the world, featuring the release of new products from an international array of companies -- and is too big for any one social scientist. But with twenty of us working together in a 'swarm', it will present an exciting opportunity to engage in collaborative qualitative scholarship on topics of interest across the site.

My colleage at Carnegie Mellon, Carl DiSalvo, and I are running an exciting workshop at CHI 2007: Imaging the City. The workshop probes the relationships between representations and interactions in th urban sphere, with a focus on how visual technologies -- surveillance cameras, GoogleMaps mashups, etc -- make the city visible and interactable. Check out our website and CFP.

I've been awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant towards my study of the Mars Rover Mission! The grant will mainly cover travel expenses and enable me to spend some quality time in California at JPL, as well as visit some of the sites at ASU and WashU.