10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17300
application/pdf
2038-3460
17300
1
en
Massimo Mazzotti
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Janet Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover. How Robots, Teams and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars, University of Chicago Press, 2015
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
7
Book Reviews
2016-07-08
2023-06-20
2016-07-08
2023-08-07
170-172
TS
Massimo Mazzotti
2016/07/08
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17300
170
University of California, Berkeley
2038-3460
1
en
172
Janet Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover. How Robots, Teams and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars, University of Chicago Press, 2015
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17300/16170
7
170                                                             Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

References
Garfinkel H. (1991) Respecification: Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Ac-
   countable Phenomena of Order, Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. in and as
   of the Essential Haecceity of Immortal Ordinary Society (I) an Announcement
   of Studies, in G. Button (ed.), Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences,
   Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 10-19.
Lynch M. (1993) Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and
   Social Studies of Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.



                                     ***

   Janet Vertesi
Seeing Like a Rover. How Robots, Teams and Images Craft Knowledge of
Mars. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2015, pp. 304

Massimo Mazzotti University of California, Berkeley


    This is a book that I read with pleasure. It captured my imagination.
And, I must admit, it wasn’t fun when one of the rovers died. Alone. In
the Martian desert. By that point, I had become almost convinced that I
too could “see like a rover.”
    “After you’ve worked with the team for a while,” says an informant,
“you kind of learn to see like a Rover.” The team is the Mars Exploration
Rover Team, and this book studies what does it mean to say that a human
member of the team can learn to see how a machine. To address this
question, Vertesi take us on a step-by-step journey through the image-
making practices that produce those familiar reddish Martian landscapes.
The outcome is a well-crafted, highly textured ethnographic account of
how the team works with the digital images sent back by Martian rovers.
The reader learns how these scientists and engineers make sense of the
images, manipulate them to make them “more objective,” and use them
to orient their action at a distance. A very long distance indeed.
    Vertesi does a great job in mobilizing relevant work in the history of
science and science studies, centering each chapter on a powerful insight.
Her story vividly reminds us of the theory-ladenness of observation, the
conventional and local nature of objectivity, and of the fact that scientific
images, including photographs, are always and necessarily constructed. It
reminds us that instrument calibration is an eminently social process, one
that is as much about people as it is about machines. On this particular
point, Vertesi goes beyond the narrative of alternative kinds of objectivi-
ty, to engage with the process of calibration as integrating machine work
and human judgment, in a way that gestures interestingly toward recent
Book Reviews                                                                171
STS work on machine learning and the concept of the mechanizable.
     A few main themes run through the chapters of the book. One is an
understanding of knowing and visualizing as embodied processes. Vertesi
engages with notions of embodied skills and priorities in the making of
scientific knowledge, and brings them into Martian territory. Hence her
interpretation of the team drawing Mars as something that makes sense to
them (e.g. constituted by different kinds of surfaces), which builds on
Wittgenstein’s notion of “seeing as.” There is plenty of body talk when it
comes to the rovers and their cognitive as well as physical achievements.
It is fascinating to see the way members of the team end up identifying
themselves with the rover they are following - not just its mechanical eyes,
but its mechanical body as well. The rover is truly a member of the team,
and when it gets stuck against a rock, or one of its mechanical arms
doesn’t work properly, its human colleagues would express and discuss
the problem through their own bodies, in a natural, unthinking, and very
effective way. I have found these ethnographic passages enlightening, and
more convincing that, say, yet another ponderous reflection on the non-
human.
     Another major theme is captured by the iconic image, at p. 180, from
Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: the king’s body as composed of its subjects’
bodies. How not to think immediately to the rover as an air pump of the
21st century? In fact, all chapters grapple, from different vantage points,
with a fundamental insight: making technoscientific knowledge about
Mars means stabilizing a particular kind of social order. Each single tech-
nical choice made by the team is also a micropolitical choice – and it has
to be so in order to succeed.
     One the most memorable passages, in this respect, is the description
of the “happy” ritual in chapter one. At the beginning of each Martian
day, the team gathers to go through the activities planned for that day.
Resources, including time, are limited, and choices need to be made
about how to allocate them. Not all experiments can be performed, and
not all routes can be pursued. There might be tensions within the team -
for example between scientists, whose priority is to collect information,
and engineers, whose priority is the survival of the rover. But even among
the different subgroups, say the geologists, one detects different discipli-
nary agendas that can produce conflicting expectations. The rover will
not move until each team member has confirmed that they are “happy”
with the plan. There is a precise social mechanism to register consent, and
it is also clear how to proceed if someone is “not happy.”
     Vertesi draws on a venerable tradition of understanding knowledge as
a collective phenomenon that has its champions in Wittgenstein and
Durkheim. One of the reasons why her case-study is so effective in mak-
ing this point lies in the nature of the team: it’s large, international, disci-
plinary diverse. These conditions make the work necessary to align inter-
ests and perceptions particularly visible. The social dynamics of the team
are designed to establish consensus and allow goal-oriented action. The
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digital images are a site for these negotiations, and the way they are seen
it’s their final outcome. That these images show something clearly, or tell
the team what to do, is indeed the outcome of a social process, not its be-
ginning. An image can show something clearly only if the alignment has
been successful.
     Interestingly, Vertesi has not chosen the case of a controversy over
digital image making or interpretation. Instead, she describes the mun-
dane operations, the daily rituals that are constitutive of seeing like a rov-
er or, and it’s one and the same thing, of being a legitimate and well-
behaved member of the team. Rather than focusing on breakdowns and
crises, she looks at normal science, the daily routine of making sense of
images of Martian things. And it is precisely through the inspection of
this routinized, normal procedures that one sees how normativity can on-
ly emerge and be sustained by the coordinated activity of concept appli-
cation carried out by the team, through rituals of perception alignment
and mutual symbolic sanctioning.
