Technological Change and the Form of Science Research Teams: Dealing with the Digitals

During the late 1990s, photography moved from being a primarily analogue medium to being an almost entirely digital medium. The development of digital cameras and software for working with photographs has led to the wholesale computerization of photography in many different domains. This paper reports on the findings of a study of the social and organizational changes experienced by marine mammal scientists who have changed from film-based photography to digital photography. This technical change might be viewed as a simple substitution of a digital for an analogue camera, with little significance for how scientists do what they do. However, a perspective anchored in social informatics leads to the expectation that such incremental technical changes can have significant outcomes, changing not only how scientists work, but also the outcomes of their research. This present study finds that key consequences of this change have been the composition of the personnel working on the scientific research teams for marine biology projects and the ways in which these scientists allocate their time.