Acknowledgments

I thank my astronomical interlocutors for their help, patience, and understanding during my fieldwork. I am very grateful to the director of “the Institute,” where I did most of my fieldwork, and the directors and staff of Calar Alto Observatory and the European Southern Observatory at La Silla for making my stays there possible and immensely enjoyable. Anthropologists commonly introduce pseudonyms when writing about their ethnographic subjects and conversationalists. I am especially grateful to the scientists and technicians whom I call Anna, Antonio, Ben, Carlos, Catalina, Christina, Chuang, Curt, Eddie, Elias, Francesca, Henry, Joe, Jorge, Ken, Mallory, Mary, Mike, Nadine, Nora, Norman, Olli, Oscar, Otfried, Otto, Owen, Pablo, Patrick, Peter, Susheela, and Tim. I hope that you recognize yourselves and feel adequately represented. Anton M. Koekemoer kindly shared the audio recording on which Transcript 4.8 is based. I am very grateful to Karin Knorr Cetina for affiliating my initial project to her former Unit of Knowledge, Finance, and Society at the University of Konstanz. Conversations with Klaus Meisenheimer, Christian Wolf, and David W. Hogg have profoundly influenced my view of data-rich science.

A number of colleagues and friends have read and commented on manuscripts that became part of this book: Jesus Aceituno, Debbora Battaglia, Ulrich Buczilowski, David DeVorkin, Abou Farman, Christian Greiffenhagen, Martin Harwit, Christian Heath, Webb Keane, Ann H. Kelly, Karin Knorr Cetina, Yaël Kreplak, Stefan Laube, Kenneth Liberman, Michael Lynch, David Martin, Klaus Meisenheimer, Curtis Moyer, Marie-Hélène Nicol, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Tanya Richardson, Hilmar Schäfer, Sergio Sismondo, Arjen van der Wel, Niklas Woehrmann, and Christian Wolf. I am particularly indebted to Grey Gundaker for her guidance when I made my first steps into ethnomethodology, her encouragement, and a close reading of the manuscript. I thank Christian Greiffenhagen for nudging me toward the title. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the articles of which parts are included in this book. Anonymous reviewers of the book proposal and the manuscript kindly provided essential advice. Of course, the responsibility for remaining mistakes is mine alone.

I have presented some of the results and materials from this study at seminars and workshops at the Universities of Konstanz, Southern Denmark, Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier, Exeter, and the College of William & Mary, at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, meetings of the International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, the Society for Social Studies of Science, the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, and onboard the research vessel Polarstern. For their comments I am particularly grateful to Nancy Barrickman, Debbora Battaglia, Catelijne Coopmans, David DeVorkin, Vanessa Dirksen, Clemens Eisenmann, Mariana Fereira, Paul Forman, Barbara Grimpe, Barbara J. King, Karin Knorr Cetina, Stefan Laube, Sabina Leonelli, Kenneth Liberman, Douglas Macbeth, Werner Reichmann, Arpita Roy, Hilmar Schäfer, David Teira, Johannes Wagner, Leon Wansleben, and Kath Weston.

Several research assistants did excellent work for this project: Mike Bernhardt, Ulrich Buczilowski, Sonja Froitzheim, Sarah Heupel, Eva-Maria Kaufmann, Jaclyn Kuizon, Sabrina Lehner, Karoline Lukaschek, Frederik Schönebeck, Friederike Sontag, Ayala Stein, Brooke Sutcliffe, and Victoria Zinyuk. Regina Vera-Quinn kindly translated Spanish recordings for me. I thank Sara LeBlanc and Michael Reyers for their work on the illustrations. Sean Speers and Herbert Balagtas rescued me from various computer troubles. Franka Heise saved me at two critical moments. I am grateful to Nadine Albert and the team of the Havenhostel Bremerhaven, where I wrote parts of this book.

At Cambridge University Press I am very grateful to David Repetto for his guidance, and to Anna Hubbard and Aleksandra Serocka for their meticulous work, help, and patience. I thank Polly Chester for her painstaking copy-editing and Ramya Selvaraj for the project management.

I am deeply grateful to my family and friends for enduring support and encouragement.

My greatest thanks are to Stefanie Hoeppe, my partner, for being with me on this journey. Without her love, understanding, and support I would not have been able to finish this book.

I am very grateful to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant HO 3986/2-1), the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation, the College of William & Mary, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Insight Grant #435-2018-1397) for essential financial support.

This book draws in part on material published in the following journal articles: “Working Data Together: The Accountability and Reflexivity of Digital Astronomical Practice,” Social Studies of Science, 44(2) (2014), 243–270; “Tensions of Accountability: Scientists, Technicians and the Ethical Life of Data Production in Astronomy,” Science as Culture, 27(4) (2018), 488–512; “Mediating Environments and Objects as Knowledge Infrastructure,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 28(1–2) (2019), 25–59; “Medium, Calculation, Play: On Digital Images in Scientific Practice,” Social Studies of Science, 49(5) (2019), 758–784; “Members Doing Ethnography? On Some Uses of Irony and Failed Translation, Witnessed in an Episode of Data Sharing in Open Science,” Ethnographic Studies, 17 (2020), 1–21; and “Encoding Collective Knowledge, Instructing Data Reusers: The Collaborative Fixation of a Digital Scientific Data Set,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 30(4) (2021), 463–505. I am grateful to the publishers Sage, Springer Nature, and Taylor & Francis for their permission to reproduce this material. Figures 3.8, 3.9, 4.5, 4.6, 8.1, and 8.2 are reproduced by permission of the American Astronomical Society.