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Global warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case for global warming is all model predictions, nothing but simulation; they warn us that we need to wait for real data, \"sound science.\" In A Vast Machine Paul Edwards has news for these doubters: without models, there are no data. Today, no collection of signals or observations--even from satellites, which can \"see\" the whole planet with a single instrument--becomes global in time and space without passing through a series of data models. Everything we know about the world's climate we know through models. Edwards offers an engaging and innovative history of how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere--to measure it, trace its past, and model its future. Edwards argues that all our knowledge about climate change comes from three kinds of computer models: simulation models of weather and climate; reanalysis models, which recreate climate history from historical weather data; and data models, used to combine and adjust measurements from many different sources. Meteorology creates knowledge through an infrastructure (weather stations and other data platforms) that covers the whole world, making global data. This infrastructure generates information so vast in quantity and so diverse in quality and form that it can be understood only by computer analysis--making data global. Edwards describes the science behind the scientific consensus on climate change, arguing that over the years data and models have converged to create a stable, reliable, and trustworthy basis for the reality of global warming.

When scientists from two or more disciplines work together on related problems, they often face what we call ' science friction'. As science becomes more data-driven, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, demand increases for interoperability among data, tools, and services. Metadata -usually viewed simply as ' data about data', describing objects such as books, journal articles, or datasets -serve key roles in interoperability. Yet we find that metadata may be a source of friction between scientific collaborators, impeding data sharing. We propose an alternative view of metadata, focusing on its role in an ephemeral process of scientific communication, rather than as an enduring outcome or product. We report examples of highly useful, yet ad hoc, incomplete, loosely structured, and mutable, descriptions of data found in our ethnographic studies of several large projects in the environmental sciences. Based on this evidence, we argue that while metadata products can be powerful resources, usually they must be supplemented with metadata processes. Metadata-as-process suggests the very large role of the ad hoc, the incomplete, and the unfinished in everyday scientific work.

Web-based platforms play an increasingly important role in managing and sharing research data of all types and sizes. This article presents a case study of the data storage, sharing, and management platform Figshare. We argue that such platforms are displacing and reconfiguring the infrastructure of norms, technologies, and institutions that underlies traditional scholarly communication. Using a theoretical framework that combines infrastructure studies with platform studies, we show that Figshare leverages the platform logic of core and complementary components to re-integrate a presently splintered scholarly infrastructure. By means of this logic, platforms may provide the path to bring data inside a scholarly communication system still optimized mainly for text publications. Yet the platform strategy also risks turning over critical scientific functions to private firms whose longevity, openness, and corporate goals remain uncertain. It may amplify the existing trend of splintering infrastructures, with attendant effects on equity of service.

A panel discussion regarding the historical perspective on the circulation of information, featuring Lisa Gitelman, Neil Safier, and Paul N. Edwards, among others, is presented. Among others, Gitelman thinks that one of the greatest pleasures of studying media history is the way it cuts against exceptionalism of the present. Having been trained in the business of analyzing literary works, this diverse world of material texts was a revelation, though she supposes it shouldn't have been. For Safier, he thinks their contribution as historians lies precisely in their ability to contextualize with reference to specific processes, actors, spaces, materials, and periods, rather than reacting in knee-jerk fashion to the \"harbingers of an entirely new age.\" It seems to be clear to all of them that broad-brush characterizations of cultures as determined by a single form of technology or type of expression leave much nuance, complexity, and historical specificity to be desired.

This article explores the history of nuclear systems and computers in apartheid South Africa, considering these systems - and apartheid more generally - as forms of 'technopolitics', hybrids of technical systems and political practices that produced new forms of power and agency. Both systems were exceptionally important to the apartheid state, not only as tools but also as symbols. Equally significant, both came to serve as focal points for Western governments and international anti-apartheid activists, who fought to limit South Africa's access to these systems. We argue that nuclear systems enacted the technopolitics of national identity, while computers expressed a technopolitics of social identity.

The IPCC has been successful at building its scientific authority, but it will require institutional reform for staying relevant to new and changing political contexts. Exploring a range of alternative future pathways for the IPCC can help guide crucial decisions about redefining its purpose.

Maintaining consistency in the huge, constantly changing meteorological data network is the work of standards. Standards are socially constructed tools--they embody the outcomes of negotiations that are simultaneously technical, social, and political in character. Edwards examines the evolution of standards implemented for meteorology.

This chapter explores the history of a global governance institution, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), from its nineteenth‐century origins through the beginnings of a planetary meteorological observing network, the WMO’s World Weather Watch (WWW), in the 1960s. This history illustrates a profoundly important transition from voluntarist internationalism, based on shared interests, to quasi‐obligatory globalism, based on a more permanent shared infrastructure. The WMO and the WWW thus represent infrastructural globalism, by which “the world” as a whole is produced and maintained (as both object of knowledge and unified arena of human action) through global infrastructures.

Abstract Many components of infrastructure are technological: pipes, asphalt, routers, buildings and other artifacts. Others are social: organizations, standards, laws, budgets or political arrangements. Finally, some components are individual human beings who contribute to infrastructure development and maintenance, or simply make use of it in their daily lives. Relationships among these elements often shift. One typical trajectory reduces the role of individual action (choices, skills and behavior) by replacing it with social mechanisms such as organizations, laws and standards, and/or technological elements such as sensors and software. Another trajectory, equally possible and sometimes desirable, moves in the other direction, replacing technological mechanisms with social ones and/or with individual choice and action. While both trajectories create “automatic” systems, in the second case the automaticity is embodied in people and/or organizational routines. All infrastructures require users to learn and adopt these behavioral regularities. Once rendered fully habitual or incorporated into widely diffused organizational routines, such regularities can be regarded as components of infrastructure. They play a key role in the phenomenon of invisibility or transparency in well-functioning infrastructures. This chapter explores examples from several different nations that show how infrastructures depend on habits, norms and routines, and how the persistence of automaticity in social systems and individuals creates its own forms of path dependence and structural inertia. My title plays on Anthony Giddens’s notion of “structuration” to evoke the mutually constructive character of agency and structure.