3:30-5:30pm, November 17, 2004
The Experiment
I visited Gilbert Hall to observe an experiment that B.CI.0
(let’s call her Sandy) and the lab technician (let’s call him Jack) were
conducting. Sandy is looking at
how caterpillars grew differently based on the controlled experiment she ran
over the summer at RMBL (Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory).
The Lab Notebook
As my research is headed toward an augmented laboratory
notebook, I wanted to ask her some questions about how she used her
notebook. In the end, I didn’t get
to ask her as many questions as I had hoped (as she was quite busy w/ the
experiment) but I learned much from observation and by interrupting and asking
them questions.
Sandy
believes that her lab notebook is one of her best ways of learning her trade
(the procedures, concepts, etc).
She learns by writing and copying
notes into her notebook.
Sometimes, she will copy pages out of her advisor’s (let’s call him
Prof. Winston) notebook and paste them into her own notebook. Biologists are very careful about who
they lend their notebooks too (and to be truthful, it seems very rare that a
biologist will lend their notebook to anybody, as it contains such precious work). In this case, Prof Winston copied the
necessary pages and handed it to Sandy.
While
Jack read off the gels, Sandy would write them down onto a sheet of paper that
would later be copied by hand (or pasted, alternatively) into her lab
notebook. This portable sheet of
paper was a little crumpled, as it has gotten soggy by touching the water on
the lab bench. Sandy’s ink is
smudged at several places, but still readable by the human eye. We later tested this interaction with
Anoto paper, with surprisingly good results.
Summary:
The notebook serves as a way to
offload cognition, but also as a way to learn. Writing into the notebook is a way to internalize the
procedures and details needed for working in the lab.
The Lab Technician
Jack, the lab technician, graduated last year with his Stanford Masters in Biology, through the coterm program. He pointed me to Bruno Latour’s work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour), on how he studied science as a process, as a machine from which results were created.
Jack’s role on the day I visited
was to be there to give advice to Sandy while she completed her
experiments. This was Sandy’s
first time performing this procedure, so she felt it would be helpful to have
the technician around. Several
times, she would have trouble recalling the prescribed amount of liquid to add,
or which next step to take, so she would verify her intention by asking Jack.
Lab Notebook as a Reference Tool
Sandy refers to her notebook several times
during the experiment. She will
look up specific numbers that pertain to the current step, as a check on her
memory.
Cooperative Reasoning
Later on in the experiment, when Sandy has
to read off the gels (from electrophoresis, the process by which they analyze
the compounds present in the caterpillars), she and Jack work cooperatively,
feeding off each other’s expertise.
They explain to each other how they would read the gel, why they would
make a decision over another. For
example, one gel band looked like it was expressing genotype 3/5 (to Sandy),
but Jack thought it was a 2/4 genotype.
This ambiguity resulted from where you considered the baseline. To resolve this problem, they invited a
professor who happened to be in the lab at the time. The professor came by, explained her reasoning, and the two
agreed to follow her lead.
An Environment Unfit for Fragile Technology?
At one point, the professor who was walking in and out
dropped a handful of test tubes.
They didn’t break because she was taking them out from a drawer pretty
close to the ground. At another
time, Jack broke a glass plate that was used to cut the gel. He disposed of it in the trash. Does this mean that this laboratory
environment is too “harsh” for technology? Probably not, as technology gets cheaper, and Tablet PCs
become ubiquitous (in Weiser’s sense), then biologists would not worry about
technology in the lab, and could throw away a Tablet PC as easily as the glass
plate.
Summary: But for now, we should stick with paper, as it is much more robust than a Tablet computer.
Audio Transcript
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