ABSTRACT
The mapping captures the fluidity of the social and thus better accounts for its temporal features. Mapping is an epistemological tool for underlining ontological singularities: a powerful visual device for deploying, not just describing, phenomena. Indeed, this provides people with a technique for producing infrareflexive accounts of socio-technical objects and processes. Mapping is not a way of illustrating, but a way of generating and deploying knowledge. Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) defines knowledge practices as restricted and circumscribed into intricate and frangible, yet costly, networks of praxis. In attempting to visualize and trace such networks, a number of collaborations between the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and web technologies were initiated. Identifying the visual techniques that natives use to generate reality before transporting them into a field of study where these techniques can further knowledge about native phenomena might appear as an unconventional technique.
