Writing Material in Chemical Physics Research: The Laboratory Notebook as Locus of Technical and Textual Integration

This article, drawing on ethnographic study in a chemical physics research facility, explores how notebooks are used and produced in the conduct of laboratory science. Data include written field notes of laboratory activity; visual documentation of in situ writing processes; analysis of inscriptions, texts, and material artifacts produced in the laboratory and assembled in notebooks; and an in-depth interview with an expert chemist whose research and writing formed the basis of this investigation. Findings from this study suggest that the notebook occupies a negotiated space between the scientist’s contingent response to exigency in the laboratory and the genre-specific strategies that he or she deploys to communicate his or her work outside the laboratory. This text, the author argues, might therefore be understood as a locus in the sense that it facilitates a reflexive process whereby inscriptions are used both to interpret a-perceptual chemical phenomena in time, and, through their inclusion and integr...