Universidad Nacional De Educación a Distancia

This paper explores the difficulties of reading large numbers of scientific pa-pers when doing the history of 20th century science and technology. It arguesthat there is a tension between two modes: that of close reading of key papersand that of citation analysis and other automated modes of mapping the litera-ture. The challenge charting between the two and of maintaining an interpretiveapproach when confronted with a large body of literature (thousands, or tens ofthousands of papers) can be met by approaching The Literature as a kind of in-formant in the anthropological sense. We characterize the literature here as so-mething which can depict the movement of scientific and technical concepts andpractices. The paper explores this approach, and suggests ways to track suchthings as materials and methods sections, the mode of emplotment they employand the problemetizations they propose or participate in.