David Ribes
Professor, Human Centered Design and Engineering
Thursday, October 29, 2026
4:30 – 5:20 p.m.
In person: 134 Sieg Building
What it Takes to Have Tidy Data: The Case of AIDS Research Infrastructures
Today, you can get data from just about any field of science or inquiry with the click of a button. This talk focuses on the backgrounded work that made this possible in one field—AIDS science. Data that demanded the labor of thousands of HIV-negative and HIV-positive participants, hundreds of scientists, across continents and over decades, can today arrive in your hands tidy and organized, almost free, with the quick click of a button. The talk uses this history to explore the concept of “punctualization”: the process by which something big, complicated, and internally heterogeneous comes to appear as a singular thing—a dot, a period, a unit: “data.”
About the presenter
David Ribes is professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington. He is a sociologist of science and technology who focuses on the development and sustainability of research infrastructures (i.e., networked information technologies for the support of interdisciplinary science); their relation to long-term changes in the conduct of science; and, transformations in objects of research. David is regular contributor to the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Information Studies. His methods are ethnographic, archival-historical and comparative. This talk is based on his hot off the MIT Press book, Machineries of Similarity and Difference, available open access. See davidribes.com or dataecologi.es for more.
About the HCDE Research Speaker Series
The HCDE Research Speaker Series features research from faculty and PhD students in Human Centered Design & Engineering and affiliated academic communities. Talks are held Thursdays during autumn quarter and are open to the public.
View the series lineup