Compare methods

	Laboratory Ethnography	Technography
Field	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1979	2011
Originator	Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar; Karin Knorr-Cetina	Kees Jansen & Sietze Vellema (Wageningen); algorithmic strand by Taina Bucher
Type	Ethnographic field method	Ethnographic field method
Seminal source	Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691028323	Jansen, K., & Vellema, S. (2011). What is technography? NJAS - Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences, 57(3-4), 169-177.
Aliases	Laboratory studies, Ethnography of the laboratory, Anthropology of science	Ethnography of technology-in-use, Technographic analysis, Algorithmic technography
Related	4	4
Summary	Laboratory ethnography is the anthropological study of scientists at work, observing how scientific facts are constructed through the mundane practices of the laboratory rather than discovered ready-made in nature. Pioneered by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life and Karin Knorr-Cetina's The Manufacture of Knowledge in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it brought the gaze of the field anthropologist into the lab as if studying an exotic tribe. The method follows benchwork, inscription devices, and the conversational and material labour through which claims are stripped of their qualifications until they harden into facts. It treats knowledge as manufactured, local, and contingent, and renders that manufacture visible through immersive observation and thick description.	Technography is the ethnographic description of technology-in-use: how tools, machines, and systems are actually handled, skilled, and enacted in the course of real tasks. Articulated as a method by Kees Jansen and Sietze Vellema in the Wageningen tradition of agrarian and development studies, it places the technical at the centre of ethnographic attention, asking how people and artefacts together accomplish work. A digital strand, exemplified by Taina Bucher's study of algorithmic power, extends technography to software and platforms, examining how algorithms are encountered, felt, and acted upon. Across both, the method treats technology not as a finished object but as something performed in practice within particular social and material settings.