In a community of protocol nerds, protocols occupy a special place in our hearts. We want to showcase their value, their virtues and their importance for solving perplexing high-scale problems of our present and future society. Protocol practices are invaluable “metawork” for articulating practices and procedures as well as standardizing them and making them transparent. But protocols have their ethics and in some cases they can even be at odds with the goals and purposes of a human organization. There is a fine path to traverse between the Harybdis of structurelessness and the Scyla of “ultra”-hardness and the key to keeping balance lies in the skillful judgment and agency of the subject using the protocol.
In my own (ethnographic) research and case studies of agricultural and plant science research under the national agricultural organization in Greece, I deal with issues of how the use scientific protocols and pipelines related to the kinds of knowledge produced and the strategies employed in dealing with unexpected novel events and contingencies within the constraints of going through a protocolized standard procedure (e.g. genomcis pipeline, from sampling plant tissue, to RNA extraction, and to genomic sequencing). As I have observed, contingencies are always part of the picture and protocols act as structuring processes, constraining the possible interpretations or actions and channeling work and energy towards the completion of the pipeline. But this channeling also puts constraints on personal expert judgment, scientific creativity, discovery and innovation, especially when there is over-reliance and complete trust in the process.
The Open Science movement and its reforms that have reshaped the scientific landscape in its agenda, has brought awareness to that there are social and subjective processes involved in making science, a perspective that was for decades reserved to sociologists, historians and philosophers of science. But at the same time, instead of bringing the perspectives of the practicing scientists and the science scholars in alignment, the Open Science reforms seem to have been furthering a divide by a pervasive idea that social processes and human subjectivity are things to be solved or minimized as much as possible in the whole process of science.
In the conetxt of Open Science, a characteristic example of “protocols gone awry” when there is over-reliance on standardization and methodological granularity is the ManyLabs approach, which attempts to solve the issue of replication in experiemental sciences in human and animal behaviour by making research processes hyper-transparent and their description as granular as possible. I specifically remember a presentation by Bart Penders, a researcher studying such cases, where he mentioned that the manual descibing the protocols for experimental setup of ManyPrimates a ManyLabs project focusing on primate behavioural research has a word count of >1 million words! I especially remember his comment on the setup protocol even accounting for the exact colour of the cup the primate would drink water from.
This is of course and extreme case of over-protocolization but from my overview of the direction of Open Science related projects, this is a trajectory that most experimental research is oriented towards. I am personnally very concerned by this direction because I value scientific creativity, and forms of perceptual and skillful learning that rely on situated knowledge and fast judgement, which over-relaiance on methods, tools and protocols has the risk of seriously imparing. I wouldn’t be so concerned in cases such as industrial manufacturing where mass production is the goal, but in science, a “Fordist” mode of mass production of knowledge and its replication is at odds with novelty generation.
To get to the point, I think we need to pay more attention to the perils of protocolization and start to explore the existential risks associated with overeliance. I am very motivated to pursue this direction and I want to know who else has similar concerns and feels a similar calling.