Digital methods in STS: continuities, discontinuities, and reconfigurations

We review the ways in which STS methods and theories have "gone digital," from laboratory ethnography to actor-networks and beyond. We introduce the main players in these transpositions and the continuities and discontinuities as STS addresses digital objects and environments. We introduce the messiness associated with this movement through critiques of digitality as hegemonic, monolithic, unified, and stable, and show how STS work addresses these concerns in practice. We then turn to the emergence of critical making that combines STS sensibilities with computational technics, and the institutional changes that facilitated overlaps between STS scholars and global centers of computing.