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Today a key feature of every technological organization is the abundance and pivotal role of standardized data sets. This paper discusses the interplay between standardized semantic knowledge representations and situated work on a knowledge intensive workplace. Drawing upon anthropological fieldwork with geologists and engineers in the 'subsurface' department of an oil company, this paper discusses how an oil reservoir is represented with standardized semantic entities, and how such representations are used when workers try to make sense of the reservoir. The terms decontextualization and recontextualization are used to address and highlight the work that is involved in transporting meaning out of and into different contexts. Examples are given on how the subsurface personnel try to make sense of the oil reservoir through data: creatively using data to explore, speculate and guess about the subsurface. Through these examples, the paper explores the integrated relationship between the minds trying to understand the reservoir and the symbolic tools they have available, outlining some of the experience-based embodied skills that are involved in this work. It is argued that a key skill in this workplace is handling the translations between the standardized and singular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how experience from field trips to geological analogues informs the interpretation of remote data sources in petroleum reservoir geology. It is based on observations of a group of petroleum geologists on a field trip to an analogue field and descriptions of the typical office work of such professionals in the same company. Special attention is given to representational artefacts and data types employed in the different settings. Field trips are experiences in which the geologists develop skills in handling the relationship between geological and physical structures experienced in the field and conventional representations of them. When trying to make sense of the offshore reservoirs deep beneath the seabed, they have to make do with fragmentary data from remote sensor arrangements. When creating integrated ideas of a reservoir based on sparse remote data sources, petroleum geologists draw analogies to the patterns observed in the field and draw from the skills developed when performing similar extrapolations in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper applies Bourdieu's theory of the scientific field to examine the sources of authority, reasons for conflict, and group dynamics in an isotope lab at a Chinese university. After 7 months of participant observation and non-structured interviews, I found that theoretical capital and technological capital are both used in the isotope lab. While both are associated with scientific authority, it was theoretical capital that determined lab members' social authority. Dominant and subordinate members of the lab applied different strategies to advance their interests. Conflicts of interest induced competition between the holders of theoretical and technological capital, which in turn caused interpersonal conflict. The specificity of the field of geoscience determines the relative power of technological and theoretical capital, and the low autonomy of the scientific field in China strengthens that hierarchy. I find that this hierarchy of scientific capital in the broader field can have a considerable impact on the social construction of experimental results in the local settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]