@misc{LippertVerran, author = {Lippert, Ingmar and Verran, Helen}, title = {After Numbers? Innovations in Science and Technology Studies' analytics of Numbers and Numbering}, series = {Science \& Technology Studies}, volume = {31}, journal = {Science \& Technology Studies}, number = {4}, issn = {2243-4690}, doi = {10.23987/sts.76416}, pages = {2 -- 12}, abstract = {Locating studies of numbers in STS-and the proposed position of this SI Number studies have featured often in past STS scholarship. Indeed, one might articulate a history of STS analytic concepts and theories by tracking number studies. One might begin such an undertaking by pointing out that studies in STS followed anthropology in proposing numbers as social entities, noting that in anthropology number studies have featured since the end of the nineteenth century. When STS studies generally were focussing on epistemology, the analytic framings of number scholarship in STS reflected that. From the 1970s until the end of the century number studies proliferated. In line with other areas of STS, a focus on ontology began to appear in number studies in the mid 1990s, albeit at first hesitantly (Watson, 1990; Watson-Verran, 1995). But it was not the STS past with its range of number studies that interested us when we set out to assemble this special issue of Science \& Technology Studies. We were more interested to show how contemporary number studies were deploying new analytics that are emerging in STS. To this end we were concerned to have contributors reflect on the analytic framing they were using to make their STS number study and to comparatively articulate the analytic affordances it offered. In beginning we register our delighted surprise at how this special issue turned out, noting how much we learned along the way from the authors who have contributed. We offer six papers each of which we see as broaching a novel issue in STS number studies. They attend to a very wide range of sociotech-nical situations where numbers and/or algorithms feature. The nexus numbers and/as algorithms is puzzlingly relevant to taking on numbers. Recognising that numbers both are and are not algorithms (and vice versa) we begin by making clear how we see relations between numbers and algorithms. While algorithms mobilise a protocol that elaborates how to work relations between numbers, e.g. embedded in a database, numbers express a protocol that lays out how to work relations embedded within a number as it comes into being in the banal routines of enumeration, as for example in Watson (1990).}, language = {en} }