I am mailing with a piece of fairly shameless self-promotion - and a question attached. This is the first anniversary of publication of a book which I now totally wish I had called something different and more obvious. I think the book has relevance to some of the AOIR community, and I'm hoping some list members might be able to help me with a question that it leaves me considering. The book is Systematics as Cyberscience: Computers, Change and Continuity in Science (MIT Press, 2008, by Christine Hine )http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11472 . The book happens to be about biologists, but my main aim was to try and look at the specificity of the Internet to particular circumstances of use, and this domain of science is one site to work through that more general argument. I wanted to see how a particular set of people were negotiating a prevailing political climate of belief in the transformative beneficial capacities of new technologies. To do this study I looked at the development of the policy context, and also tried to engage with the embedding of the Internet into an existing set of communication practices, an institutional structure and a material culture. It's this last bit that leaves me with my current question as I'm working with some of the data that didn't make it into the book. Can anyone suggest to me other recent studies which look at shifts from working with material objects to working with their virtual counterparts? I'm thinking, for example, of interviews I have with someone studying classification of fish, who now often turns to an image which preserves living colour, rather than a preserved specimen which is the "actual" fish, but is now often deemed less satisfactory than the image. I have interviews with people who work with pressed plant specimens, negotiating whether to request specimens on loan or work with images online - and sometimes yearning for the days when they were given good quality colour prints to work with rather than being expected to work off the screen. I'm interested in the transformation of practices of working with material objects as virtual versions come along, and the accompanying respecification of the objects themselves. Can anyone think of parallel examples in other fields of working practice - and recommend published studies that describe them? Maybe there are examples from medicine - anywhere else? Any studies describing the working practices of artists in digital media? Best wishes, Christine Christine Hine Department of Sociology University of Surrey Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK c.hine@surrey.ac.uk http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/christine_hine.htm