Coding and Expertise

This chapter distinguishes two views on expertise: realist and relativist. It argues that coding expertise should be understood through a realist lens and from a relational perspective, defining it as bundles of operations anchored in group-supported discursive and nondiscursive skills. The chapter examines the relationship between coding and varied domains of social and natural science expertise, such as economics, financial economics, and biology, both from the viewpoint of ethnographic investigations on the ground and from that of historical, discursive rationalizations of coding expertise. The chapter argues that neither coding expertise nor the domains of scientific expertise should be treated monolithically, but rather as bundles of expert operations. Coding expertise entails rule-based systems of communication among human actors and machines. Additionally, the chapter makes the case that the expansion of machine-learning-based infrastructures raises conceptual challenges with regard to interaction as a key sociological notion. The chapter suggests the notion of interactions with incomplete intersubjectivity as a starting point for analyzing communication across machines and human actors.