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About

Janet Vertesi is a leading sociologist of science and technology whose research illuminates the hidden human work behind robotic exploration and digital platforms. Her landmark study, "Seeing like a Rover" (2012, 143 citations), draws on over two years of ethnographic immersion with NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission to reveal how scientists and engineers use visualization, embodiment, and interaction to make decisions about robot movement millions of miles away. This work, along with her broader scholarship on human-robot relations and team dynamics, has fundamentally shaped our understanding of how distributed teams collaborate with non-humanoid robots in high-stakes environments. Vertesi's influential paper "The value of data" (2011, 105 citations) demonstrates how scientific data-sharing practices are deeply embedded in the production and acquisition processes of research communities. More recently, she has turned her ethnographic lens to the gig economy, coining the concept of "pre-automation" to describe how platform monopolies employ outsourced labor while developing automation tools to replace those workers. Her work has been widely recognized for bridging science and technology studies with human-computer interaction, offering critical insights into the social dimensions of robotics, data practices, and labor in the digital age.