Ok, more weird questions from your friendly neighborhood bioinformatician: I have grown to believe that the computer infrastructure, programming languages and software tools that someone has access to shapes the research questions they will think to pose. To put it a bit floridly: infrastructure becomes a language that decides what you can say. Anyone within compsci or other sciences know of studies adressing such things?
not an exact answer
@karinlag No studies to hand, unfortunately, but this matches my experience - also for computerized tasks more generally, not just research, and even including software development itself.
A related concept seems to be Conway's Law, which is almost the inverse relationship as it relates to infrastructure *development* - and taking those two together, I've ended up at "organizations reinforce their own structure externally, through the infrastructure they construct".
(I suspect that anthropology might have some useful things to say on this topic, but have not had the time to really look into it yet)
