Validating what counts as knowledge: the algorithmic gaze and nested multifocality in the biosciences

In this article, we introduce the notions of algorithmic gaze and nested multifocality as analytical categories for investigating the production of evidence in contemporary biosciences. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a translational medicine project involving the clinic, the wet lab, and bioinformatic work—as well as interviews with bioinformaticians and computational biologists—we show how evidence emerges through the situated negotiation of different gazes, 'professional visions,' and 'styles of reasoning.' We define the algorithmic gaze as an emergent computational mode of seeing and rendering biological phenomena intelligible through pattern recognition, visualization, and algorithmic procedures. Its epistemic legitimacy, we show, is negotiated through its relation to clinical and molecular gazes within 'biomedical platforms.' The concept of nested multifocality accounts for an epistemic condition in which evidence is not only relative to 'epistemic cultures' and specific research situations, but also emerges through a broader multifocal vision that accommodates different gazes and 'professional visions'