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The digital and material traceability of our interactions in organizations are nowadays the subject of very advanced analyses through tools known as social media analytics (SMA). As thinking (infrastructure), SMA tools constitute objects to think of our digitally mediated interactions with. It produces a substratum (a new meaning) that would not exist otherwise, and enacts different types of reasoning that hypothetically influence community managers’ or members’ sensemaking of digitally mediated interactions. This chapter proposes to look behind the curtain of charts and graphs, in order to highlight the performativity of the interactions between the different machines and the traces of our digitally mediated interactions. Drawing on a detailed analysis of the fabric of SMA, this chapter highlights the explanatory power of a communication perspective on types of reasoning enacted by thinking infrastructures. First, considering the SMA tool as an editorial enunciation allows us to see it as a process implying several beings (e.g. machines, humans and logs) that are not without consequences. Second, we show that these beings have different modalities of interactions with each other, and that these modalities of interactions influence the materiality of the digital traces of past interactions. Third, throughout the process, we demonstrate the fragility and variability of their materiality. Finally, faced with the rise of a technological deterministic discourse, which tends to portray the exploitation of our digital traces as an objective way of representing the collaborative practices that make up the organization, our research aims, on the contrary, to demonstrate their relativity.

This chapter discusses the development of evidence-informed practice in Australian education. It highlights growing system-wide aspirations and support for Australian teachers, school leaders, and jurisdictions to be engaging productively with research and evidence. Our aim here is to step back from these developments and consider them in the context of: (1) the nature and distinctive characteristics of the Australian school system; (2) what is known (and not known) about Australian educators' use of research and evidence; and (3) recent insights into enablers and barriers to research use in Australian schools. We argue that the development of evidence-informed practice in Australia needs to take careful account of the complex history and fatalist nature of the wider school system. This will make it possible to identify and work with the productive places that exist within a system of this kind. It is also important to recognize that research use in schools is a topic that has been investigated surprisingly little in Australia relative to other countries internationally. Current policy aspirations around evidence-informed approaches therefore need to be matched by greater efforts to understand the dynamics of research engagement in Australian schools and school systems.