Relying on Latour's sociology of science (+ others such as Latour and Woolgar, 1991; Callon, Law, and Rip, 1986), inscriptions (journal articles, conference papers, presentations, grant proposals, and patents, images of many sorts, databases...) are the core of scientific/knowledge work. Inscription is basically the process of creating technical artifacts that would allow to stabilize the research work so that it can travel across space and time and be combined with other work (and eventually establish the protection of an actor's interests/credibility). On a personal note, I still have to turn this into higher level research inscription:

This is a kind of summary of my research results so far.