The datafication of nature: data formations and new scales in natural history

In this essay, I consider the scales and connections lost and gained as natural history adopts digital data infrastructures. On the basis of ongoing work in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, I track the relations between insect specimens and their material and digital informational ecologies. Using Latour's notion of the ‘circulating reference’, I follow the insect specimens as they make their way into taxonomies, databases, and digitization apparatuses. In focusing on human-data mediations in museum practices of ordering, describing, and distributing specimens, I show how the datafication of nature makes present conventionally dissociated contexts, including German colonialism. Proposing the concept of a data formation, I suggest that ethnographers have much to contribute in bringing forward the sociocultural and historical specificities and contingencies within data.Peer Reviewe

Goldsmiths Research Online and Open Access: an introduction for researchers

This booklet provides an overview of Goldsmiths’ institutional repository, Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO), as well as an introduction to key aspects of the Open Access (OA) philosophy and its relevance for researchers

Inside the sequence universe: the amazing life of data and the people who look after them

This thesis provides an ethnographic exploration of two large nucleotide sequence databases, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Bank, UK and GenBank, US. It describes and analyses their complex bioinformatic environments as well as their material-discursive environments – the objects, narratives and practices that recursively constitute these databases. In doing so, it unravels a rich bioinformational ecology – the “sequence universe”. Here, mosquitoes have mumps, the louse is “huge” and self-styled information plumbers patch-up high-throughput data pipelines while data curators battle the indiscriminate coming-to-life caused by metagenomics. Given the intensification of data production, the biosciences have reached a point where concerns have squarely turned to fundamental questions about how to know within and between all that data. This thesis assembles a database imaginary, recovering inventive terms of scholarly engagement with bioinformational databases and data, terms that remain critical without necessarily reverting to a database logic. Science studies and related disciplines, investigating illustrious projects like the UK Biobank, have developed a sustained critique of the perceived conflation of bodies and data. This thesis argues that these accounts forego an engagement with the database sui generis, as a situated arrangement of people, things, routines and spaces. It shows that databases have histories and continue established practices of collecting and curating. At the same time, it maps entanglements of the databases with experiments and discovery thereby demonstrates the vibrancy of data. Focusing on the question of what happens at these databases, the thesis follows data curators and programmers but also database records and the entities documented by them, such as uncultured bacteria. It contextualises ethnographic findings within the literature on the sociology and philosophy of science and technology while also making references to works of art and literature in order to bring into relief the boundary-defying scope of the issues raised

Defiant Objects Project Report

The Defiant Objects project was an 18-month Sherpa-LEAP research project, looking at depositing non-standard or difficult research outputs (which we have termed 'defiant objects') into institutional repositories. Headed by Tahani Nadim (Goldsmiths) with research assistance from Rebecca Randall (Goldsmiths). It followed on from work carried out by the LEAP Media Working Group into depositing multi media work into repositories. Defiant Objects addresses a number of issues that have arisen in conjunction with the increase in non-text-based, non-standard or otherwise difficult deposits in repositories: deciding what exactly to upload, the relationship between a work and it's surrogate, choice of appropriate item type, metadata or controlled terminology, and completing item records in such a way as to be clear and comprehensible to end users of the repository. Outputs from this project include a deposit guide poster and leaflet, a project report, a blog and twitter feed and a conference poster for Open Repositories 2013 in Canada. The research and its recommendations are very much focused on arts-based research as well as the IR software EPrints. This is because the research team has most experience with these subjects due to institutional affiliation and because the EPrints system is the most widely used IR system within the University of London. Arts-based research is also where one is likely to find many research outputs that could be seen as ‘defiant’

JISC funded Kaptur project environmental assessment report

The overall objective of the JISC funded Kaptur project (October 2011 - March 2013) is to discover, create and pilot a sectoral model of best practice in the management of research data in the visual arts. This report outlines findings from the first workpackage, environmental assessment, based on the following research question: What is the nature of visual arts research data? Appendix A provides detail on the methodology; data was gathered from a literature review and 16 face-to-face interviews with visual arts researchers; four at each partner institution: Glasgow School of Art; Goldsmiths, University of London; University for the Creative Arts; and University of the Arts London

Defiant Objects Project Report

The Defiant Objects project was an 18-month Sherpa-LEAP research project, looking at depositing non-standard or difficult research outputs (which we have termed 'defiant objects') into institutional repositories. Headed by Tahani Nadim (Goldsmiths) with research assistance from Rebecca Randall (Goldsmiths). It followed on from work carried out by the LEAP Media Working Group into depositing multi media work into repositories. Defiant Objects addresses a number of issues that have arisen in conjunction with the increase in non-text-based, non-standard or otherwise difficult deposits in repositories: deciding what exactly to upload, the relationship between a work and it's surrogate, choice of appropriate item type, metadata or controlled terminology, and completing item records in such a way as to be clear and comprehensible to end users of the repository. Outputs from this project include a deposit guide poster and leaflet, a project report, a blog and twitter feed and a conference poster for Open Repositories 2013 in Canada. The research and its recommendations are very much focused on arts-based research as well as the IR software EPrints. This is because the research team has most experience with these subjects due to institutional affiliation and because the EPrints system is the most widely used IR system within the University of London. Arts-based research is also where one is likely to find many research outputs that could be seen as ‘defiant’

Defiant Objects: Non-standard research outputs in Institutional Repositories

The Defiant Objects project was an 18-month Sherpa-LEAP research project, looking at depositing non-standard or difficult research outputs (which we have termed 'defiant objects') into institutional repositories. Headed by Tahani Nadim (Goldsmiths) with research assistance from Rebecca Randall (Goldsmiths). It followed on from work carried out by the LEAP Media Working Group into depositing multi media work into repositories. Defiant Objects addresses a number of issues that have arisen in conjunction with the increase in non-text-based, non-standard or otherwise difficult deposits in repositories: deciding what exactly to upload, the relationship between a work and it's surrogate, choice of appropriate item type, metadata or controlled terminology, and completing item records in such a way as to be clear and comprehensible to end users of the repository. Outputs from this project include a deposit guide poster and leaflet, a project report, a blog and twitter feed and will also include a conference poster for Open Repositories 2013 in Canada

The Commons and Care

Several projects within the Radical Open Access Collective (including Mattering Press, Goldsmiths Press, the PPJ, and Capacious) frame the work they do around open access publishing as a form of care. Here publishing is understood as a complex, multi-agential, relational practice. In various ways, these projects are concerned with considering how to attend more closely to some of the key participants in the publishing process and the practical responsibilities this might entail. This is in marked opposition to those neoliberal variants of open access publishing that focus more on individual authorial brands and measurable quantifiable outputs. In challenging such models, publishers have sought to open up and render explicit the politics of scholarly communication. This has been by, for example, developing an ethos in which people are paid fairly for their labour, in particular those without a direct stake in the published works themselves, acknowledging and otherwise making explicit their contributions, and redirecting volunteer efforts away from commercial pro t-driven entities in favour of supporting more progressive not-for-pro t forms of publishing. Through these and other means, care is used as a way for open access publishers to both reflect on their own work and begin to counter the calculative logics that permeate academic publishing. A key promise that animates these endeavours is the potential for developing publishing practices that enrich not just the careers of individual scholars but also scholarly communities. The hope is that it might be possible to build new and more horizontal alliances between authors, reviewers, publishers, readers, and the usually invisible body skilled professionals and volunteers on which so many experiments in open access publishing depend

Towards a reflexive turn in the governance of global environmental expertise the cases of the IPCC and the IPBES

The role and design of global expert organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) needs rethinking. Acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all model does not exist, we suggest a reflexive turn that implies treating the governance of expertise as a matter of political contestation

Blind regards: Troubling data and their sentinels

A new generation of environmental satellites, the Sentinels, has recently been launched by the European Space Agency (ESA). Part of ESA’s Copernicus Programme, the sentinel mission has adopted an Open Data policy which intends to make different levels of data freely available via an online data hub. Sentinel data will support applications including land monitoring, emergency management and security and will thus form the evidence-base for a wide-range of local, regional, national and international decisions, from individual insurance claims to humanitarian interventions. By providing ever more data streams for monitoring and managing the planet, the sentinels institute a novel mode of visibility in terms of resolution, coverage and frequency. At the same time, they are co-constitutive of the increasing datafication of the environment. In the entwinement of heavenly gaze and data visions, I want to recover the work of ‘data fictions’ in order to demystify notions of visibility and calculability associated with “earth observation” and trouble its unquestioned pursuit of total monitoring