Primary Investigator

Email

Institution

Bowker, Geoffrey C.

bowker@ucsd.edu

University of California, San Diego

Abstract
Biodiversity and ecosystems data are currently being gathered in a large range of formats by a constellation of loosely connected private, government and not-for-profit agencies. The normal response to this double heterogeneity has been the development and enforcement of metadata (data about data) standards; in this response one tries to abstract data away from its organizational context in order to render it universally accessible. This project takes the opposite track, and seeks new ways of grounding environmental data in its organizational context in such a way that it can both be used more flexibly today and so it can retain its value longer. The hypothesis, based on the last 25 years of work in the field of Science Studies, is that formal data descriptions must be wrapped in informal descriptions in order to be useful. The informal description for short-lived data is provided by face-to-face contact, by exchanging graduate students, through conference papers and so forth. It is precisely this layer which is lost in highly distributed data collection efforts characteristic of biodiversity and ecosystem informatics; it is also this layer which is lost when data is wrapped in formal metadata and saved to disk. The goal of this project is to open up a major new field of database inquiry tied precisely to the specific problems of the biodiversity and ecosystems communities generated by their need for very long lasting and highly distributed data. The project will develop into a larger study of the articulation between metadata and narrative modes of wrapping data.