Paper short abstract:

The environmental sciences have over the last decades experienced a “data deluge”, prompting concerns around the curation, storage and sharing of increasingly enormous data sets. This paper will explore the value of scientific data, and the social and relational efficacy that it has as a result.

Paper long abstract:

Although it has not attracted as much attention as the Big Data of social media and business, the natural sciences have also over the last decades experienced a "data deluge", prompting concerns around the curation, storage and sharing of increasingly enormous data sets. Large scale scientific projects regularly produce peta or exa bytes of data, and data scientists such as James Gray, who worked closely with the natural sciences over his lifetime, have proposed that we understand contemporary data-driven science as functioning under a "fourth paradigm", to indicate this shift into data. One of the reasons that this shift has attracted less attention from the critical social sciences is that scientific data is often presumed to be inherently alienable, and without much direct economic value. This has meant that the value of scientific data is very rarely explored. Drawing on fieldwork with a large-scale scientific project in the Brazilian Amazon and on literature about "the fourth paradigm" in science, this paper will explore the value that scientific data both creates and accrues, the different sorts of knowledge economies and regimes of value that it co-constructs, and the social and relational efficacy that it has as a result.