Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the idea of data journeys and its implications for the conditions under which objects can cease to be treated as scientific data. It is grounded on an ongoing empirical study of the movements of data across a variety of situations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the idea of data journeys and its implications for understanding how objects come to be treated as scientific data, and cease to be treated as such. I focus on cases where online databases act as crucial passage points for data travel, documenting the types of expertise, resources and conceptual scaffolding used by database curators and users to expand the evidential value of data thus propagated. In particular, I consider 'omics' data gathered on model organisms (particularly thale cress and yeast); phenomics data gathered on plants; and data about cancer mutations gathered on human and non-human organisms. From the reconstruction and qualitative analysis of such data journeys, I draw a conceptualisation of data as relational objects, whose epistemic role is defined by their use as prospective evidence for claims. In this view, data are mutable mobiles, and their integrity is a matter of lineage rather than of stability and reticence to change. Within this framework, data death is a common occurrence and happens whenever the objects that serve as data are lost, misplaced, mistreated and/or forgotten. At the same time, death is not necessarily the final stage of the life of data. The same dataset can die and resurrect in a variety of forms and for different purposes, depending on the treatment of the objects concerned and the materials, infrastructures, institutions and cultures within which such treatment is embedded.