Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of samples and materiality in the creation of long-term, oceanographic plankton data. In my case study, the “birth” of the plankton data crucially depends on the creation, handling, and manipulation of samples, which I aim to consider as epistemic things.

Paper long abstract:

In light of recent considerations of scientific data as constituting a "life cycle" or "journey", this paper zooms in on a local case of a data life cycle's first stage, the "birth" of data. The paper is based on an empirical study of the production of spatio-temporal oceanographic plankton data at the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation of Ocean Science in Plymouth, UK. The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the process of data production and focus on the relation of samples to scientific data. The samples in this case are produced by mechanical devices, which filter the ocean water through silk while being towed behind commercial ships, squashing organisms between two silk layers. The handling and analysis of these samples in order to produce data require careful manual steps of manipulation, microscope usage, and counting. I will consider a view of the silk samples as an example of epistemic things and their creation as the beginning of the history of an object, from which a data life cycle as well as a sample life cycle originate. I aim to discuss the requirements of displacing and using the samples for data creation, what exactly distinguishes samples and data, whether samples might be regarded as a specific form of data or vice versa, and if the "birth" of data is preceded by an inevitable "birth" of samples.