Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic work at the Natural History Museum Berlin, I attend to questions of loss in the mass-digitization of natural history collections. Combining the sociology of data and infrastructural studies, I query the nature of digital specimens and the hopes and promises pinned on them.

Paper long abstract:

Big natural history museums have begun digitizing their collections on an industrial scale. Digital production lines are turning molluscs, pressed plants, microscopic slides and millions of insects into data objects. The National Museum of Natural History Paris has digitized most of its herbarium; the Natural History Museum London has just begun mass-digitizing their 80 million specimens; the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden has already made more than 30 million specimens digitally available; and the Natural History Museum Berlin has recently completed a pilot project mass-digitizing 10,000 insect drawers. The ambition driving these efforts and iterated in national and international roadmaps is capacious: increase accessibility of collections, rationalise collection management, aid preservation , facilitate monitoring and conservation, allow for discoveries "born from the data", address societal needs and interests. Driven by the prospect of irrecoverable loss and decay and the promises of globally coordinated data-intensive biodiversity science, the production of digital specimens has thus emerged as a key response to institutional, environmental and political pressures. Yet, production of digital specimens is characterized by a distinct register of losses and absences (What gets digitized when, by whom? How is it made intelligible, for whom?). In this presentation I wish to attend to questions of loss by examining data and digitization practices at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Based on ethnographic work at the museum, my analysis combines insights from the sociology of data and infrastructural studies to problematise the nature of digital specimens and the hopes and promises pinned on them.