Short Abstract

What counts as soil data? This panel invites reflections on the conceptual, methodological, affective, aesthetic, and institutional dimensions of soil data, contributing to broader STS debates on the diversification and politicization of environmental data in the Anthropocene.

Description

What counts as soil data? Who collects, analyzes, governs, and communicates such data, and how do its meanings shift across time, scale, and disciplinary context? Is soil data beautiful? Can data have a shelf life—changing in relevance or interpretation over decades or centuries? Might nonhuman actors such as worms or microbes also be understood as producers or interpreters of data about their environments? And what forms of data give rise to practices of soil care—or, conversely, can soil care be practiced without data at all?

This panel emerges from the collaboration of two researchers working for over a decade at the interface of soil science, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts. Over the past eighteen months, we have been developing a transdisciplinary glossary of boundary objects for soil research, The Language of Soil, a print and online resource mapping key terms and concepts in contemporary soil inquiry. We observe that what qualifies as soil data varies widely: from ethnographic field notes and participatory mapping to artistic soil chromatographies and sonifications of water flow, alongside standardized soil measurements of temperature, pH, bulk density, microbial biomass, and heavy metals. Some data conform to international protocols; others underpin social movements and citizen-led campaigns. Environmental monitoring, soil protection legislation, and funding programs are dependent on (certain) soil data. Building on this plurality, we adopt a boundary objects approach (Star & Griesemer, 1989) to examine how different soil data both enable transdisciplinary collaboration and reproduce asymmetries of expertise, access to knowledge, and rights to land. We conceptualize soil data as simultaneously weakly structured—flexible and open to interpretation—and strongly structured—codified through specific tools, or collection and validation methods. The panel invites reflections on the conceptual, methodological, affective, aesthetic, political, and institutional dimensions of soil data, contributing to broader STS debates on the diversification and politicization of environmental data in the Anthropocene.

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