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- Convenors:
-
Lucilla Barchetta
(University Cà Foscari of Venice)
Adrienne Mannov (Aarhus University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 10 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel explores open data platforms as fieldwork sites to prompt a dialogue about pitfalls and possibilities in anthropological working within multidisciplinary, research consortia and digital media dedicated to the study and anticipation of environmental emergencies and health threats.
Long Abstract:
Open data platforms aggregating data sets through algorithms, computing tools and AI call for a renewed open, timely and future-focused approach to stimulate data sharing practices among different professionals and accelerate response to the threats posed by social and environmental emergencies to present and future generations.
Anthropological studies of data science have helped highlight contradictions and biases in the use of open data platforms. They have shed light on the emerging frictions between being in service and being critical in interdisciplinary collaborations with data scientists. They have raised criticisms regarding the oppositional interpretation of open-source data - either a viable avenue for a sustainable turn or a privacy security risk - experimenting with ways to envision diverse future scenarios of open data platforms.
In seeking to interrogate the co-production of futures as they emerge from the collaboration between anthropologists and data scientists, the purpose of this panel is twofold. First, it asks how the rhetoric of big data as salvific technology shapes data scientists' subjectivities. How do data scientists negotiate different futures? Which future is considered worth investigating (possible, probable, preferred futures)?
In seeking to understand the implications of knowledge production processes in multidisciplinary contexts, this panel ponders the epistemic challenges of making such a future sharable, knowable and operational. How does the collaboration between anthropologists and data scientists affect anthropology's capacity to analyse and anticipate futures?
Topics to be addressed in the panel might include future collaboration between anthropologists and data scientists, open data platforms as agents of change.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 10 June, 2022, -Goetz Hoeppe (University of Waterloo)
Paper short abstract:
How does acquiring membership in the “culture of open science” (if there is one) guide scientists’ work on preparing data sets for future uses? This critical anthropological view considers scientists as ethnographers of what is, to them, an as yet unknown domain in which they seek to become actors.
Paper long abstract:
What does it mean to be scientists in a time of novel aspirations to the open access of data and software? How does acquiring membership in the “culture of open science” (if there is one) guide scientists’ work on preparing data sets for future uses? This paper takes an anthropological look at these questions by considering scientists as ethnographers of what is, to them, an as yet unknown domain in which they seek to become actors. The paper is inspired by remarks of Harold Garfinkel (1967) who, in his Studies in Ethnomethodology, argued that ‘doing, recognizing, and using ethnographies’ is ‘for members a commonplace phenomenon’, as well as by Harvey Sacks’ (1992) probing into how ‘doing being a member’ can be accomplished by encountering a limited, even small portion of a society’s order.
I draw on my ethnography of a team of junior astronomers who prepared a scientific data set for public release. These astronomers—members of MUWAGS, the Multi-Wavelength Galaxy Survey (pseudo-acronym)—had assembled a data set of observations and measurements from various instruments, including the Hubble Space Telescope, which they used for diverse studies of galaxy evolution (Hoeppe 2020). Toward the end of their project’s core phase they prepared a set of reduced digital photographic images and tables of measurements for release to the public. Team members discussed how to prepare their data and encode their knowledge, when and how to release their data, and what to leave out, so that they would be understood by future users. This seemed to me to be a perspicuous setting for inquiring into the co-production of knowledge, “open science” and possible anthropologies of the future.
Garfinkel, Harold (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Hoeppe, Götz (2020). Members doing Ethnography? On Some Uses of Irony and Failed Translation, Witnessed in an Episode of Data Sharing in Open Science. Ethnographic Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 1 – 20.
Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Luis Felipe R. Murillo (University of Notre Dame)
Paper short abstract:
When it comes to the question of climate crisis research, current debates are increasingly thematizing the needs and the challenges of collaborative, transdisciplinary work. Geophysical characterizations of climate change are increasingly deemed insufficient to respond to the challenges that vulnerable communities face worldwide.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I will describe the experimental work of studying-while-caring for an open data stack for environmental research. I suggest reframing “data management” as a problem of “data stewardship” that is better conceived as a “knowledge infrastructure” (Bowker et al. 2010; Edwards 2010; Edwards et al. 2013). To examine the challenges of this alternative framing, I discuss the notion of "infrastructural blues" that stems from integrating CARE and FAIR practices in the context of latent conflict between technoscientific and community projects. For the conclusion, I discuss the shift toward community data stewardship and sovereignty as guiding practices for (open) climate research.
keywords:
data management, data stewardship, data sovereignty, free and open source technologies, open science, open data.