Contribution short abstract:

This paper combines fragmentary qualitative field observations buried in quantitative biological recording datasets into found poetic artefacts to explore how they might challenge ideas of scientific objectivity and resurface the lived textures of interspecies encounters that give rise to "data".

Contribution long abstract:

This paper draws interspecies stories from qualitative fragments in large quantitative datasets, specifically those of the UK’s National Biodiversity Network, where sightings of nonhumans are meticulously recorded. It might be tempting to say that such datasets “thin out” the rich, embodied, sensory encounter between people and animals. The writing style of this data table does everything it can to fix certain kinds of facts and not others – to quantify the encounter and remove all sense of its quality. The literary conventions of the genre of biodiversity spreadsheets remove the modality of the encounter between human and nonhuman: the voice of the author is removed, and the text attempts to disappear as such, striving to achieve a state of pure information without writerly artifice. However, between the cracks of the numerical inputs are spaces for qualitative comments – a column titled “Occurrence Remarks” which are included in the database but generally ignored in analysis. This paper takes these fragments of subjectivity to “unwrite” their context that strives above all for objectivity: it approaches them as found poetic objects as the voices of different biological recorders come together by accident to produce polyvocal texts. Using different combinations of filters to read athwart the spreadsheet, I examine these fragmentary poetic accidents as means to write lively texture back into big datasets, to complicate the forms of knowledge they carry and represent: what stories do spreadsheets tell, despite themselves, and what can they teach us about living alongside other beings?