Preface: A Roadmap for Readers.- Chapter 1. Learning from Data Journeys (Sabina Leonelli).- Part I: Origins: Data Collection, Preparation and Reporting.- Chapter 2. Material Origins of a Data Journey in Ocean Science: How Sampling and Scaffolding Shape Data Practices (G Halfmann).- Chapter 3. What Data Get to Travel in High Energy Physics? The Construction of Data at the Large Hadron Collider (K Karaca).- Chapter 4. Tracing Data Journeys Through Medical Case Reports: Conceptualizing Case Reports Not as “Anecdotes” but Productive Epistemic Constructs, or Why Zebras Can Be Useful (R Ankeny).- Part II: Clustering: Data Ordering and Visualization.- Chapter 5. From Dirty Data to Tidy Facts: Clustering Practices in Plant Phenomics and Business Cycle Analysis (M Boumans and S Leonelli).- Chapter 6. The Datum in Context: Measuring Frameworks, Data Series and the Journeys of Individual Datums (M Morgan).- Chapter 7. Data Journeys Beyond Databases in Systems Biology: Cytoscape and NDEx (W Bechtel).- Chapter 8. A Data Journey through Dataset-Centric Population Genomics (J Griesemer).- Part III: Sharing: Data access, Dissemination and Quality Assessment.- Chapter 9. Sharing Data, Repairing Practices: On the Reflexivity of Astronomical Data Journeys (G Hoeppe).- Chapter 10. Evaluating Data Journeys: Climategate, Synthetic Data and the Benchmarking of Methods for Climate Data Processing (W Parker).- Chapter 11. The Babel of Drugs: on the Consequences of Evidential Pluralism in Pharmaceutical Regulation and Regulatory Data Journeys (N Tempini and D Teira).- Part IV: Interlude.- Chapter 12. Most Often, What Is Transmitted is Transformed (T Porter).- Part V: Interpreting: Data Transformation, Analysis and Reuse.- Chapter 13. The Reuse of Digital Computer Data: Transformation, Recombination and Generation of Data Mixes in Big Data Science (N Tempini).- Chapter 14. Data, Meta Data and Pattern Data: How Franz Boas Mobilized Anthropometric Data, 1890 and Beyond (S Müller-Wille).- Chapter 15. Radiocarbon Dating in Archaeology: Triangulation and Traceability (A Wylie).- Part VI: Ends: Data Actionability and Accountability.- Chapter 16. ‘Overcoming the Bottleneck’: Knowledge Architectures for Genomic Data Interpretation in Oncology (A Cambrosio, J Campbell, E Vignola-Gagné, P Keating, B Jordan and P Bourret).- Chapter 17. Realizing Healthful Housing: Devices for Data Travel in Public Health and Urban Redevelopment in the 20th Century United States (E Ramsden).- Chapter 18. From Washington DC to Washington State: The Global Burden of Diseases data basis and the political economy of global health (J-P Gaudilliere and C Gasnier).- Chapter 19. Data Journeys in Art? Warranting and Witnessing the ‘Fake’ and the ‘Real’ in Art Authentication (C Coopmans and B Rappert).- Part VII: Afterword.- Chapter 20. Data, Contexts, Purposes (H Longino).- Chapter 21. Visual Metaphors: Howardena Pindell, Video Drawings, 1975 (N Tempini).- Subject Index.
Sabina Leonelli is Professor in Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter, where she co-directs the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences and leads the data governance strand of the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. Her interests include the epistemology, history and social studies of data-intensive science, open science and biological modelling. She is a Turing Fellow, ERC grantee, Editor-in-Chief of History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Associate Editor of the Harvard Data Science Review.
Niccolò Tempini is Senior Lecturer in Data Studies at the University of Exeter and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. He researches big data research and digital infrastructures, investigating the specific knowledge production economies, organization forms and data management innovations that these projects engender with a focus in their social and epistemic consequences. His research has been published in international journals across science and technology studies, information systems, sociology and philosophy.
This groundbreaking, open access volume analyses and compares data practices across several fields through the analysis of specific cases of data journeys. It brings together leading scholars in the philosophy, history and social studies of science to achieve two goals: tracking the travel of data across different spaces, times and domains of research practice; and documenting how such journeys affect the use of data as evidence and the knowledge being produced.
The volume captures the opportunities, challenges and concerns involved in making data move from the sites in which they are originally produced to sites where they can be integrated with other data, analysed and re-used for a variety of purposes. The in-depth study of data journeys provides the necessary ground to examine disciplinary, geographical and historical differences and similarities in data management, processing and interpretation, thus identifying the key conditions of possibility for the widespread data sharing associated with Big and Open Data.
The chapters are ordered in sections that broadly correspond to different stages of the journeys of data, from their generation to the legitimisation of their use for specific purposes. Additionally, the preface to the volume provides a variety of alternative “roadmaps” aimed to serve the different interests and entry points of readers; and the introduction provides a substantive overview of what data journeys can teach about the methods and epistemology of research.