ISSN:
1359-0987
,
1359-0987
Language:
English
Pages:
1 Online-Ressource (14 Seiten)
Titel der Quelle:
The journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Publ. der Quelle:
Oxford [u.a.] : Wiley-Blackwell
Angaben zur Quelle:
27,2021,S1, Seiten 62-75
DDC:
300
Keywords:
Sozialwissenschaften
;
Biologie
Abstract:
In this essay, I consider the scales and connections lost and gained as natural history adopts digital data infrastructures. On the basis of ongoing work in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, I track the relations between insect specimens and their material and digital informational ecologies. Using Latour's notion of the ‘circulating reference’, I follow the insect specimens as they make their way into taxonomies, databases, and digitization apparatuses. In focusing on human-data mediations in museum practices of ordering, describing, and distributing specimens, I show how the datafication of nature makes present conventionally dissociated contexts, including German colonialism. Proposing the concept of a data formation, I suggest that ethnographers have much to contribute in bringing forward the sociocultural and historical specificities and contingencies within data.
Abstract:
Peer Reviewed
DOI:
10.1111/1467-9655.13480
URN:
urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-110-18452/23908-8
URL:
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