Transforming Objects into Data: How Minute Technicalities of Recording “Species Location” Entrench a Basic Challenge for Biodiversity

Abstract

New research technologies can create gaps between old and new practices that need to be integrated if historically significant, continuous research programs are to be sustained. In our study of biodiversity survey work spanning a century, we track consequences of a series of seemingly “trivial” and “technical” decisions on how to represent a species locality in a biodiversity database, and show how these contingencies entrenched an unavoidable gap between two concepts of ecological space. We ask why locality data produced by a new technology – Global Positioning Systems (GPS) – is not interoperable with data produced by a long-standing technology of descriptive field-notes. We argue that interoperability is not practically feasible in this case – and we suspect in other cases as well – because more than one concept of space shapes the working practices of scientists. “Space,” as something “out there,” unaffected by the organisms inhabiting it, is embedded in representations of “locality” via the use of an exogenous regular grid of, for example, latitude and longitude coordinates. This concept is inevitably in tension with a view of space as a dynamic organism-environment relation represented in narrative, context-sensitive field-notes. In our case study, the technologies sustaining an exogenous concept of space did not successfully “incorporate” technologies sustaining an interactionist concept of space, yet both kinds of technology were required for a usable database of species distributions. Reflection by scientists on their historical practices explicated these theoretical tensions and brought about a resolution: workable alternation rather than universal interoperability between two concepts of space and kinds of locality descriptions. We therefore suggest that historical analysis may function as a practical tool for those who tackle theoretical challenges in research fields driven by technological change.