Enactments of Semantics: How Beliefs about Language Shape Data Infrastructure

• In Event: Schemas, Graphs, Ontologies - III

Abstract

Over the past 5 years, researchers advocating for increased scientific data sharing have been initiating calls to make data FAIR - findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. More specifically, they have been advocating for the design and implementation of digital infrastructure that can contextualize data produced in diverse geographies, by diverse disciplines, and through the use of diverse technologies so that it can interpreted as it is shared across borders. In order to do so, many researchers are calling for semantics to be “added” to data through the use of shared metadata schemas and applied ontologies. In this paper I examine the beliefs about language that the designers of these semantic technologies bring to their work. Drawing on ethnographic observation of semantic data infrastructure design meetings, FAIR hackathons, and interviews with semantic data infrastructure designers, I characterize how diverse ideas about what constitutes meaning – along with how it operates, disseminates, and erodes – become interwoven in the design of semantic data infrastructures. I argue that some data infrastructure designers hold what linguistic anthropologist Jan Blommaert refers to as an “artifactual view of language” – the idea that language crystallizes into concrete shapes and that meaning is something that can be possessed. Other data infrastructure designers acknowledge meaning to be enacted through social semiotic practices in which designers designate which differences are relevant to encode in data infrastructure. I show how these differences have practical implications for how data infrastructures work, how they organize complex knowledge, and how STS scholars view the politics and pragmatics of information infrastructure.

Author

• Lindsay Poirier, University of California Davis