Prototyping Nature's Data Futures in Emerging Database Architectures

• In Event: Experiments with Algo-governance and Future-Making: STS Scholars as Designers I.

Abstract

Over the last decades, the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin has engaged in an effort to establish itself as a center for interdisciplinary, international, integrated research data management. Toward this goal, the institution recently received public funding for a large-scale digitization of its collections, which includes more than 30-million specimens. Planned as a 10-year enterprise, the future database is intended to democratize access, produce engagements with the collections for scientific and public purposes, and position the museum at the centre a growing field of data intensive research in the natural sciences. Our proposal seeks to further explore the assumptions embedded in digital governance and its production of publics. Rather than accepting the democratic character of prototyping as given due to its open and participatory process, we argue that prototyping can act as an experimental tool for sketching out problems of participation rather than simply seeking to solve them. We propose to prototype alternative data futures through the case of Neptune Sandbox Berlin, a database synthesizing microfossil occurrences from decades of deep-sea drilling, a unique tool for high temporal and taxonomic resolution analyses of marine plankton over the last 100 my. Using this database as a case-study, we first analyze the imprints of digital curation on shifting material specimens into digital data-points. Then, we propose a conceptual exercise in exploring its political potentials by hacking the database through injecting historical narratives that convey what is forgotten and what can be remembered; producing unexpected data-points for unexpected publics-in-the-making.

Authors

• hagit keysar, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

• Tahani Nadim, Museum fuer Naturkunde

• Filippo Bertoni, Aarhus University

• Felipe Mammoli, UNICAMP