Article ID: CBB311562850

Data Labours: How the Sequence Databases GenBank and EMBL-Bank Make Data (2016)

unapi

What actually happens inside genetic databases, how do they work upon data and who does this work? While they have become central tools for doing science, not much is known about the work that goes on inside these vital infrastructures. Ethnographic explorations of two of the world’s largest nucleotide sequence databases, GenBank and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s EMBL-Bank, reveal manifold goings-on. Like most infrastructural work, it is modest and invisible routines that build and maintain the vast interconnected suite of bioinformational resources. Data curators construct organisms out of sulphuric sludge, dataflow engineers as self-styled “genetic information plumbers” keep the data deluge flowing, and a data submissions support assistant manages to make room for care amidst this deluge. Taken together, these data labours render tangible the modest and processual aspects of data infrastructure while also revealing the databases to be situated and lively spaces of convergence. Inventively analysing data labours paves surprising ways for encountering and making sense of databases, data and the work they do. Here, practices of natural history, like specimen-making and curation, are continued by other means while the assembly of sludge sheds light on the absences and deletions which mystify infrastructural maintenance work.

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Authors & Contributors
Kranke, Nina
Christopher McKevitt
Sarah Ehlers
Casini, Silvia
Manoj Vimal
Wairokpam Premi Devi
Concepts
Data analysis
Data collection; methods
Databases
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Genomics
Psychology
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
19th century
20th century
Modern
Places
United States
Singapore
Hawaii (U.S.)
Scotland
Ecuador
France
Institutions
DNA Data Bank of Japan
University of Aberdeen
International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration
GenBank
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)
United States. Census Bureau
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