Article ID: CBB586818085

The Database before the Computer? (2017)

unapi

Are characteristic practices of modern data-driven science—the compiling of databases, quantitative analysis of large data sets, standard graphical representations of data patterns—a product of the computer era? I explore this question through a comparative analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century data approaches in paleontology. Drawing on examples of large-scale quantitative data collection and analysis of both paper-based taxonomic compendia and eventual electronic databases, I argue that, in fact, paleontologists engaged in what we might call “databasing” long before computers arrived on the scene. The arrival of computers in paleontology, I argue, fits closely into a pattern that Jon Agar has described whereby preexisting practices and epistemologies are adapted to new technologies. However, I also attend to the ways in which changes in the technology and material culture of data between the nineteenth and later twentieth centuries affected the “moral economy” of data. Each era faced particular challenges for coping with “data friction,” and new technologies and materialities of data had consequences for the professional division of labor in data-driven taxonomic sciences.

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Article Bruno J. Strasser; Paul N. Edwards (2017) Big Data Is the Answer … But What Is the Question?. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 328-345). unapi

Article Elena Aronova; Christine von Oertzen; David Sepkoski (2017) Introduction: Historicizing Big Data. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-17). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Sepkoski, David Christopher
Meyns, Chris
Włodzimierz Gogołek
Jessica Pykett
Nadim, Tahani
Goëta, Samuel
Concepts
Data analysis
Data collection; methods
Databases
Computers and computing
Biology
Paleontology
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, late
18th century
17th century
Places
United States
Prussia (Germany)
France
Europe
Ireland
Great Britain
Institutions
GenBank
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)
Columbia University
Royal Society of London
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