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Article ID: CBB999485139

A Centrifuge of Calculation: Managing Data and Enthusiasm in Early Twentieth-Century Bird Banding (2017)

Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 32
Issue: 1
Pages: 286-306

DOI: 10.1086/694172

URI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/694172

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Data collection; methods Big data Citizen science; community science Government sponsored science Birds Biological surveys 20th century, early United States United States. Biological Survey

Beginning in 1920, bird banding in the United States was coordinated by an office within the U.S. Biological Survey that recruited volunteers, issued permits, distributed bands and reporting forms, and collected and organized the data that resulted. In the 1920s and 1930s, data from thousands of volunteers banding millions of birds helped ornithologists map migratory flyways and census bird populations on a continental scale. This essay argues that the success of the bird-banding program depended on a fragile balance between the centripetal effects of national coordination and the centrifugal effects of volunteer enthusiasm. For various reasons, efforts to maintain this balance were largely abandoned by the Bird-Banding Office from the late 1930s onward. Nonetheless, the first two decades of the national bird-banding effort provide an example of how a “citizen-science” project that generates “Big Data” can produce significant scientific results without subordinating the enthusiasms of volunteers to the data-collecting needs of professional scientists.

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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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