Sarah Rachael Davies

How can data communities be studied? In this paper, we combine existing literature with our own research spanning more than a decade to propose five dimensions and a series of guiding questions that can be used to analyze data communities. These dimensionsーdisciplinary domains, social orderings, material orderings, data uses, and data expertiseーillustrate the variability of data communities and offer starting points for future empirical research, infrastructure design, and policy activities. Analyzing data communities through the multidimensional perspectives that we propose encourages critical interrogation of these heterogeneous groups while highlighting the complex ways in which data practices constitute particular communities and how those communities in turn shape data. Studying data communities with the questions we propose provides ways to honor epistemic diversity, experiment with community-centric infrastructures and policies, and create and value different forms of expertise.

Near-shore coral reefs in southern Guam (Mariana Islands) experience severe sedimentation, in particular during the wet season when rainfall and erosion are high. We sampled fragments of the reef-forming coral Porites lobata from opposite ends of a sedimentation gradient in Fouha Bay, southern Guam, during dry and wet seasons. Using DNA metabarcoding, we characterized the diversity and composition of P. lobata -associated Symbiodiniaceae and bacterial microbiome communities. As in many species of Porites , Symbiodiniaceae communities of P. lobata were dominated by variants of Cladocopium C15 with sites showing differences in Symbiodiniaceae communities attributable to variation in these Cladocopium C15 variants. Bacterial microbiomes of P. lobata were dominated by Endozoicomonadaceae , a family of putative coral bacterial endosymbionts involved in nutrient cycling. Site and seasonal differences in bacterial diversity and community composition were apparent. In close proximity to the mouth of the river draining into Fouha Bay, bacterial diversity was highest during the wet season when sedimentation is generally severe. Microbiome reorganization in response to sedimentation may explain this result, but we also found overrepresentation of bacteria associated with terrestrial origin close to the river mouth and/or during the wet season. Together these patterns highlight that coral Symbiodiniaceae and bacterial communities are both spatially and temporally structured in this disturbed system. IMPORTANCE: This study provides a time series dataset of coral-associated microorganisms, including dinoflagellate algae and bacteria, from a tropical bay impacted by sedimentation that results from upstream erosion of disturbed soils. Characterizing temporal patterns of coral-associated microbes provides insights into the dynamic nature of these communities. While microbiome variability across sites and seasons may be a result of acclimatization to different environmental conditions, we identified bacterial groups of putative terrestrial origin in sampled coral microbiomes that may have been exported from eroded soils to the near-shore reef. Considering that disturbed soils act as hotspots for the proliferation of potentially harmful substances, such as antimicrobial resistance genes, understanding microbial community connections at the marine-freshwater-terrestrial interface is an important step toward evaluating environmental impacts across connected ecosystems from ridge to reef.

This research note reflects on, and responds to, Lee and Ribes discussion of ‘computational universalism’, setting this in dialogue with Suchman’s account of ‘The uncontroversial “thingness” of AI’ and with wider STS literature. In discussing the conceptual resources that STS has to offer with regard to studying computational universalism we reflect on existing scholarship oriented to technical vernaculars, digital practices and frictions, and event thinking. In closing we suggest that in studying computation we should attend not only to how our research objects are constituted through the analytical languages and tools we use to engage with them, but how we, as researchers and research community, are being made alongside our objects.

This essay argues for the need to understand and study science communication ‘in the wild’ – as a set of practices that are not only ‘organised, explicit, and intended actions that aim to communicate scientific knowledge’, but that take on a variety of other meanings as they are realised in particular contexts. I make this point by building on my experiences of studying science communication projects and by reflecting on their internal heterogeneity in terms of what they were ‘about’ for those organising them. By showing this diversity in the meanings of science communication to those carrying it out, and in particular how this is exacerbated by the conditions of precarity and scarcity that frequently frame science communication activities, I argue for the importance of understanding science communication practice as not only being ‘about’ the communication or negotiation of scientific knowledge, but myriad other aspects, from personal prestige to the need for a job.

This teaching reflection shares experiences of teaching citational politics in the context of a PhD course titled Writing as Thinking: Experimenting and Working with Writing as Knowledge Practice. It describes course content, and in particular the kinds of discussions that arose when students and teachers engaged with ideas of citational justice. Based on these experiences, I make two suggestions: first, that we should not consider citation practices (and their politics) in isolation, but rather as one aspect of the intertwined set of practices that comprise scholarly writing more widely; and second, that if we care about citational politics we should also seek to diversify the nature of what is accepted as "academic writing."

Introduction. Motivated by increasing policies for data management, this paper presents the findings of a collaborative autoethnography designed to deeply explore how qualitative researchers relate to and care for their data. Method. We (8 researchers at a European university) collectively researched our data practices, using the established method of autoethnography. This included writing field notes, collective written reflections, a workshop, and semi-structured interviews. Analysis. Inductive coding and thematic analysis were performed. Identified themes informed the theoretical framing used in our analysis: the relational nature of data and data care. Results. The emotions experienced when working with data emerged as being integral to our (responsible) research practices. These, often negative, emotions are intertwined with three ways in which we care for data: i) as a means of caring for research participants; ii) caring for data maintenance and infrastructure; and iii) caring for data’s quality and usefulness. The emotions and caring relations we identify are often in tension with common expectations for data sharing. Conclusion. We conclude by reflecting along three lines about the implications of our findings for how data management and sharing might be carried out in ways which acknowledge the affective nature of research data practices.

The notion of ‘excellence’ has become the key logic structuring academic funding and evaluation. This essay offers a critique of this policy logic by examining the case of biocuration, an area of academic scholarship that is ‘non-excellent’ (according to this notion’s operationalisation) but that has, I argue, profound epistemic significance. I develop my argument in a number of steps. I first characterise excellence regimes by examining how excellence is operationalised within them, before discussing epistemic diversity and injustice, and how these concepts can be applied in the context of studies of maintenance and repair. I then turn to my case study of biocuration and its use of bio-ontologies, introducing biocuration and its struggles for visibility and recognition before discussing its epistemic significance and contribution to the wider biosciences. In closing I argue that there is a need to better understand what epistemic diversity in academic settings looks like in practice, to assess the different kinds of work that contribute to knowledge production, and to base evaluation and funding practices upon the acknowledgement and material recognition of epistemic diversity.

This perspective article synthesizes current knowledge regarding what is known regarding biocuration as a career and the challenges facing the field. It draws on existing literature and ongoing qualitative research to discuss the nature of biocuration, biocurators’ career trajectories, key challenges that biocurators face, and strategies for overcoming these. Overall, biocurators express a high degree of satisfaction with their work and see it as central to the wider biosciences. The central challenges that they face relate to the underfunding and under-recognition of this work, meaning that there is minimal stable funding for the field and that the work of human biocurators is often invisible to those who use curated resources. The article closes by critically discussing existing and potential strategies for responding to these challenges.

Recent years have seen substantial interest in, and experiments with, public participation in environmental and scientific research and decision-making. In this paper we explore a case of such citizen participation, a co-creation project that aimed to bring together citizens, researchers, and artists to bring about sustainable futures. Drawing on recent theories of the nature of expertise, we argue for the importance of understanding it as involving practices of care, attachment, and affect. In investigating how expertise is performed and negotiated within this case, we find that expertise is distributed across the project, including in the work of organising it. This organisational work, in particular, often involves engagement with the moral imperatives of participation and with embodied and relational skills necessary to it. The analysis thus contributes to discussion of the ways in which different forms of expertise may be present in citizen participation in science, and to understanding the kinds of skills that are necessary for successfully supporting such participation.

Using ethnographic vignettes from the development of simulations for architectural design and spatial planning in university contexts, this article discusses how the material, embodied, and tacit dimensions of developing and doing research with simulations can be opened up to analysis. We ask how (in)visibility comes to matter in simulations and how it is made and unmade in different situations. In particular, we explore how specific enactments of the things that are simulated and the practices involved in producing and handling them are rendered (in)visible through the simulation process. We argue that focusing on the politics of (in)visibility in making simulations can render power relations underpinning architectural and spatial planning practices more apparent.