Background
This one-year project was carried out by social scientists at Lancaster University who wanted to understand the ways in which information and database technologies are designed and used to inform biodiversity polices in the UK and globally. It was funded under the ESRC’s Science and Society Programme.
The construction of novel forms of information and communication technologies has, since the 1992 Global Biodiversity Convention, been seen to be a matter of urgency in the biodiversity policy domain. Global biodiversity is held to be in crisis and understanding the extent of its loss and the biodiversity that remains is deemed as an important underpinning to national and global policymaking (Royal Society 2003). Using ‘science studies’ perspectives, the research aimed to focus on 2 different UK-based data frameworks/softwares used to gather, collate, exchange and represent data about the distribution of plant and animal species within the UK: the ‘National Biodiversity Network’ (NBN) and ‘MapMate’.
The initial hypothesis of the research was that these two database technologies harbour very different underlying philosophies, with possible significant implications for their uptake by contributors, and their robustness and use by national and international policy. Whilst the first data framework, the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) has been assembled very much with wider global policy needs in mind, the second – a database named 'Mapmate' – is driven largely by the practices and expectation of groups of field naturalists and recorders in the UK. The study aimed to explore the relationships between standardising data frameworks and those who gather and contribute data.
As the social sciences and humanities have documented, natural history, taxonomy and other ‘databasing of nature’ activities, have always been ‘co-produced’ with dominant social, political and cultural trajectories and visions (Foucault 1992 [1966], Thomas 1984, Richards 1993, Grove 1995, Bowker 2000, Bowker and Star 2002). Seen from a social science perspective, the ordering of information about the natural world will inevitably harbour implicit and unaccountable visions of the social, of nature and governance. Science studies practitioners have long been interested in investigating the nature of these implicit visions, especially their public dimensions (Wynne 2005), in order to open them up for critical discussion and debate. This research was designed to build on this research and to engage with database designers, data contributors and database users in doing so.
Objectives
The research aimed to:
1. Explore two related paradoxes: first, that whilst nationally/globally oriented biodiversity databases (such as NBN) sustain powerful connections to policy responsibilities, their connection to local, dispersed communities of data producers may be relatively weak. Second, while localised networks of data contributors (e.g. to Mapmate), are sustained by strong internal social and epistemic connections, these latter networks lack connections to national and global data bases.
2. Explore the different implicit visions of science, society, nature and environmental governance embedded within NBN and Mapmate, so as to render them more explicit and potentially open for debate.
3. Identify the communities of contributors to and users of each/both database and the ways in which their practices and expectations are potentially changed or accommodated by the technologies.
4. Lastly, the research set out to explore, with database designers and users, the potential fruitfulness of intermingling the two distinctive philosophies of constructing information about the natural world seen in NBN and Mapmate.
Objectives 1, 2, and 3 were carried out as anticipated. As we shall highlight at section 4 of the ‘Results’ section, Objective 4 was modified to encourage further reflection and reflexivity about the construction of databases (further in line with point 2 above), rather than to suggest how to design them in future.
Methods
a) Interviews
An examination of the design, use and policy visions associated with NBN was carried out through interviews and focus group discussions. It soon became clear that the relationship between NBN and the data collation software initially associated with NBN, called ‘Recorder’, also needed to be understood. Accordingly, interviews and discussion groups and participant observation were carried out with NBN, Mapmate and Recorder designers, data gatherers and users. The researchers therefore had three, rather than two, ‘objects’ for research and analysis.
The researchers selected practitioners from three different groups:
. • software and database designers
. • data gatherers
. • data users
Individuals from each group relating to the three types of data technology were interviewed (16 interviews in all, see Annex 1, Table 1).
b) Participant Observation
Participant observation often took place at the computer screen, particularly with database designers, giving the researchers occasion to reflect upon the particular challenges faced when the object of study is virtual and fluid rather than geographically fixed (Star 1999, Hine 2005, Mackenzie 2006,). Maria Pacha, the main researcher, also observed discussions and interactions of relevant project stakeholders at the annual meeting of the National Federation of Biological Recorders, Edinburgh, November 7-9th 2005.
c) Focus Groups
In February 2006, three focus groups were carried out. Two researchers were present at each focus group. The three focus group recordings were transcribed and coded through Atlas TI and subsequently analysed by the three researchers together. Through the focus group discussions the researchers gained a good sense of people’s priorities, challenges encountered and particular concerns about specific technologies and desires for change. Focus group transcripts now provide a good foundation for further discussion of issues at the workshop due to be held in November 2006.
d) Workshop with database designers, data gatherers and data users
A workshop will be held about the research’s findings at the Natural History Museum, London, as part of the National Biodiversity Network’s Annual Meeting in November 2006. The aim of the workshop will be to create discussion among practitioners (designers, data gatherers and data users) about some of the assumptions and philosophies embedded within the three different softwares. The researchers will then encourage practitioners to look forward and to think about the implications for the future design of biodiversity software. A booklet containing a summary of the results of the research will be presented and disseminated at this meeting.