Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study
Sabina Leonelli
Abstract
The convergence of new technologies for the production, dissemination and analysis of scientific data and new regulatory regimes has provoked a reshuffling of priorities in research practices and outcomes, with important consequences for what is viewed as scientific knowledge and how that knowledge is obtained, legitimated and used. This book investigates how databases are set up and used to generate biological knowledge, and the practical difficulties and challenges confronted by database curators when attempting to package data for travel. These insights inform debate on four fundamental iss ... More
The convergence of new technologies for the production, dissemination and analysis of scientific data and new regulatory regimes has provoked a reshuffling of priorities in research practices and outcomes, with important consequences for what is viewed as scientific knowledge and how that knowledge is obtained, legitimated and used. This book investigates how databases are set up and used to generate biological knowledge, and the practical difficulties and challenges confronted by database curators when attempting to package data for travel. These insights inform debate on four fundamental issues: what counts as knowledge at a time of significant technological and institutional changes; what counts as data, and how this relates to existing conceptions of the role and use of evidence in the life sciences and elsewhere; what does it mean to organize and interpret data to generate new knowledge of living systems; and under what conditions is such a systematization achieved.
Keywords:
data,
database,
scientific epistemology,
scientific methods,
evidence,
Open Data,
big data,
data science,
Open Science
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226416335 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2017 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226416502.001.0001 |
