Making Data Travel: Technology and Expertise
Making Data Travel: Technology and Expertise
Chapter 1 analyses the development of sophisticated technologies to disseminate data over the last three decades of experimental biology research. I focus in particular on the online databases used to collect and analyse the wide variety of data acquired on key model organisms, such as the fruit-fly Drosophila melanogaster, the thale-cress Arabidopsis thaliana and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. I discuss the history and features of these databases as a prime example of technology set up to organise and interpret such data; and the wealth and diversity of expertise, resources and conceptual scaffolding that such databases draw upon in order to function. I conclude with a discussion of the idea of data journeys, which I use to capture the labor-intensive, uneven and unpredictable nature of data travel through biological databases.
Keywords: databases, data journeys, model organism research, data flows, experimental biology
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