I’m giving myself a bit of leeway at the end of the year to explore something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year: norms, roles, and responsibilities in providing, managing, and analyzing occurrence data. My latest round of exploration has gotten deeply philosophical, so now I’m spending time with the following five papers:
Sterner, Beckett, and Nico M. Franz. 2017. “Taxonomy for Humans or Computers? Cognitive Pragmatics for Big Data.” Biological Theory 12 (2): 99–111. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-017-0259-5.
Franz, Nico M, and Beckett W Sterner. 2018. “To Increase Trust, Change the Social Design behind Aggregated Biodiversity Data.” Database, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1093/database/bax100.
Sterner, Beckett W., Edward E. Gilbert, and Nico M. Franz. 2020. “Decentralized but Globally Coordinated Biodiversity Data.” Frontiers in Big Data 3 (October): 519133. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdata.2020.519133.
Sterner, Beckett, Joeri Witteveen, and Nico Franz. 2020. “Coordinating Dissent as an Alternative to Consensus Classification: Insights from Systematics for Bio-Ontologies.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (1): 8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-020-0300-z.
Sterner, Beckett, Steve Elliott, Edward E Gilbert, and Nico M Franz. 2023. “Unified and Pluralistic Ideals for Data Sharing and Reuse in Biodiversity.” Database 2023 (July): baad048. https://doi.org/10.1093/database/baad048.
There’s so much to know here. Every time I’ve tried to explore this I end up in a bunch of rabbit holes and download tens of new papers…somehow I have to formalize some thoughts here instead of just meandering and spiraling. This batch of papers emphasize the handling of taxonomic information, something I’m particularly interested in. Here’s hoping something concrete materializes…