As we enter what has been referred to as the Age of Big Data, experts speculate about the implications of shifting scientific paradigms and knowledge practices. This project explores the valuation of data and how new models of intelligibility and tools for making data coherent are being made and tested. This research, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous empirical fieldwork, examines specifically how astronomical data are produced, managed, and circulated.
Katheryn Detwiler, under the supervision of Dr. Hugh Raffles of the New School University, will explore how resources for optimal astronomical data collection are established, how massive datasets are produced and managed in practice, and the effects of these data as they circulate. The research will principally take place in the Atacama Desert, which hosts nearly two thirds of the world's infrastructure for astronomical observation. The researcher will detail the regulation of light and radio wave pollution in the desert and, at one of the Atacama's largest observatories, will inquire into the everyday work of transforming light waves into data. The project follows these data as they circulate to far-flung datacenters, valuable for the astronomical knowledge they generate and also as Big Data, a proving ground for new techniques of data management and interpretation. This study has two broad aims: 1) to develop an understanding of the contemporary Atacama Desert as a site of techno-scientific innovation; 2) to provide a detailed account of how narratives associated with the Age of Big Data relate to the ways actors conceptualize and work with massive data in lived, material practice. It proposes to study massive data through ethnographic methods analyzing the specific relations from which data emerge and those that data forge. The research will draw from the social study of science and technology, media and communication theory, the anthropology of value, and ethnographies of infrastructure and material networks. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, the project would help contribute to understanding and improving upon how scientific data is disseminated to the public.
