Rebecca Ellis

Caught between the Cartographic and the Ethnographic Imagination: The Whereabouts of Amateurs, Professionals, and Nature in Knowing Biodiversity:

In this paper we document current research into new forms of public engagement presently taking place in UK biodiversity policy. This involves locating the main participants in such patterns of engagement; namely nature, amateur naturalists, and professional biologists and conservationists. Two interwoven and mutually interdependent perspectives or ‘imaginaries’—the ‘cartographic’ and the ‘ethnographic’—are presented in the paper to explore the shaping and interpretation of such new forms of engagement. However, in this context the interest lies in the ways in which either perspective is foregrounded or backgrounded by the different parties involved. The described shifts and movements of a range of actors and processes being studied demonstrate the fluidity and instability of networks of ‘knowing nature well’, whose stability is often assumed. The tracing of two constants— expertise and exchange—within networks inhabited by nature and by amateur and professional naturalists allows for an exploration of ways in which social/natural inclusions and exclusions occur in new participatory practices designed as part of biodiversity action planning.

How reliable are citizen‐derived scientific data? : assessing the quality of contrail observations made by the general public

Citizen science projects encourage the general public to participate in scientific research. Participants can contribute large volumes of data over broad spatial and temporal frames; however the challenge is to generate data of sufficient quality to be useable in scientific research. Most observations made by citizen‐scientists can be independently verified by ‘experts’. However, verification is more problematic when the phenomena being recorded are short‐lived. This paper uses a GIS methodology to verify the quality of contrail observations made by the general public as part of the OPAL Climate Survey. We verify observations using datasets derived from a variety of different sources (experts, models and amateur enthusiasts) with different spatial and temporal properties which reflect the complex 3D nature of the atmosphere. Our results suggest that ~70% of citizen observations are plausible based on favourable atmospheric conditions and the presence or absence of aircraft; a finding which is in keeping with other, more conventional citizen science projects. However, questions remain as to why the quality of the citizen‐based observations was so high. Given the lack of supporting data on observers, it is impossible to determine whether the dataset was generated by the activities of many participants or a small but dedicated number of individual observers.

Jizz and the joy of pattern recognition: Virtuosity, discipline and the agency of insight in UK naturalists’ arts of seeing

Approaches to visual skilling from anthropology and STS have tended to highlight the forces of discipline and control in understanding how shared visual accounts of the world are created in the face of potential differences brought about by multi-sensorial perception. Drawing upon a range of observational and interview material from an immersion in naturalist training and biological recording activities between 2003 and 2009, I focus upon jizz, a distinct form of gestalt perception much coveted by naturalist communities in the UK. Jizz is described as a tacit and embodied way of seeing that instantaneously reveals the identity of a species, relying upon but simultaneously suspending the arduous and meticulous study of an organism’s diagnostic characteristics. I explore the potential and limitations of jizz to allow for both visual precision and an enchanted and varied form of encounter with nature. In so doing, I explore how the specific characteristics of wild, intangible and irreverent virtuoso performance work closely together with disciplining taxonomic standards. As such, discipline and irreverence work together, are mutually enabling, and allow for an accommodation rather than a segregation of potential difference brought about by perceptual variety.

Taxonomy, biodiversity and their publics in twenty-first-century DNA barcoding.

We examine the crafting of publics in the global Barcoding of Life Initiative (BOLI)—seen as crucial for re-invigorating, and democratizing, early-twenty-first-century taxonomic sciences and hence for actually achieving biodiversity protection. Our approach to the issue of publics differs from that of conventional public understanding of or engagement with science work. Combining science and technology studies with critical political theory allows us to examine the discursive and material formation of publics occurring within the science of DNA barcoding. Co-productionist theory suggests BOLI to be actively crafting its prospective publics imaginatively, as an integral part of its self-composition as public science. Drawing on the work of Laclau’s On Populist Reason, we examine how such normatively weighted abstract publics are necessarily chronically incomplete, with an unavoidable tension between the universal and the particular.

Classifying, Constructing, and Identifying Life Standards as Transformations of “The Biological”

Recent accounts of “the biological” emphasize its thoroughgoing transformation. Accounts of biomedicalization, biotechnology, biopower, biocapital, and bioeconomy tend to agree that twentieth- and twenty-first-century life sciences transform the object of biology, the biological. Amidst so much transformation, we explore attempts to stabilize the biological through standards. We ask: how do standards handle the biological in transformation? Based on ethnographic research, the article discusses three contemporary postgenomic standards that classify, construct, or identify biological forms: the Barcoding of Life Initiative, the BioBricks Assembly Standard, and the Proteomics Standards Initiative. We rely on recent critical analyses of standardization to suggest that any attempt to attribute a fixed property to the biological actually multiplies dependencies between values, materials, and human and nonhuman agents. We highlight ways in which these biological standards cross-validate life forms with forms of life such as publics, infrastructures, and forms of disciplinary compromise. Attempts to standardize the biological, we suggest, offer a good way to see how a life form is always also a form of life.

Participatory mass observation and citizen science.

The authors outline and reflect upon a new research agenda on participatory mass observation and citizen science as an introduction to the 3 project outlines in this special section of Transactions.

Biotagging Manchester:interdisciplinary exploration of biodiversity

Biotagging used audio-visual equipment to engage a range of individuals in tagging plants and animals with specific and local meaning to them. This was an experiment in subverting conventional approaches to biodiversity monitoring with the aim of expanding ideas of both biodiversity and citizen science.