DH Seminar: From Field to Byte: Digging into the Plant Science Data Landscape

In the face of climate change and global food security issues, plant science and agricultural research are becoming data-intensive fields, mobilising data from molecular biology through microbiomes and field studies through climate modelling. This talk reflects on our attempts to understand the shifting data landscape of plant science as part of the Alan Turing Institute project ‘From Field Data to Global Indicators’, and the challenges of working collaboratively with data scientists in order to introduce sociological, epistemological and ethical perspectives into systems for plant data linkage. I will also discuss our work developing a historical database of plant science data systems, the PlantDBMap, and some of the challenges of adequately capturing and representing historical and sociological information about complex, globally distributed technical systems.

Hugh Williamson is Research Fellow at Egenis, the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, and affiliated researcher at the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Exeter. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. As well as his work on plant science data systems, he has conducted ethnographic research on rural development and conservation in Romania.

Hybrid event: If attending in person, please wear a mask (unless exempt) and keep a safe distance, and do join us for drinks and nibbles following the paper!

Join Zoom Meeting 
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/98669328149?pwd=SldOU3dNNjBMaEQyTElzaEJjN1RiZz09 

Meeting ID: 986 6932 8149 
Password: 699858