Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Ethnographic Analysis of the Production and Management of Astronomy's Big Data Sets

随着我们进入所谓的大数据时代，专家们猜测科学范式和知识实践的转变会带来什么影响。这个项目探讨了数据的价值，以及如何制作和测试新的可理解性模型和使数据连贯的工具。这项研究培训一名研究生如何进行严格的经验实地考察，具体考察天文数据是如何产生、管理和流通的。Katheryn Detwiler将在新学院大学的Hugh Raffles博士的指导下，探索如何建立优化天文数据收集的资源，如何在实践中产生和管理海量数据集，以及这些数据在循环中的影响。这项研究将主要在阿塔卡马沙漠进行，那里拥有世界上近三分之二的天文观测基础设施。研究人员将详细介绍沙漠中光和无线电波污染的规则，并将在阿塔卡马最大的天文台之一，调查将光波转换为数据的日常工作。该项目跟踪这些数据传递到遥远的数据中心，这些数据对它们产生的天文知识很有价值，也是大数据，是新的数据管理和解释技术的试验场。这项研究有两个广泛的目标：1)发展对当代阿塔卡马沙漠作为技术科学创新场所的理解；2)提供与大数据时代相关的叙事如何与参与者在生活的物质实践中对海量数据进行概念化和使用的方式相关的详细说明。它建议通过人种学方法研究海量数据，分析数据产生和数据伪造的具体关系。这项研究将借鉴科学技术的社会研究、媒体和传播理论、价值人类学以及基础设施和物质网络的民族志。除了为人类学研究生的培训提供资金外，该项目还将有助于了解和改进如何向公众传播科学数据。

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.